🔴⚫ Checkers Day – September 23 ⚫🔴
Every game of checkers begins with confidence.
You sit down.
Arrange the pieces.
Look across the board.
How hard can this be?
They move diagonally.
You jump things.
Eventually somebody gets a king.
Then, approximately four minutes later, your opponent says:
“You have to jump me.”
And suddenly you're learning that this cheerful little board game has rules, consequences, and a surprisingly aggressive personality.
September 23 is Checkers Day, a fine excuse to dust off the board, challenge someone you love, and discover whether either of you actually remembers how to play.
Spoiler:
There may be negotiations.
🔴 Affiliate Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It supports Celebrate Quirky and perhaps replaces the three missing checker pieces currently being represented by pennies.
⚫ People Have Been Moving Pieces Across Boards for a Very Long Time
Checkers feels like the kind of game that has always existed.
In a sense, its family tree nearly has.
Ancient civilizations played board games involving pieces moving across marked spaces, but modern checkers didn't simply emerge unchanged from an Egyptian tomb.
The game we recognize developed much later from earlier European games.
A medieval game known as alquerque—played on a different board—helped influence what eventually became draughts.
By roughly the Middle Ages, versions began being played on the familiar chessboard.
Rules continued evolving over centuries.
Which means generations of people have experienced the same fundamental human emotion:
I did not see that double jump coming.
🔴 Checkers or Draughts?
That depends where you live.
In the United States, most people call it checkers.
In Britain and several other English-speaking places, draughts is the familiar term.
And there isn't just one universal version.
English draughts—essentially the version commonly played as American checkers—uses an 8-by-8 board and 12 pieces per player.
International draughts is generally played on a larger 10-by-10 board with different rules.
Other regional variations exist too.
So if someone confidently tells you that you're playing checkers incorrectly, there is at least a small possibility you are both right.
Use this information responsibly at family game night.
👑 Becoming a King Changes Everything
At first, your checker pieces are limited.
They move diagonally forward.
Then one survives the dangerous journey to the opposite side of the board.
And suddenly:
King me.
Traditionally, another checker is stacked on top to mark the king.
Kings gain additional movement abilities, including moving backward in the familiar American version.
It's an impressively dramatic promotion.
No interview.
No probationary period.
Just cross the board alive and receive expanded authority.
Corporate America could learn something.
🔴 A Few Moves Worth Knowing
⬛ A standard American checkers board has 64 squares, but play occurs only on the dark squares.
🔴 Each player begins with 12 pieces, occupying the dark squares of the first three rows on their side.
↗️ Ordinary pieces move diagonally, one square at a time when not capturing.
🦘 Captures happen by jumping over an opposing piece into an empty square beyond it.
🔁 Multiple jumps can happen in a single turn when another legal capture is available.
👑 Reach the far side and your piece becomes a king, gaining the ability to move and capture backward in American checkers.
🧠 And despite its simple rules, checkers has enormous strategic depth.
In 2007, computer scientists announced that English draughts had been weakly solved: with perfect play from the starting position, the game ends in a draw.
So if your grandfather has beaten you 46 consecutive times, unfortunately science cannot help.
🏠 Find the Old Game Board
Before buying anything, look in the closet.
You know the closet.
Monopoly with no money.
Uno with 103 of its supposed 108 cards.
Scrabble containing seven Qs for reasons nobody can explain.
And somewhere underneath?
Checkers.
Set it up on the kitchen table.
No batteries.
No passwords.
No updates.
No notification asking whether you'd like to accept cookies.
Just two people and a board.
There is something increasingly luxurious about that.
🏆 Hold a Tiny Tournament
Make brackets.
Best two out of three.
Winner advances.
Children versus adults.
Neighbors versus neighbors.
Couples versus the consequences of taking recreational competition far too seriously.
Award the winner something appropriately ridiculous.
A paper crown.
A chocolate bar.
The right to announce “King me” whenever entering a room for the rest of the evening.
🔴 Play With Something Besides Checkers
No board?
Make one.
Draw an 8-by-8 grid on cardboard and color alternating squares.
Then use:
Bottle caps.
Coins.
Buttons.
Crackers.
Candy pieces.
The candy version adds an interesting strategic question:
Can you eat captured pieces?
Obviously yes.
We have improved checkers.
⚫ More Ways to Celebrate
Teach a child to play.
Call the person who taught you.
Learn a checkers strategy.
Try an online match.
Play a best-of-five series.
Make a giant outdoor board with sidewalk chalk.
Use red and black candies as pieces.
Try another regional version of draughts.
Visit a game café.
Start a family game night.
Put a board in the break room.
Practice spotting double jumps.
Let the youngest player explain the rules for once.
And resist moving the piece back after you've taken your hand off it.
We saw you.
🍽️ Dinner Is Red and Black
We're using the checkerboard colors without making everyone eat food arranged into 64 squares.
Again:
Restraint.
🍗 Red & Black Pepper Chicken
Ingredients
4 chicken breasts or thighs
1 roasted red pepper, sliced
1 teaspoon cracked black pepper
2 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ cup chicken broth
Salt
Brown seasoned chicken in olive oil.
Add garlic, roasted pepper, black pepper, and broth.
Cover and simmer until the chicken is safely cooked through.
Serve with the sauce spooned over top.
🥔 Crispy Checkerboard Potatoes
Cube potatoes into roughly equal pieces.
Toss with olive oil, paprika, garlic, salt, and pepper.
Roast at 425°F until crisp.
No ruler required.
🥗 Red & Black Salad
Combine greens with cherry tomatoes, black olives, red onion, feta, and balsamic vinaigrette.
The theme has been satisfied.
🍒 Double Jump Fizz – Mocktail
Combine tart cherry juice and lime juice over ice.
Top with ginger ale.
Add a few blackberries.
Take two sips.
Double jump.
🥃 King Me – Cocktail
Ingredients
1½ ounces bourbon
½ ounce blackberry syrup
½ ounce lemon juice
Ginger beer
Ice
Combine bourbon, blackberry syrup, and lemon over ice.
Top with ginger beer.
Garnish with blackberries.
Enjoy responsibly.
Kings still have rules.
⬛ Checkerboard Brownies
Bake brownies and cut them into small squares.
Arrange them on a platter alternating with blondie squares.
That's it.
You've made a checkerboard dessert without spending three hours piping icing.
If you'd rather skip the geometry entirely, serve one brownie with one blondie and call it conceptual art.
🎒 Checkers Sneaks Math Into the Classroom
Elementary: Build a Board
Have students create an 8-by-8 checkerboard.
Count:
Rows.
Columns.
Total squares.
Dark squares.
Pieces.
Then play short games while practicing forward, backward, left, right, and diagonal vocabulary.
Math has disguised itself as recess.
Don't expose it.
Secondary: Can a Computer Solve a Game?
Use the 2007 solving of checkers as an introduction to artificial intelligence and game theory.
What does it mean for a game to be “solved”?
How can computers evaluate enormous numbers of possible positions?
Why can a game with simple rules still be computationally difficult?
Then discuss the difference between knowing the theoretical outcome with perfect play and actually being good enough to achieve it.
Your uncle remains undefeated.
💼 Around the Office
Set up a Five-Minute Checkers Challenge in the break room.
Players get five minutes.
Winner stays.
Next challenger sits down.
Keep a simple tally throughout the day.
No elaborate tournament administration.
No mandatory participation.
No strategic planning meetings about the strategic planning game.
It's checkers.
We can handle this.
🎬 Movie Pick - WarGames (1983)
A teenager.
A computer.
Games.
Strategy.
And the increasingly important question of whether every game should actually have a winner.
Checkers itself makes only a brief conceptual appearance in the larger world of game theory here, but the film's famous lesson fits today's strategic mood beautifully.
Sometimes the smartest move isn't the flashiest one.
📺 TV Pick - The Andy Griffith Show – “Opie and the Spoiled Kid”
Rather than hunting for a television episode built specifically around checkers, spend tonight in Mayberry.
The series regularly gives us the exact atmosphere today's holiday deserves: people sitting around, talking, passing time, and playing uncomplicated games without a glowing screen anywhere nearby.
Put the checkerboard on the coffee table while you watch.
That's the assignment.
🔴 The Best Games Leave Room for Talking
That's what I remember about checkers.
Not who won.
Not the brilliant strategy.
Not the devastating double jump of 1989.
I remember the table.
Someone sitting across from me.
Hands moving pieces.
Conversation happening in the spaces between turns.
Board games give us an excuse to remain at the table a little longer.
And maybe that's why they survive.
We have games now with extraordinary graphics, enormous worlds, cinematic stories, and people playing together from opposite sides of the planet.
Wonderful.
But there's still something good about sitting three feet from another person and saying:
“Your move.”
No loading screen.
No headset.
No Wi-Fi.
Just time together.
Sometimes the game isn't what keeps us at the table. It's the person sitting across from us.
Set up the board.
Find something to use for the missing red checker.
And play one more game.
📱 Hashtags
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