English Draughts vs International Draughts: What Changes on a 10×10 Board
They share a family name and not much else. English draughts is the 8×8 game most Britons grew up with; international draughts is a 10×10 game with its own piece count, its own capture law and kings that behave like something out of chess. If you sat down at a 10×10 board expecting a slightly roomier version of the game you know, the first flying king would disabuse you inside five moves.
The short answer for anyone deciding what to play: choose English draughts if you want the classic game, quick to learn and quick to finish, the one you can play free on our board this minute. Choose international draughts if you want the deeper, longer tournament game the rest of the world plays, in which case Checkers Online has a 10×10 international draughts board waiting for you.
Now the detail.
The differences at a glance
| Rule | English draughts (8×8) | International draughts (10×10) |
|---|---|---|
| Board | 8×8, play on 32 dark squares | 10×10, play on 50 dark squares |
| Men per side | 12 | 20 |
| First move | Black | White |
| Men capture | Forward only | Forward and backward |
| Kings | Move one square diagonally | ”Flying”: slide any distance along a diagonal |
| Choice of captures | Any available capture | Must take the line capturing the most pieces |
| Crowning mid-jump | Move ends, man is crowned | Man jumps through and is only crowned if it ends there |
| Governing body | WCDF and national bodies (EDA, ACF) | FMJD, the World Draughts Federation |
Every one of those rows changes how the game feels. Let’s take the ones that matter most.
Twenty men on fifty squares
The 10×10 board holds 20 men a side on its first four rows, against 12 on three rows for the English game. More material and more space make for longer games with a bigger middle: there is simply more board to fight over before anyone reaches an endgame. And where Black opens in English draughts, White moves first in the international game, a small courtesy swap that trips up everyone the first time.
One historical footnote from BoardGameGeek’s records: the old Polish form of the 10×10 game was played with 15 men rather than 20. “Polish draughts” survives as the international game’s other name, which tells you where the modern rules grew up.
Men that capture backwards
An English draughts man lives a forward-only life until it is crowned. Its international cousin still moves only forward, but it captures in all four diagonal directions from day one.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. In the English game, slipping a man behind an enemy man puts it beyond harm from that piece forever. On the 10×10 board there is no “behind”: any adjacent enemy man with an empty square beyond it is a threat, whichever side it stands on. Whole defensive habits from the 8×8 game die on contact with this rule.
The flying king
Crown a piece in English draughts and it gains reverse gear, nothing more. It still steps one square at a time. Crown a piece in international draughts and it becomes a flying king: it slides any number of empty squares along a diagonal, captures a piece from long range, and lands on any empty square beyond its victim, from where it may well keep capturing.
A single flying king can dominate an open board in a way no English king ever could, which is why endgames in the two games are such different animals. English endgames are slow sieges of blocked squares and tempo. International endgames can hinge on one long diagonal.
You must take the most
English draughts asks only that you capture something when a capture exists. Offered a single jump and a triple jump, you may take either, and choosing the small one is often the sharper move.
International draughts removes the choice: when several capture lines exist, you are obliged to play the one that captures the greatest number of pieces. Players of the 10×10 game build whole combinations on this rule, herding the opponent into positions where the forced maximum capture walks their pieces into a trap. It is elegant and brutal at once, and it is the rule that most changes how the two games think.
There is a matching wrinkle at the crowning row. In the English game a man that jumps onto the last rank stops and takes its crown. In the international game a capture sequence passes straight through the last rank: the man keeps jumping as a man, and only becomes a king if its sequence actually finishes on the crowning square.
Draw laws: simple versus codified
The English game, as played on this site, draws in two ways: threefold repetition of a position, or 40 moves by each side with no capture and no man moved. Our rules of draughts spell both out.
The international game carries the most detailed codified draw law in the family, and the FMJD rulebook puts numbers on the classic endgames. Per the game’s published tournament rules: a game is drawn after 25 consecutive king-only moves without a capture, after 16 moves each when a lone king faces three pieces including a king, and after just 5 moves each when a lone king faces two. Threefold repetition applies as well. Draughts players joke about drawish endgames for a reason, and the international rulebook is the paper trail.
The halfway house: international rules on an English board
One more member of the family is worth knowing about, because it answers an obvious question: what if you like the international rules but not the enormous board? That game exists. Brazilian draughts is, in BoardGameGeek’s blunt description, an 8×8 version of international draughts: 12 men a side on the familiar board, but with backward-capturing men, flying kings and the compulsory maximum capture. The rules themselves are old; the survey literature traces the same game back to “Minor Polish draughts”, played in sixteenth-century Holland, long before Brazil gave it a federation and a name.
For a player crossing over from the English game, Brazilian draughts makes a gentler introduction to international rules than the 10×10 board does. Same geography, new physics.
So which should you play?
Both, ideally, but not at once.
Start with English draughts if you are new to the family. The rules fit on a postcard, games are shorter, and everything you learn about forced captures and king endings carries over in spirit. It is also the game whose name wars we covered in draughts vs checkers, so you will know exactly what to call it. Our board plays it free, against the computer or a friend, with no account to create.
Graduate to international draughts when you want the bigger canvas. It is the most widely played form of draughts worldwide, the version with the deepest tournament scene, and honestly a beautiful game once flying kings stop terrorising you. You can play international draughts at Checkers Online, our sister site, straight from the browser.
Either way you will be playing draughts. Just check the size of the board before you form a plan.
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