Chinese Checkers

The board is a six-pointed star: a hexagon of 61 holes in the middle with a triangular point of 10 holes on each of its six sides, 121 holes in all. Each player's ten marbles start filling one point, and the whole game is a race to move all ten into the point directly opposite. You play Red from the bottom point, so your target is the top one, marked with a dashed gold outline.

Players take turns clockwise, one move each, and moving is compulsory. A move is either a single step into one of the up to six holes touching the marble, or a chain of jumps — never a mixture of the two. Nothing is ever captured: a marble you jump over stays exactly where it was, and it may be the rung someone else climbs next turn.

From the starting position you have exactly 14 legal moves: 8 steps out of your front row of four, and 6 single jumps by the three marbles of the second row over the front row. Every one of them is a quiet opening. The game only opens up once marbles meet in the middle, which is where the long chains are.

A jump goes over one adjacent marble — yours or anybody else's — into the empty hole directly beyond it, in a straight line. From where it lands the same marble may jump again, in any direction, and again after that, for as long as there is a marble to jump and an empty hole behind it. You can stop the chain at any hole along the way. The one restriction is that a chain may not land on the same hole twice, and that includes the hole the marble started from.

On this board you never have to trace the chain yourself. Pick up a marble and every hole it can reach glows — the search finds every chain there is, including ones that double back across the board. Point at a glowing hole and the route is drawn; tap it and the marble hops there jump by jump. When two different chains reach the same hole, the one with fewer jumps is the one played.

In most games your target point is somebody else's starting point, so a player could spoil your game simply by never moving a marble or two out of it. This board uses a clear anti-blocking rule. A marble has left home once it has finished a move outside its own starting point, and that never un-happens. If holes in your target are still held by marbles of the player who started there and have never left home, you win as soon as every other hole in your target holds one of your own marbles.

The rule cuts both ways, so bring every marble out of your own point early. Leave three behind and your opponent only needs seven of theirs in to win. A marble that leaves home and later wanders back does not count as a blocker, and in a three-player game the rule never comes up at all, because every target there is a point nobody started in.

Those are the four table sizes the game is played at. Five does not work: one player would race into an empty point while everyone else raced into a full one. With three players nobody's target is anybody's home, so the race is pure; with four or six every target starts full, and the traffic through the middle of the board is the game.

Every computer player measures a position by how many steps each of its marbles still is from the tip of its target point — a total that bottoms out at 20 when the point is exactly full, and at no other arrangement. It pulls stray marbles toward the holes of its target that are still open, and gives each jump in a chain a small bonus. Easy stops there. Normal and Hard also charge themselves for any marble more than three rows behind the average of its own group, and for marbles parked in a point that is neither their home nor their target.

Each step up is a real step. In three test matches of 12 two-player games — six seeds, each level taking each side of the board — Hard beat Easy 12–0, Hard beat Normal 12–0 and Normal beat Easy 12–0. When Hard finished its matches against Easy, Easy had on average only 4.5 of its ten marbles home. Ties between equally good moves are settled from the game number, so a game replays move for move from that number.

No, and it is not a form of checkers either. It was invented in Germany in 1892 as Stern-Halma — star Halma — a six-pointed version of Halma, the jumping race George Howard Monks devised in the United States in 1883 or 1884 on a 16 × 16 square board. The oriental-sounding English name was coined for the American market in the late 1920s and stuck.

Halma is still the clearer ancestor: the same steps, the same chains of jumps over any piece, the same race into the opposite corner, played with 19 pieces a side between two players or 13 each among four. The star board is what made it a game for up to six.