Checkers online — five rule sets, rank norms and a full game review

It is a series of four consecutive games against the bot set to that rung’s strength. To earn the rank you must win two of the four without taking any moves back; colors alternate each game. Attempt any rung you like: take the norm on a high one and every rung below it is credited at once. The rank is stored in this browser and belongs to the rule set you played: Russian and international count separately.

Russian is 8×8 with 12 men a side; international is 10×10 with 20. Kings fly and captures are compulsory in both, but the maximum-capture rule exists only in international: in Russian you may take any available capture rather than the longest one. Brazilian drafts is exactly the international rules played on the 8×8 board.

In English (American) checkers a king moves one square, a man captures forward only, and the longest capture is not required. Giveaway uses Russian movement with the objective reversed: the first player to lose every piece — or to be left with no move — wins.

On Tactical it runs alpha-beta with iterative deepening, a transposition table, killer and history heuristics and a quiescence search through capture chains; in the endgame the depth cap comes off, because branching collapses there. In a rank game the strength comes from the rung instead — and a lower rung is not weaker through mistakes: it never hangs a piece, it simply does not always pick the strongest move it found. Every rung sees combinations.

The way drafts training has always done it: five rungs — classes 3, 2 and 1, then candidate master and master — and each one is earned by results against an opponent of that strength, not by a rating that drifts up and down with your last few games. That makes the rung something you pass rather than something you hover around, which is the point of a norm. The bot plays the corresponding strength for each rung, and the game record lets you step back through a failed attempt to see where it actually went wrong.

Yes. Games are written in PDN, the standard drafts notation other programs read. Copy it, download it as a file, or paste someone else’s record in and step through it.