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Championship Chinese Checkers Help Index

Chinese Checkers Playing Rules


Chinese Checkers Playing Rules

Quick Overview:

Chinese Checkers is a fascinating Oriental board game for players of all ages. Animated Chinese Checkers limit the possible number of players to 2 or 3 players, even though Chinese Checkers in general allows 4 or 6 players. The reason for this restriction is that it would be difficult to judge whether a player had intentionally left behind pieces to prevent opposite player from finishing. Also, in the many game author had played or watched other people played, 3 players usually provide the most challenge and fun, with more of an open board for strategic play, while 4 or more players tend to crowd the board too much.

Each player starts out with 10 pieces of the same color as one of the outer regions of the six-pointed star-shaped board, as shown below. For 3 player setting, they are evenly spaced out among the six regions. The rule of winning is simple: whoever manages to move his/her pieces across the board from the home region to the opposite destination region wins!

Each player takes one move on one of his/her piece in turn. Such move can be either one simple move to an adjacent vacant position, or one jump over an adjacent occupied position to a vacant position in the same direction, or a series of such jumps. In the following figure, the blue circles represent all the possible position that the yellow piece (pointed by the arrow) can move in its turn. As you will notice, the yellow piece is restricted from moving into the red region, but is allowed to jump though it. A piece can only stay in the neutral (white) region or the region of its color, but is allowed to jump through region of other color.

Words from the author:

Well, now you can discover the challenges and fun of this ancient Oriental board game. It is very simple to play, but you may be surprised to find out about all the pitfalls and strategies that involves during a 3-player game. You may easily varies the difficulty of playing against the computer players by changing their style against other players. And you may find that with both computer players set to be hostile against the human player and friendly toward each other, the game is quite challenging even for a good human player.

Well, once again, thank you for playing Animated Chinese Checkers.  If you enjoy playing the game would like to register, please see menu item "How To Register". The author will greatly appreciate your support. And your support will enable the author to continue improving the game and/or working on other fun games. Please e-mail to the author at <tlai-ca@geocities.com> if you have any comments and/or suggestions.  Thank you.