How to Play Draughts with Friends Online (and on One Device)
Draughts against the computer is good practice. Draughts against a person is the actual game: the groans, the gloating, the accusation that you moved while they were making tea. If you’re trying to get a human opponent onto the board, you have two situations to solve, and they need different tools.
Same room? You want a two-player mode on one screen, and this site has one. Different postcodes? You want online multiplayer, and for that we’ll point you to our sister site, which does it properly. Here’s how both work.
How do you play draughts with a friend on one device?
On our free online draughts game, choose “2 Players” on the setup screen and press Play Now. The board becomes a shared table: one of you plays White, the other Black, and you take turns on the same screen, phone, tablet or laptop. No accounts, no downloads, nothing to set up.
That’s the whole procedure, but a few details make it nicer in practice.
It’s a pass-and-play board. Make your move and hand the device over, or just angle the screen if you’re sitting across from each other. A laptop flat on the kitchen table works exactly like a board between you, minus the lost pieces.
Black moves first. That’s the law of English draughts, not our preference, so decide who takes Black before you start. Traditional dispute-resolution methods (youngest goes first, loser of the last game goes first, rock-paper-scissors) all remain in force.
The rules referee themselves. Captures in draughts are compulsory, which in over-the-board games is the single biggest source of arguments. Here the board only offers legal moves, so the “you have to jump, actually” conversation never happens. If a ruling still manages to start a debate, the rules of draughts are one tap away and cover everything from crowning to the draw laws.
It works offline. The game is a web app you can install: load it once and it keeps playing with no connection, which makes it decent train and aeroplane entertainment for two.
There’s an undo button, though whether undos are permitted between friends is a treaty you’ll have to negotiate yourselves. We take no position.
The thirty-second rules refresher
Two-player games attract lapsed players, so here is the law of English draughts in brief, for whoever hasn’t played since school. Men move one square diagonally forward on the dark squares and capture by jumping over an enemy piece into the empty square beyond. If a jump is available you must take one, and a piece that has jumped must keep jumping while it can, all in the same turn. When several different jumps are on offer, the mover picks whichever they like; there’s no obligation to take the biggest haul. Reach the far row and your man is crowned a king, which moves and captures one square diagonally in all four directions. Wipe your opponent out, or leave them with no legal move, and you’ve won.
Two draw laws exist for stubborn endgames, and the board applies them itself: threefold repetition of a position, and 40 moves per side with no capture and no man moved. Nobody has to concede a family game on a technicality; the screen just declares it.
Playing draughts online with friends who are far away
Pass-and-play needs one device and two people beside it. For everyone else in your life, you need true draughts online multiplayer, with two boards kept in sync across the internet, and that lives at our sister site.
Play draughts online against real opponents at Checkers Online. It’s the bigger platform in our family of sites, it runs live games between real people in the browser, and like this site it needs no download to start a game. Send a friend that link, both open a game, and settle whatever needs settling at whatever distance separates you.
The same site also matches you against strangers when no friend is available, which is a different pleasure entirely: nobody’s feelings to spare.
Which option should you pick?
Honestly, this one’s easy.
Pick the two-player mode here when you’re in the same place: family evenings, pubs, classrooms, long journeys, the half hour after Sunday lunch when somebody says “go on then, best of three”. One screen between two people is the closest thing to a real board, and it starts in seconds.
Pick Checkers Online when distance is the problem, or when you want opponents on tap rather than by arrangement.
And between human opponents, keep your eye in against the computer. Our board gives you three difficulty levels, and the hard one has ended many a winning streak before it reached the family reunion. Any of the habits in our beginner strategy guide will travel with you to either kind of game.
Draughts is better with witnesses
A win against the computer evaporates the moment the screen closes. A win against your brother is a permanent asset. Get the board up, pick your Black, and start a two-player game of draughts now; the online kind, with real opponents around the world, is one click further at Checkers Online.
Play draughts free →