Brazilian Draughts - Free Brazilian Draughts Online: 8x8 International Rules

Brazilian Checkers

Brazilian checkers is international draughts at 8x8 scale, a free online board game you can start right on this page. The board and the dozen pieces per player match the checkers set you already own, while the rules come straight from the 10x10 tournament game: pieces jump enemies in front of them and behind them, a promoted piece covers whole diagonals in a single move, and whenever you can choose between captures, the rules pick the one that takes the most. Brazil made this compact version its national standard, which is how it earned the name.

The result is the densest game in the draughts family. International draughts spreads those tactics across 100 squares, and Brazilian checkers packs them into 64.

Brazilian Draughts Rules

Each player starts with 12 flat round pieces, draughts players call them men, arranged on the dark squares of their three nearest rows. White plays the first move. A man slides one square diagonally ahead onto a free dark square, and it never slides toward its own side.

Most of the game is in the jumping. A man jumps an enemy sitting diagonally next to it, in any of the four directions, coming down on the empty square just beyond it and taking the piece. If the square it lands on opens another jump, the same turn keeps going, and skipping a jump is never allowed.

Reach the far side and stop there, and your man is promoted to a king. The stop matters: per the rules of Brazilian draughts, a man whose jumping sequence merely passes across the back row keeps its ordinary rank, which is one of the two details that separate this game from the Russian version played on the same board. A king moves like a bishop in chess, covering any number of open squares at once, and it can start a jump from far down the diagonal, stopping on the square directly after the piece it captures.

Wins and draws work the way the rest of the family handles them. Capture everything, or leave your opponent frozen with no legal move, and the game is yours. A position repeating for the third time is a draw, and so are 100 consecutive turns without a capture.

The Majority Rule in Practice

The other separating detail is the majority rule, and a board shows it better than a paragraph can. Whenever more than one capture is available anywhere on your side of the board, you are required to play the capture that takes the most pieces off the board. Not the most convenient one. The biggest one.

Russian draughts, played on this same 8x8 board, hands that decision to the player. Brazilian rules never do, and that single difference changes the whole strategy. Since your opponent's captures are predictable, you can offer a piece on purpose and know exactly which jump they must make, then attack the square they were forced onto. Chains of these forced moves are the signature combination of the game, and the majority rule is what makes them airtight.

Brazilian Checkers Online with Friends or Bots

This page's board is already set to the Brazilian preset, so pressing play starts the real thing. You can also reach it from Foony's main checkers lobby: Play with Friends opens the room settings where Brazilian Draughts sits in the Presets tab, and Play Bots offers the same choice under Game Variant. Rooms are shared by link, friends join in one tap from a phone or desktop browser, and nobody needs an account or a download to play.

Against the computer you choose one of seven strengths, Trivial up through Grandmaster, and that one strength holds from the first move to the last. Each move has a 25 second timer, and the host can loosen it or remove it entirely. The Advanced tab goes further for house games, letting the host toggle every rule on this page independently, board size included.

Brazilian Draughts Strategy

Think in forced sequences, not single moves. The majority rule means every capture is an obligation, so from any position you can follow the chain: if I offer this piece, they must jump here, then I jump these two, and so on. Reading three forced moves ahead in Brazilian checkers is easier than reading one free move ahead in chess, because your opponent's replies are written into the rules.

Beware of gifts. The other side of that advice is that every piece your opponent leaves free to take is a trap until proven otherwise. Before you accept material, find the jump you will be forced to make afterward and look hard at the square where you land.

Value the first king like a queen. On 64 squares a flying king sees a huge fraction of the board, and a lone king against scattered men often picks them off one by one. Spending a couple of moves to secure a promotion is nearly always worth it, and denying your opponent their promotion square is worth just as much.

Hold your back row. Since promotion requires a full stop on your back row, a defender there does two jobs at once, blocking the promotion squares and covering your rear diagonals against backward jumps.

Related Checkers Games on Foony

If you want the same rules with more elbow room, the 10x10 international preset scales this game up. And if you have never played any draughts variant at all, plain checkers is the easiest starting point Foony has, with the same seven computer strengths to climb and the same one-link invites when a friend is ready to join.