About Checkers Arena

Who runs this site, how it is built, and how it pays for itself · Updated August 9, 2026

Checkers Arena is a place to play checkers — properly, in a browser, without an account and without paying. This page explains who is behind it, how the game works under the hood, and where the money comes from, because a site that asks you to spend your evening on it should be willing to say those things plainly.

What this site is

Four games live here, not one. American checkers is the version most English speakers grew up with. Brazilian draughts uses the same 8×8 board with the international rules — men capture backward, kings fly. International draughts plays those rules on a 10×10 board, and Turkish draughts turns the whole thing 90°: pieces move orthogonally across every square. All four are playable against the computer on three levels, and against other people online.

You do not need an account. A guest gets a name, an Elo rating and a full game history, all stored in their own browser. An account is free and takes ten seconds — it exists so your rating follows you to another device and so you can keep a friends list, not as a toll gate.

How fair play is enforced

Every online move is checked on the server against the same rules engine the board uses. A modified browser cannot make an illegal move, because the move is not accepted unless the server agrees it is legal. The move clock runs on the server too, so it cannot be paused by closing a laptop. Games interrupted by a dropped connection wait for the player to come back rather than ending instantly.

Ratings use the Elo system, the same one chess uses. Everyone starts at 1200. Games between two people on the same network are recorded but not rated — that keeps the leaderboard honest without punishing two people who share a flat.

Who is behind it

Checkers Arena is built and operated by Compu Global Hyper Meganet UG (haftungsbeschränkt), a company registered in Mühlhausen, Germany. The full legal details — register number, VAT ID, postal address — are on the legal notice, as German law requires.

The quickest way to reach a human is email: games@cghm.company. Questions about your account, a bug you hit mid-game, a rules disagreement, or anything commercial all go to the same place. There is also a contact page and an open Discord server where players arrange games and report the odd broken thing.

How the site pays for itself

Straightforwardly: there is no subscription, no paid tier, and nothing on the board is locked. The site earns a small commission through the Amazon Associates programme — the “Games we love” cards on the home page link to physical board games, and a purchase made through one of those links pays a percentage at no extra cost to you. Those links are marked as sponsored, and the disclosure sits next to them.

That is the whole business model. Nothing about the game changes based on whether you ever click one.

What we do with data

As little as the game needs. A guest identity is a random key in your own browser — no email, no real name. Accounts need a username and a password, and still no email address. The privacy policy and cookie policy spell out the details, including the analytics the site uses.

How it is built

The board, the rules engine and the computer opponent all run in your browser, which is why a game against the computer works instantly and keeps working on a bad connection. Online games add a Node.js server that owns the authoritative game state. One rules engine serves all three — browser, computer opponent and server — so they cannot disagree about what a legal move is.

The site is tested the way it is played: complete games are played out automatically against the real server before every release, including in a real browser, and the guides are checked for broken links, wrong canonicals and mismatched translations. That is not a promise that nothing is ever broken — it is the reason most things are not.

Come and play

The fastest way to understand any of this is to open the board and make a move. No account, no download, no wait.