A Short History of International Draughts

How the 10×10 game became the standard · Updated August 20, 2026

International draughts is the competitive heart of the whole draughts family — the version played in world championships. It grew out of the older tradition of draughts by moving the game onto a larger 10×10 board, a change that deepened it enormously.

The story everyone repeats — and why it is probably wrong

Nearly every account of this game tells the same story: in Paris, around 1723, a Polish courtier and a French officer sat down together, enlarged the draughts board to 10×10, added twenty pieces a side, and invented backward capture, the long king and compulsory majority capture in an afternoon. The game was named jeu polonais after the Pole, and the rest is history. The story was popularised by the great games historian H. J. R. Murray and has been copied ever since.

It is almost certainly false. The Dutch draughts historian Arie van der Stoep pointed out that Pierre Marin's Dictionnaire complet François et Hollandois, published in Amsterdam in 1710, already contains the phrase "Sçavez vous damer à la Polonoise?" — "Can you play Polish draughts?" That is thirteen years before the game was supposedly invented, in a different country, printed in a dictionary for ordinary learners. A game does not appear in a language textbook the decade before someone thinks of it.

The honest answer to "where does international draughts come from" is that nobody knows. The evidence points at the Low Countries rather than Paris: the 10×10 board was probably in use in the Netherlands from around 1550, and the number of pieces grew to twenty a side sometime between 1650 and 1700 — a gradual drift over a century and a half, not a single inventive evening.

So why "Polish" draughts?

If no Pole invented it, the name needs another explanation, and the likeliest one is unflattering. It appears to follow a Dutch convention of the period in which ideas considered odd or "unnatural" were labelled Polish — the way English once attached "Dutch" to things it found peculiar. The enlarged board with its long-range kings and compulsory captures would have struck players of the older game as exactly that sort of oddity.

The name stuck anyway. The game is still jeu de dames polonais in French and warcaby stupolowe — "hundred-square draughts" — in Polish, and it was only as it became the international competitive standard that "international draughts" took over as the neutral term. We have a Polish-language version of this page, with the rules in Polish.

Where the game really comes from

Behind all the draughts variants stands a much older game: alquerque, a capture-by- jumping game played across the Mediterranean world long before anything recognisable as draughts existed. From that common ancestor the family split into two branches that still exist side by side today — one in which pieces move and capture diagonally, and one in which they move orthogonally, in straight lines.

International draughts sits at the far end of the diagonal branch. Turkish draughts is the surviving major member of the straight-line branch, which is why it feels so unrelated to play despite sharing the same great-grandparent. Van der Stoep also argued, against the conventional telling, that draughts owes nothing to chess — the two games have separate ancestries and merely ended up sharing a board.

What the 10×10 board changed

Whatever its origins, the move to a larger board is what made this the deepest game in the family. Fifty dark squares instead of thirty-two, twenty pieces a side instead of twelve, and the international rules — men that capture backward, flying kings and compulsory maximum capture — together produce something qualitatively different from 8×8 checkers rather than merely bigger.

The most visible consequence is the length of combinations. Captures of five, six and seven pieces are an ordinary feature of the 10×10 game rather than a curiosity, and because the longest capture is compulsory, a player who sees one move further can force the reply several moves in advance. That is the quality that made the game attractive to serious players and gave it a published theory.

A century of world champions

The first world championship was played in 1894 and won by the Frenchman Isidore Weiss, who then held the title for eighteen years across seven championship wins — a period of dominance with few parallels in any board game. For close to sixty years after him the title stayed in France or the Netherlands.

That changed in 1958, when Iser Kuperman became the first world champion from the Soviet Union. Soviet players went on to dominate the game much as they dominated chess in the same era, and the strength of the former Soviet republics is still visible in the modern rankings. A women's world championship has been held since 1973, first won by Elena Mikhailovskaya, and a junior championship since 1971.

A game that travelled

From continental Europe the 10×10 game spread widely and put down especially deep roots in the Netherlands, France, and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as parts of Africa, where it enjoys a huge following. Wherever it went it became the serious competitive form of draughts, the one associated with masters, tournaments and published theory.

That African following is not a footnote. Senegal in particular has produced players of genuine world class, and the game is widely played across West Africa — one reason the 10×10 version has a far larger global constituency than the 8×8 game that English speakers think of as checkers.

The tournament standard

Today international draughts is governed by the World Draughts Federation (FMJD), which has overseen official world championship status since 1948 and rates the leading players. It sits alongside its 8×8 cousins — such as Brazilian draughts, which shares its rules on a smaller board — as the largest and deepest member of the family. Its long, forced combinations and dominant flying kings are what give the game its reputation.

Play a piece of it

The best way to appreciate the 10×10 game is to play it. Try a game against the computer and you will quickly feel why the extra space makes such a difference — or set up a position on the analysis board and see what the engine makes of it.

Learn the rules, compare it with other games on the differences page, or read the FAQ.