(This article was rewritten on 09 February 2005 and again on 11 October 2025 due to newly found information affecting its accuracy.)

Take a good look at the image below. It's an AI conception of a serious checker game in a rural grocery store. Nice drawing, but the AI was clearly not well trained on checkers.

However, the game these two are playing in fact could be an attempt to represent one of several less well known checker variants, some new and some quite old.

Do you know what variants would be a "reasonable" match? How many such variants can you name?

Click on Read More for the solution, at least to the extent a solution is possible.

The two best possibilities are Breakthrough and Gothic Checkers. We received the following from George Miller of England:

"The game in the diagram could well be 'Breakthrough' - moves are made one square forwards either horizontally or vertically - capture like a pawn in chess. First play to get to the 8th rank wins by breakthrough. I first played this game in Cambridge while at a checkers match against Uganda. I reckon it's a win for the second player if they can play appropriate waiting moves to counter the first player."

Checker Maven staff did some research and found that Breakthrough was created by Dan Troyka as an entry in a contest to create new 8x8 board games held in 2001. More information can be found at The Games Forum, and the game can be played competitively by email through Gamerz.Net. The only problem is that there are pieces on the 8th rank already and the game would have been over some moves back.

Another possibility that we came across is the much older game of Gothic Checkers, as described in R. Wayne Schmittberger's book, New Rules for Classic Games. This too fits the board display at least to a certain (fanciful) degree. An internet reference on this game is here. (The diagrams there are clearly incorrect, as the men are shown on points rather than in the squares.) In German it's called "Altdeutsche Dame" and seems to date all the way back to 1650. It can be played competitively at BrainKing, where it is described as the "newest" variant of checkers. Newest on the site, perhaps, but certainly an old and venerable game.

Others? It could be Armenian Draughts or Turkish Draughts. These variants are played on all 64 squares, with White moving first, and 16 men per side.

These games are also described in Schmittberger's book and on various and sundry internet sites.

If you had guessed that this could have been the Roman game Latrunculi that would not have been too bad a try, either, but that's a fair bit further afield than the other possibilities.

Now, do you really suppose the two guys in the drawing knew about any of these unusual variants? Gothic Checkers would be the most likely candidate, as that's what we asked the AI to represent, but it's obvious that artifical intelligence has some way to go. It's a nice drawing, it just ... oh well.