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Checkers: Game Rules for Beginners and Teaching Tips for Adults

Games, including board games, are perceived by many adults as an activity that is not worth wasting your time on, because you can have fun, allegedly and more interestingly. However, it should be borne in mind that most classic board games depend not only and not so much on luck, but on the ability to play them. The player's task is to either outsmart the opponent, or surpass him in attentiveness and the ability to build a strategy, which means that the passion for such a pastime perfectly trains these skills.

Checkers is one of the most widely known board games, and child psychologists insist that it is worth teaching a child the basic rules at an early age.

Why do children need it?

At the age of five, the average child begins to see the relationship between his actions and the subsequent development of the situation, so it is at this stage that he first becomes able to build some kind of strategy. Child development experts say that this new ability should be developed as soon as possible, and one of the best ways to do this is to teach your child the rules of checkers.

The gameplay in this case makes you think, because only a rather smart and attentive person can win. At the same time, the game competitive component makes the child return to the task again and again in order to still achieve success. Of course, against a serious opponent, a small beginner will constantly lose, which is not very interesting, but after all, rivals can also be found among peers - then the chances of success will be higher.

Regularly playing checkers, such a preschooler acquires at least the ability to focus on solving some problem (which is unusual for most children) and perseverance. These qualities are very useful for learning at school - a child is more likely to make some progress right away. Moreover, to win, you need to be able to think through a strategy several moves ahead, which is useful at any stage of life. In checkers, the kid also learns that he needs to make decisions on his own, and some of them may turn out to be wrong - then you need to be able to accept the consequences of your own mistake.

If either parent has a rough idea of the game, it will be a good evening activity to help strengthen the family atmosphere. If the parents do not have such skills, and even they do not have the time, it is more reasonable to send the child to a specialized circle where the baby will be taught by professionals.

Game accessories

It should be noted that the rules of the game of checkers have several variations, named after the country in which they appeared - for example, English, Turkish, Italian. All this will probably be taught in special circles, but for a start it is worth mastering ordinary Russian checkers, supplies for which can be bought at any toy store.

The set, familiar to our country, looks quite simple. The game board (and at the same time, as a rule, the box for the whole game) is a wooden or plastic field, folded in half in the form of a suitcase, although it can even be depicted on cardboard. Such a field is a complete analogy of a chess one - it is divided into eight rows in length and width, the cells are painted white and black through one. Checkers act as playing chips - identical figures, of which there should be 12 pieces in black and white in a set.

An important condition is the possibility of a stable position of the checker in an inverted form, and visually the difference between a correctly installed checker and an inverted one should be obvious.

Today, a whole industry of games is working to satisfy children's desires, so classic checkers are somewhat outperformed by competitors in terms of colorful design. With a strong desire, you can find a checkers set designed specifically for kids - as the first such gift for homeschooling, such a solution will have a slightly higher chance to interest the child.

Rules for beginners

It is checkers that is recommended as the first intellectual game because there are no rules that are difficult to understand. In general, remembering them is not difficult, although for a five-year-old child this can be a certain problem - if this happened, do not be too lazy to find special rhymes on the Internet with which children can quickly remember the basic rules.

It should be noted that people who have never been seriously interested in checkers before can only think that they know all the rules, while some points turn out to be a surprise for them. Consider all the principles of the game thesis:

checkers at the beginning of the game are placed in three rows on their side of the board, occupying only black cells, and they can also move exclusively on black, that is, only diagonally;

checkers always move only forward, the end of the move must be on the nearest free cell;
at home, this rule is often forgotten, but the player does not have the right to change his mind - even a simple touch on the figure means that now he must resemble it;
opponents take turns;
to win, you need to kill all the checkers of the enemy one by one - for this it is necessary that the enemy figure stands directly in front of yours, and immediately behind it there is an empty field;

you can’t go back, but you can kill the opponent’s checkers in any direction;
moreover, the figures go only one cell forward, while you can kill several enemy checkers at once in one move, if they are located through one - in the process you can even change the direction of movement;
one more rule that is often ignored: if the opponent is exposed to a blow, the player does not have the right to refuse to beat him;
a checker that has reached the opposite edge of the board turns into a "king" - such a figure no longer has any restrictions on the direction of movement or even the length of the move, although it is still limited only by black diagonals;

any ordinary checker can kill the "lady";
in some cases, a draw is possible if there are too few pieces left in the game, and the opponents are approximately equal (otherwise the game may be too long), or if the surviving pieces of the opponents have blocked each other in such a way that there are no available moves left.

In some varieties of the game, other special rules are possible, but for the time being, this simplest version will suffice.

Party terms and timeframes

If you want a child to not just play checkers sometimes in his free time, but to take checkers relatively seriously, you should immediately teach him to use at least basic terms. If everything is clear with a simple checker, then the onboard one is the figure that is located on the right or left edge of the field, and the passer is the one that after the next move will turn into a “lady”.

“King”, as we have already said, is the piece that has reached the opposite end of the board from the player, and the eighth row itself, which turns the checker into a “lady”, is called the ladies field. A well-thought-out combination of moves, the result of which will be the transformation of a simple checker into a “king”, is quite logically called a breakthrough.

If the figure, after walking, does not beat anyone, this is called a quiet move, but you need to strive to make shock moves - when the figure has beaten the opponent. A move in which one's own simple checker is purposefully exposed to the opponent's blow is called a subjugation. An exchange is a move (more precisely, one move from each of the opponents), as a result of which both lose the same number of figures.

If the simple checkers of one player are blocked by the checkers of another so that they can neither move nor beat the opponent, this is called locking. When a similar situation has already occurred with the participation of “kings” who, standing at opposite ends of the diagonals, do not allow the opponent’s similar piece to leave their corner without sacrificing, the position on the board is called “tetanus”. Finally, the position of the checkers through one with free fields is usually called a sieve.

It is not so easy to teach a child to play from scratch - you will have to tell him absolutely everything, even what adults used to consider obvious. The problem also lies in the fact that the baby must remember all this at once, and this is both difficult and not always interesting. Therefore, do not rush to throw out all the information at once - for the first time it will be enough just to place the checkers on the board. If you can, always add a little fantasy - let knights fight on the field instead of faceless checkers.

In the first game, it is often advised to use eight checkers instead of twelve - this way there will be more free space, you do not need to immediately get involved in the battle. Explain each move, your task now is not to win, but to fix the rules. It’s inappropriate to smash a beginner or make fun of him now, but you shouldn’t succumb, completely losing the game - this will not help mental development, but defeat would be an excellent incentive for self-improvement. However, sometimes it is useful to succumb a little to equalize forces, because no one wants to constantly lose without the slightest hope of success.

Pay attention to the fact that it is desirable to think through not only the next move, but also the whole combination in advance. Be prepared that the preschooler will not immediately master the game - he will make mistakes, but you need not scold him at such moments, but explain what's what. But for successful actions you need to praise every time.