52-639: The World Draughts Federation ( Fédération Mondiale du Jeu de Dames ) FMJD , is the international body uniting national draughts federations. It was founded in 1947 by four Federations: France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Currently, the FMJD has more than 70 national federation members in 2021. Recently the FMJD has become a member of the Global Association of International Sports Federations and strives for Olympic recognition. The FMJD memberships
104-409: A pawn can be promoted to any of several types of pieces, including a queen, when the pawn is moved to the player's furthest rank (the opponent's first rank). Such a queen created by promotion can be an additional queen or, if the player's queen has been captured, a replacement queen. The queen is by far the most common piece type a pawn is promoted to due to the relative power of a queen; promotion to
156-484: A black square—thus the mnemonics "queen gets her color", "queen on [her] [own] color", or "the dress [queen piece] matches the shoes [square]" (Latin: servat rēgīna colōrem ). The queen can be moved any number of unoccupied squares in a straight line vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, thus combining the moves of the rook and bishop . The queen captures by moving to the square on which an enemy piece stands. Although both players start with one queen each,
208-452: A long time, the queen could also move like a knight; some players disapproved of this ability to "gallop like the horse" (knight). The book A History of Chess by H.J.R. Murray, says that William Coxe , who was in Russia in 1772, saw chess played with the queen also moving like a knight. Such an augmented queen piece is now known as the fairy chess piece amazon . Around 1230, the queen
260-514: A more favorable tactical position. One of the most widely known examples of this was in the game Anderssen–Kieseritzky, 1851 , where Anderssen sacrificed a queen (along with three other pieces) to reach checkmate . The queen was originally the counsellor or prime minister or vizier ( Sanskrit mantri , Persian farzīn , Arabic firzān , firz or wazīr ). Initially, its only move was one square diagonally. Around 1300, its abilities were enhanced to allow it to jump two squares diagonally (onto
312-435: A queen is colloquially called queening . The queen is typically worth about nine pawns , which is slightly stronger than a rook and a bishop together, but slightly weaker than two rooks, though there are exceptions. It is almost always disadvantageous to exchange the queen for a single piece other than the enemy's queen. The reason that the queen is stronger than a combination of a rook and bishop, even though they control
364-437: A queened pawn as a ferzia , as opposed to the original queen or regina , to account for this. When the queen was attacked, it was customary to warn the opponent by announcing " gardez la reine " or simply " gardez ", similar to the announcement of "check". Some published rules even required this announcement before the queen could be legally captured. This custom was largely abandoned in the 19th century. In Russia, for
416-815: A same-colored square) for its first move. The fers changed into the queen over time. The first surviving mention of this piece as a queen or similar is the Latin regina in the Einsiedeln Poem , a 98-line Medieval Latin poem written around 997 and preserved in a monastery at Einsiedeln in Switzerland. Some surviving early medieval pieces depict the piece as a queen. The word fers became grammatically feminized in several languages, such as alferza in Spanish and fierce or fierge in French. The Carmina Burana also refer to
468-532: Is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque . The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move". The most popular forms of checkers in Anglophone countries are American checkers (also called English draughts ), which
520-604: Is called "ντάμα" (dama), which is also one term for the queen in chess. Similar games have been played for millennia. A board resembling a checkers board was found in Ur dating from 3000 BC. In the British Museum are specimens of ancient Egyptian checkerboards, found with their pieces in burial chambers, and the game was played by the pharaoh Hatshepsut . Plato mentioned a game, πεττεία or petteia , as being of Egyptian origin, and Homer also mentions it. The method of capture
572-411: Is no draw with one king and men versus one king. 10x10 15 10x10 15 Column draughts (Russian towers), also known as Bashni , is a kind of draughts, known in Russia since the beginning of the nineteenth century, in which the game is played according to the usual rules of Russian draughts, but with the difference that the captured man is not removed from the playing field: rather, it is placed under
SECTION 10
#1732872537913624-545: Is part of a more general movement toward integration of Mind Sports in the regular sports arena, a development that, in the vision of the FMJD, is to be lauded. The FMJD is member of the: International draughts at 100 squares, Russian and Brazilian 64 and checkers : In June 2021 have 77 members: Africa (17) / Americas (14) / Asia (12) / Oceania (2) / Europe (32) Members in 2014: Draughts Checkers ( American English ), also known as draughts ( / d r ɑː f t s , d r æ f t s / ; British English ),
676-485: Is placed on the number of moves that are allowed in between jumps (which is a reasonable generalisation of the drawing rule in standard Checkers), then the problem is in PSPACE, thus it is PSPACE-complete. However, without this bound, Checkers is EXPTIME-complete. However, other problems have only polynomial complexity : In an ending with three kings versus one king, the player with three kings must win in thirteen moves or
728-606: Is played in Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Greece, and several other locations in the Middle East, as well as in the same locations as Russian checkers. There are several variants in these countries, with the Armenian variant (called tama ) allowing also forward-diagonal movement of men and the Greek requiring the king to stop directly after the captured piece. With this rule, there
780-403: Is played on an 8×8 checkerboard ; Russian draughts and Turkish draughts , both on an 8x8 board; and International draughts , played on a 10×10 board – with the latter widely played in many countries worldwide. There are many other variants played on 8×8 boards. Canadian checkers and Malaysian/Singaporean checkers (also locally known as dam ) are played on a 12×12 board. American checkers
832-403: Is possible, capturing is mandatory in most official rules. If the player does not capture, the other player can remove the opponent's piece as a penalty (or muffin), and where there are two or more such positions the player forfeits pieces that cannot be moved (although some rule variations make capturing optional). In almost all variants, a player with no valid move remaining loses. This occurs if
884-422: Is the most powerful piece in the game of chess . It can move any number of squares vertically, horizontally or diagonally , combining the powers of the rook and bishop . Each player starts the game with one queen, placed in the middle of the first rank next to the king . Because the queen is the strongest piece, a pawn is promoted to a queen in the vast majority of cases. The predecessor to
936-561: The 13th-century book Libro de los juegos . The rule of crowning was used by the 13th century, as it is mentioned in the Philippe Mouskés 's Chronique in 1243 when the game was known as Fierges , the name used for the chess queen (derived from the Persian ferz , meaning royal counsellor or vizier). The pieces became known as "dames" when that name was also adopted for the chess queen. The rule forcing players to take whenever possible
988-526: The Art of Chess with 150 Problems ) by Luis Ramírez de Lucena , was published during the reign of Isabella I of Castile . Even before that, the Valencian poem Scachs d'amor ("Chess of Love") depicted a chess game between Francesc de Castellví and Narcís de Vinyoles and commented on by Bernat Fenollar , which clearly had the modern moves of the queen and the bishop . Well before the queen's powers expanded, it
1040-553: The Virgin Mary and instead opted for secular terms such as Königin in German and "queen" in English. In Russian, the piece keeps its Persian name of ferz ; koroleva (queen) is colloquial and is never used by professional chess players. However, the names korolevna (king's daughter), tsaritsa ( tsar 's wife), and baba (old woman) are attested as early as 1694. In Arabic countries,
1092-430: The ability to move any amount of squares at a time (in international checkers), move backwards and, in variants where men cannot already do so, capture backwards. Like a man, a king can make successive jumps in a single turn, provided that each jump captures an enemy piece. In international draughts, kings (also called flying kings ) move any distance. They may capture an opposing man any distance away by jumping to any of
SECTION 20
#17328725379131144-462: The advent of the printing press and the popularity of new books on chess. The new rules faced a backlash in some quarters, ranging from anxiety over a powerful female warrior figure to frank abuse against women in general. At various times, the ability of pawns to be queened was restricted while the original queen was still on the board, so as not to cause scandal by providing the king with more than one queen. An early 12th-century Latin poem refers to
1196-495: The capturing piece (man or tower). The resulting towers move around the board as a whole, "obeying" the upper piece. When taking a tower, only the uppermost piece is removed from it: and the resulting tower belongs to one player or the other according to the color of its new uppermost piece. Bashni has inspired the games Lasca and Emergo . Draughts associations and federations History, articles, variants, rules Online play Queen (chess) The queen (♕, ♛)
1248-486: The cells of a square grid was not already known to the Moors who brought it, which it probably was, either via playing on a chessboard (in about 1100, probably in the south of France, this was done once again using backgammon pieces, thereby each piece was called a "fers", the same name as the chess queen , as the move of the two pieces was the same at the time) or adapting Seega using jumping capture. The rules are given in
1300-425: The enemy camp. Because of its long range and ability to move in multiple directions, the queen is well-equipped to execute forks . Compared to other long range pieces (i.e. rooks and bishops), the queen is less restricted and stronger in closed positions. A player should generally delay developing the queen, as developing it too quickly can expose it to attacks by enemy pieces, causing the player to lose time removing
1352-474: The first computer checkers and arguably the first video game ever according to certain definitions. In the 1950s, Arthur Samuel created one of the first board game-playing programs of any kind. More recently, in 2007 scientists at the University of Alberta developed their " Chinook " program to the point where it is unbeatable. A brute force approach that took hundreds of computers working nearly two decades
1404-437: The game from English speakers), checkers is called dame , dames , damas , or a similar term that refers to ladies. The pieces are usually called men , stones , "peón" (pawn) or a similar term; men promoted to kings are called dames or ladies. In these languages, the queen in chess or in card games is usually called by the same term as the kings in checkers. A case in point includes the Greek terminology, in which checkers
1456-455: The game is a draw. In an ending with three kings versus one king, the player with three kings must win in thirteen moves or the game is a draw. There is also a 10×8 board variant (with two additional columns labelled i and k ) and the give-away variant Poddavki . There are official championships for shashki and its variants. 10x10 15 With this rule, there is no draw with two kings versus one. Slovak draughts 10x10? 15? 8 It
1508-427: The game. American checkers (English draughts) has been the arena for several notable advances in game artificial intelligence . In 1951 Christopher Strachey wrote the first video game program on checkers. The checkers program tried to run for the first time on 30 July 1951 at NPL, but was unsuccessful due to program errors. In the summer of 1952 he successfully ran the program on Ferranti Mark 1 computer and played
1560-601: The most complex game ever solved . In November 1983, the Science Museum Oklahoma (then called the Omniplex) unveiled a new exhibit: Lefty the Checker Playing Robot. Programmed by Scott M Savage, Lefty used an Armdroid robotic arm by Colne Robotics and was powered by a 6502 processor with a combination of Basic and Assembly code to interactively play a round of checkers with visitors to the museum. Originally,
1612-430: The necessity for two pieces to cooperate to capture one, although, like Ghanaian draughts, the game could still be declared lost by a player with only one piece left. An Arabic game called Quirkat or al-qirq , with similar play to modern checkers, was played on a 5×5 board. It is mentioned in the tenth-century work Kitab al-Aghani . Al qirq was also the name for the game that is now called nine men's morris . Al qirq
World Draughts Federation - Misplaced Pages Continue
1664-415: The opening, long before the endgame. A common goal in the endgame is to promote a pawn to a queen. As the queen has the largest range and mobility, queen and king vs. lone king is an easy win when compared to some other basic mates . Queen and king vs. rook and king is also a win for the player with the queen, but it is not easy. A queen sacrifice is the deliberate sacrifice of a queen in order to gain
1716-419: The opponent's pieces. A move consists of moving a piece forward to an adjacent unoccupied square. If the adjacent square contains an opponent's piece, and the square immediately beyond it is vacant, the piece may be captured (and removed from the game) by jumping over it. Only the dark squares of the checkerboard are used. A piece can only move forward into an unoccupied square. When capturing an opponent's piece
1768-434: The opposite color to the square on which it stands. A factor in favor of the rook and bishop together is that they can attack (or defend) a square twice, while a queen can only do so once. However, experience has shown that this factor is usually less significant than the points favoring the queen. The queen is strongest when the board is open, the enemy king is poorly defended, or there are loose (i.e. undefended) pieces in
1820-402: The player has no pieces left, or if all the player's pieces are obstructed from moving by opponent pieces. An uncrowned piece ( man ) moves one step ahead and captures an adjacent opponent's piece by jumping over it and landing on the next square. Multiple enemy pieces can be captured in a single turn provided this is done by successive jumps made by a single piece; the jumps do not need to be in
1872-553: The power ascribed to women in the troubadour tradition of courtly love ; and the medieval popularity of chess as a game particularly suitable for women to play on equal terms with men. She points to medieval poetry depicting the Virgin as the chess-queen of God or Fierce Dieu . Significantly, the earliest surviving treatise to describe the modern movement of the queen (as well as the bishop and pawn), Repetición de amores e arte de axedres con CL iuegos de partido ( Discourses on Love and
1924-401: The program was deliberately simple so that the average museum visitor could potentially win, but over time was improved. The improvements however proved to be more frustrating for the visitors, so the original code was reimplemented. Generalized Checkers is played on an M × N board. It is PSPACE-hard to determine whether a specified player has a winning strategy. And if a polynomial bound
1976-571: The queen as femina (woman) and coniunx (spouse), and the name Amazon has sometimes been seen. During the great chess reform at the end of the 15th century, Catholic nations kept using an equivalent of Latin domina ("lady"), such as dama in Spanish, donna in Italy, and dame in France, all of which evoke " Our Lady ". However, Protestant nations such as Germany and England refused any derivatives of domina as it might have suggested some cult of
2028-502: The queen from danger. Despite this, beginners often develop the queen early in the game, hoping to plunder the enemy position and deliver an early checkmate , such as the scholar's mate . Early queen attacks are rare in high-level chess, but there are some openings with early queen development that are used by high-level players. For example, the Scandinavian Defense (1.e4 d5), which often features queen moves by Black on
2080-456: The queen is the ferz , a weak piece only able to move or capture one step diagonally, originating from the Persian game of shatranj . The modern queen gained its power and its modern move in Spain in the 15th century. The white queen starts on d1, while the black queen starts on d8. With the chessboard oriented correctly, the white queen starts on a white square and the black queen starts on
2132-470: The queen remains termed and, in some cases, depicted as a vizier . Historian Marilyn Yalom proposes several factors that might have been partly responsible for influencing the piece towards its identity as a queen and its power in modern chess: the prominence of medieval queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine , Blanche of Castile , and more particularly Isabella I of Castile ; the cult of the Virgin Mary ;
World Draughts Federation - Misplaced Pages Continue
2184-437: The same line and may "zigzag" (change diagonal direction). In American checkers, men can jump only forwards; in international draughts and Russian draughts , men can jump both forwards and backwards. When a man reaches the farthest row forward, known as the kings row or crown head , it becomes a king . It is marked by placing an additional piece on top of, or crowning , the first man. The king has additional powers, namely
2236-418: The same number of squares, is twofold. First, the queen is more mobile than the rook and the bishop, as the entire power of the queen can be transferred to another location in one move, while transferring the entire firepower of a rook and bishop requires two moves, the bishop always being restricted to squares of one color. Second, unlike the bishop, the queen is not hampered by an inability to control squares of
2288-528: The second and third moves, is considered sound and has been played at the world championship level. Some less common examples have also been observed in high-level games. The Danvers Opening (1.e4 e5 2.Qh5), which is widely characterized as a beginner's opening, has occasionally been played by the American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura . A queen exchange often marks the beginning of the endgame , but there are queen endgames , and sometimes queens are exchanged in
2340-456: The unoccupied squares immediately beyond it. Because jumped pieces remain on the board until the turn is complete, it is possible to reach a position in a multi-jump move where the flying king is blocked from capturing further by a piece already jumped. Flying kings are not used in American checkers; a king's only advantage over a man is the additional ability to move and capture backwards. In most non-English languages (except those that acquired
2392-436: Was weakly solved in 2007 by a team of Canadian computer scientists led by Jonathan Schaeffer . From the standard starting position, perfect play by each side would result in a draw. Checkers is played by two opponents on opposite sides of the game board. One player has dark pieces (usually black); the other has light pieces (usually white or red). The darker color moves first, then players alternate turns. A player cannot move
2444-601: Was already being romantically described as essential to the king's survival, so that when the queen was lost, there was nothing more of value on the board. Marilyn Yalom wrote that: During the 15th century, the queen's move took its modern form as a combination of the move of the rook and the current move of the bishop. Starting from Spain, this new version – called "queen's chess" (in Italian, scacchi della donna ) or, pejoratively, "madwoman's chess" ( scacchi alla rabiosa ) – spread throughout Europe rapidly, partly due to
2496-547: Was also independently invented as a piece in Japan, where it formed part of the game of dai shogi . The piece was retained in the smaller and more popular chu shogi , but does not form a part of modern shogi . In most languages the piece is known as "queen" or "lady" (e.g. Italian regina or Spanish dama ). Asian and Eastern European languages tend to refer to it as vizier , minister or advisor (e.g. Arabic/Persian وزیر wazir (vazir), Russian/Persian ферзь/فرز ferz ). In Polish it
2548-671: Was brought to Spain by the Moors , where it became known as Alquerque , the Spanish derivation of the Arabic name. It was maybe adapted into a derivation of latrunculi , or the game of the Little Soldiers, with a leaping capture, which, like modern Argentine, German, Greek and Thai draughts, had flying kings which had to stop on the next square after the captured piece, but pieces could only make up to three captures at once, or seven if all directions were legal. That said, even if playing al qirq inside
2600-404: Was introduced in France in around 1535, at which point the game became known as Jeu forcé , identical to modern American checkers. The game without forced capture became known as Le jeu plaisant de dames , the precursor of international checkers. The 18th-century English author Samuel Johnson wrote a foreword to a 1756 book about checkers by William Payne , the earliest book in English about
2652-505: Was placing two pieces on either side of the opponent's piece. It was said to have been played during the Trojan War . The Romans played a derivation of petteia called latrunculi , or the game of the Little Soldiers. The pieces, and sporadically the game itself, were called calculi ( pebbles ). Like the pawn in Chess , Alquerque was probably derived from πεττεία and latrunculi by removing
SECTION 50
#17328725379132704-460: Was used to solve the game, showing that a game of checkers will always end in a draw if neither player makes a mistake. The solution is for the checkers variation called go-as-you-please (GAYP) checkers and not for the variation called three-move restriction checkers, however it is a legal three-move restriction game because only openings believed to lose are barred under the three-move restriction. As of December 2007, this makes American checkers
#912087