How to play Nigerian draughts
Nigerian draughts is played on a 10×10 board with 20 seeds each. It's fast and tactical: men capture backwards, kings fly across the board, and capturing is compulsory. Here are the rules used on Naija Draft Club.
1The board and the seeds
The board has 10×10 squares, and only the dark squares are used. Each player has 20 seeds on the first four rows on their side.
The long diagonal runs to each player's right-hand side (the Nigerian way of setting the board).
White moves first. After each game the players switch colours, so the other player starts the next game.
2Moving
A seed (a "man") moves one square diagonally forward to an empty dark square.
Men never move backwards, except when capturing.
3Capturing ("eating")
- Jump over an opponent's seed that is right next to you diagonally, landing on the empty square just behind it. The jumped seed is eaten.
- Men capture forward and backward.
- Capturing is compulsory: if you can eat, you must.
- If you have several captures, you may choose any of them. You don't have to take the biggest one.
4Keep jumping
After a capture, if the same seed can capture again, it must keep jumping in the same move, eating seed after seed.
Eaten seeds stay on the board (marked ✕ in the game) until the move is finished, and a seed can't be jumped twice.
5Kings fly
A man that ends its move on the far row becomes a king (♛). (Passing through the far row in the middle of a capture doesn't count.)
A king moves any number of squares along a diagonal, forwards or backwards. It captures from a distance and can land on any empty square behind the seed it eats. If it can continue capturing from one of those squares, it must land there.
6Winning
You win when your opponent has no seeds left, or can't make any move.
Draw: when each side has only 1 or 2 seeds left, the game is a draw after 4 moves each without a capture. In general, it's a draw after 25 moves each without a capture.