Russian Draughts - Free Russian Draughts Online: Flying Kings vs Friends or AI Bots

Russian Checkers Online

Russian checkers is the sharpest of the classic 8x8 draughts games, free to play online right on this page. Three things give it that reputation. Ordinary pieces can jump enemies behind them as well as ahead, a promoted piece moves any number of squares in one turn instead of stepping square by square, and, uniquely, a piece is promoted the instant it touches the far row, even in the middle of a jump. The board and the 12 starting pieces per player are the same ones you know from checkers, so there is nothing new to learn about the setup.

Foony has the variant built in. Start a game from this page and the room comes preset with the full Russian ruleset, ready for a friend on an invite link or a computer opponent at any of seven strengths.

Shashki

Ask for this game in Moscow and you would say shashki, which is simply the Russian word for draughts. It is the dominant form of the game across Russia and most of the former USSR, with organized play through Eastern Europe and Israel as well, as covered in the Wikipedia article on Russian draughts. Where American players grow up on the forward-only 8x8 game, shashki is the childhood version there.

Shashki games are short, tactical, and famous for sudden turns where several pieces change hands at once and a calm position falls apart.

Russian Checkers Rules

The ordinary round pieces are called men. A man that gets promoted is a king, and everything interesting in this variant involves how those promotions happen. White always moves first, one piece per turn, diagonals only.

A man walks one square diagonally forward. It never walks backward, but it may jump an adjacent enemy piece in any diagonal direction, backward included, landing on the free square just past it and removing it from the board. If another leap is available from the landing square, the turn continues, and jumping is never optional. When an enemy piece can be taken, you must take.

Two rules then set the Russian game apart from its cousins:

The first is the free choice of capture. When several jumps are open to you, any of them is legal. The standard rules of the variant let you pick the two-piece sequence or the one-piece escape as you see fit. Brazilian draughts uses the same board and pieces but takes that choice away from you, always requiring the biggest capture.

The second is instant promotion. Elsewhere a man must finish its move on the far row to be crowned. In Russian checkers a man is crowned the moment it touches that row, so a jump that passes over the far row mid-chain produces a king even though the piece ends its turn somewhere else entirely. Watch it happen:

Kings are the payoff. A king moves any number of squares along an open diagonal, and it can jump a distant enemy, landing on the square just beyond the piece it takes. One king is worth several men. Games end when a player has no pieces or no legal move left, and they end in a draw when the same position shows up a third time or 100 turns pass without a capture.

Russian Checkers vs Computer

Playing shashki against the computer is the standard way to learn it, and Foony has seven strengths of computer opponent for exactly that, running from Trivial at the bottom all the way up to Grandmaster. Every bot in a match plays at the single strength the host selected, so a game is one consistent opponent from start to finish.

The lower strengths make plenty of mistakes while you get used to backward captures, which trip up every American checkers player at first. The upper strengths are much stronger. They spot the multi-jump turns this variant is famous for, and they will sacrifice a man to pull your piece onto a square where a second, bigger jump is waiting. Losing to that trick a few times is the fastest shashki lesson there is.

2 Player Russian Checkers with Friends

Every Foony room is built around a shareable link. Start a game from this page, send the URL, and your opponent opens it in any modern browser without installing or signing up for anything. If you are in the main checkers lobby, hit Play with Friends and select Russian Draughts from the Presets tab, or hit Play Bots and pick it under Game Variant for a solo table.

Matches run head to head, one player per side, with a 25 second clock on each move that the host can extend or turn off for a slower, more thoughtful game. Hosts can also change the rules: the Advanced tab has a switch for each one, so a group of friends can play Russian rules without forced captures, or try instant promotion on a 10x10 board just to see what happens.

Russian Draughts Strategy

Watch the squares behind you. Backward captures mean the safe squares from American checkers no longer exist, and the most common beginner disaster is marching a piece forward past an enemy man that promptly jumps it from behind. Before every advance, check the two diagonals behind the square you are landing on.

Make the free choice work for you. Because your opponent picks which capture to make, a sacrifice only works when every one of their legal replies leaves you better off. The same goes for defending: if you must lose a piece, look for the capture that ruins the attacker's follow-up rather than the one that saves the biggest man.

Race for the crown. Instant promotion plus flying movement makes the first king an enormous advantage, so moves spent walking a man to the far row are rarely wasted. And since a mid-jump touch of the far row counts, watch for capture chains that pass over it. Setting one up is the signature shashki move.

Trade into a king endgame you win. With only 12 men a side, pieces come off the board fast. If you are a piece up, simplify. If you are a piece down, complicate, because tangled positions are where the big multi-jump swings happen.

Beyond Shashki

The quickest way to appreciate what this variant changes is to feel the baseline again. Play a round of the American game at checkers, where men only capture forward and a new king moves one square at a time, then come back to shashki and feel the difference. Same board, same pieces, completely different pace.