In 1283, a team of scribes working for King Alfonso X of Castile finished a manuscript that game historians have been mining ever since: the Libro de los juegos, the Book of Games. Most of its hundred or so illuminated pages belong to chess. But tucked between the chess problems and the dice games sit a handful of pages describing a board of twenty-five points joined by lines, twelve black pieces facing twelve white, and a rule that lets one piece leap over another and remove it from the board.
The scribes called it alquerque. You almost certainly know its grandchild: checkers.
The Game on the Twenty-Five Points
Alquerque is played on a 5×5 grid of points connected by orthogonal lines and a lattice of diagonals. Each player starts with twelve pieces filling their back two rows and the two nearest points of the middle row, leaving exactly one point, the centre, open. Pieces move one step along any marked line to an empty point.
The teeth of the game is the jump. A piece adjacent to an enemy piece may leap over it to the empty point directly beyond, capturing it, and may keep leaping as long as captures are available, mopping up several pieces in one turn. In the Alfonso manuscript the capture is compulsory: pass up an available jump and the opponent may remove your negligent piece instead, the penalty later known in draughts as “huffing”.
Play out a few games and the family resemblance to checkers is impossible to miss. Diagonal-ish movement on a lattice, jump captures, chain captures, forced captures. What alquerque lacks is promotion (there are no kings) and a retreat rule: in most reconstructions pieces may not move backwards, which drives the armies into a grinding central collision where one mistimed step loses three pieces to a chain jump.
Where Alquerque Came From
The name is Spanish by way of Arabic: al-qirkat (القرقات), the game the Moors carried into Iberia during the centuries of al-Andalus. Arabic sources mention qirq centuries before Alfonso’s scribes wrote: the game appears in the 10th-century Kitab al-Aghani, and Islamic scholars debated whether playing it was permissible long before it acquired a Castilian spelling.
How much older is it than that? Here the trail gets muddier, and honest game history says so. Boards of the alquerque pattern (the square, the cross, the diagonals) are scratched into the sandstone roofing slabs of the temple of Kurna at Thebes in Egypt, which was built around 1400 BCE. For most of the 20th century, popular histories cited that as proof of a Bronze Age pedigree. The problem: graffiti cannot be dated by the building it sits on. Quarrymen, Coptic monks, and bored visitors used those roofs for three thousand years, and the incised boards could have been cut in any of those centuries. The pattern is ancient in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean; how ancient, nobody can currently prove.
What the record does support: a line-board capture game, played across the Islamic world, arriving in Europe through Spain, described in full by 1283. For a board game, that is already an unusually well-documented pedigree: better than latrunculi, whose Roman rules we reconstruct from poetry, and on a par with the luckier survivals like the Royal Game of Ur.
When Was Checkers Invented?
Somewhere around the 12th century, in the south of France, somebody made a move that created a new game: they took the pieces and jump-capture of alquerque and put them on the chessboard.
The 64-square board changed the game’s geometry. Play shifted onto the dark diagonals only, the piece count settled at twelve a side on the 8×8 board, and the back rank acquired a new meaning: a piece reaching it was crowned, promoted to a fers, borrowing the name and the move of the mediaeval chess queen. The French called the game fierges, later jeu de dames. The board game historian H. J. R. Murray, whose 1952 A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess remains the standard reference on this lineage, placed the merger in the 1100s; the earliest unambiguous literary references to dames follow in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Two later dates matter for anyone asking when checkers became checkers. In the 16th century, the compulsory capture, alquerque’s old rule, was folded into the French game as forcée, and the modern tournament game existed in all but name. And in the 18th century, players in France and the Netherlands enlarged the board to 10×10 and gave crowned pieces the long-range “flying” move, creating international draughts, while the English-speaking world kept the 8×8 game that Americans call checkers and the British call draughts.
So: checkers was not invented on a date. It condensed, over about four centuries, out of a Moorish line game, a chessboard, and a French promotion rule. If you need one answer for a pub quiz, “12th-century France, on a chessboard, from the older game of alquerque” is the defensible one.
Playing Alquerque Now
Alquerque is easy to set up (the board takes thirty seconds to draw) and the Alfonso rules are complete enough to play as written, which is rare luxury in this field. A few practical notes from modern play:
The no-retreat reconstruction produces tense, short games that usually end in material grind-downs; if both players play safe, draws are common, a complaint already recorded in the Alfonso manuscript, which notes that the first player to move can force an advantage with correct play. Modern players often allow backward non-capturing moves late in the game to open things up. Purists play it straight and accept the draws.
And the chain jump deserves respect. A single exposed piece in the centre can cost you four. The oldest tactical advice in draughts (develop evenly, keep your back row intact, count exchanges before you enter them) already applies on the twenty-five points, three centuries before anyone crowned a king.
If capture games are your corner of the hobby, the site’s playable Nine Men’s Morris scratches the adjacent line-game itch, Seega covers Egypt’s own custodial-capture tradition, and Hnefatafl shows what the Norse did with asymmetric capture armies. The whole family is mapped in The Art of Ancient Strategy.
The Board That Would Not Die
The alquerque pattern itself refused to retire when checkers superseded it. It survives as the board of Fanorona in Madagascar (with a capture twist all its own), as the tiger-hunt boards of South and Southeast Asia, and in dozens of folk games recorded by R. C. Bell, whose collection Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations devotes a full chapter to the family. Bell himself sided with caution on the Kurna boards, and his hedge is worth repeating: the pattern is easy to invent, easy to carve, and useful for at least a dozen different games.
Which is, perhaps, the real story of alquerque. Not one game, but a piece of graphical infrastructure, twenty-five points and their lines, that carried capture games across three continents and two millennia, and then handed its rules to a chessboard and watched its grandchild conquer the world.
The Kurna roof slabs, for what it is worth, are still there.
Alquerque & Checkers Origins — Frequently Asked Questions
What is alquerque?
Alquerque is a capture board game played on a 5×5 grid of points joined by lines, with twelve pieces per player and jump captures. It reached Europe through Moorish Spain (from Arabic al-qirkat) and was fully described in King Alfonso X’s Libro de los juegos in 1283. It is the direct ancestor of checkers/draughts.
When was checkers invented?
Checkers condensed out of alquerque around the 12th century, when players in southern France moved its pieces and jump-capture onto the chessboard and added promotion. Forced capture was standardised in the 16th century, and the 10×10 international version appeared in the 18th. There is no single invention date — 12th-century France is the defensible short answer.
Who invented checkers?
No individual inventor is recorded. The game emerged from anonymous mediaeval players combining alquerque’s pieces and captures with the chessboard and a promotion rule borrowed from the chess queen (the fers). The historian H. J. R. Murray traced this merger to 12th-century France.
Is alquerque really 3,400 years old?
Unproven. Alquerque-pattern boards are carved into the roof of the Kurna temple in Egypt (built c. 1400 BCE), but graffiti cannot be dated by its building — the boards could have been cut centuries or millennia later. The securely documented history runs from early Islamic-era references (10th century CE) to the full rules of 1283.
How is alquerque different from checkers?
Alquerque is played on the points of a 5×5 line grid rather than the squares of a chessboard, has no kings or promotion, and in most reconstructions pieces cannot move backwards. Both games share jump captures, chain captures, and compulsory capture (the old “huffing” rule).
Continue the Lineage