A Short History of Turkish Draughts

Where the orthogonal game comes from · Updated August 20, 2026

Turkish draughts — dama — is one of the most distinctive members of the whole draughts family. Its defining feature, orthogonal movement across every square, sets it apart from the diagonal games played further west, and it has been a fixture of daily life across a huge region for a very long time.

Where does dama come from?

The honest answer is that nobody can date it precisely, and any page that gives you a confident year is guessing. Draughts games spread through everyday play rather than through published rulebooks, so they leave very little written trace until somebody thinks to write down what everyone already knows. What can be said with confidence is where dama sits in the family — and that turns out to be a more interesting answer than a date would be.

Behind every draughts game stands a much older ancestor: alquerque, a capture-by-jumping game played across the Mediterranean world long before anything recognisable as modern draughts existed. Dama is not a Turkish reinvention of European checkers. It is a separate surviving branch of the same tree, and in some respects the older-looking one.

One ancestor, two branches

From that shared alquerque ancestry the family split along a single question — which way do pieces travel? — and both answers survive today:

• The diagonal branch moved onto the dark squares of a chequered board. It produced American checkers, Brazilian draughts and, at its deepest, international draughts on the 10×10 board.
• The orthogonal branch kept pieces moving in straight lines across every square. Turkish draughts is its best-known surviving form.

This is why dama feels so unrelated to checkers despite obviously belonging to the same family. It is not a variant of the diagonal game with the rules bent — it is a cousin that never went diagonal in the first place. Nothing you learned about diagonal geometry transfers, and that is a fact about ancestry rather than about difficulty.

Why straight lines instead of diagonals?

The diagonal games made a trade that is easy to miss: by restricting play to squares of one colour they throw away half the board. A checkers piece lives on 32 usable squares out of 64. That restriction is what makes the diagonal game work — pieces on dark squares can only ever meet other pieces on dark squares — but it is a restriction all the same.

Dama keeps the whole board and gets its structure from direction instead: men move forward and sideways but never backward, so there is still a clear sense of advance, and the board still has a front and a back. What it gains is space. Kings sweep entire ranks and files like a rook, there are no unusable squares to hide behind, and a piece can be threatened from three sides rather than two.

Dama in Turkey and beyond

In Turkey the game is simply called dama, and it is enormously popular — played in homes, cafés and coffee houses, and passed down as a matter of course. It is played well beyond Turkey too: the same game, under local names and with small regional differences, is found in Greece, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, and at points around the Mediterranean and the wider Middle East. That distribution follows old trade and imperial routes rather than modern borders.

Competitively the game is much younger than the game itself. The first official Turkish Draughts World Championship was held on 22–24 October 2014 in İzmir, and world championships have been held annually since. A game that people had been playing in coffee houses for centuries acquired a formal world title within living memory.

Türkçe okumak isteyenler için: Türk daması sayfamız ve dama kuralları.

The wider orthogonal family

Turkish draughts is the best known of its branch but not the only member. Armenian draughts, also called tama, is closely related and differs mainly in allowing diagonal movement alongside the orthogonal one. Keny is another regional relative. More recently designers have built new games on the same straight-line idea — Croda, by the Croatian mathematician Ljuban Dedić, and Dameo, by the Dutch games designer Christian Freeling.

That a modern designer would choose the orthogonal branch as a starting point says something about it: the geometry is not a historical quirk to be tidied away, it is a genuinely different and workable basis for a game.

The game today

Turkish draughts remains one of the most widely played board games in its region, and its unusual orthogonal rules make it a favourite curiosity for players elsewhere who grew up on the diagonal game. Online, it lets anyone try a genuinely different kind of draughts in seconds. On Checkers Arena it sits alongside the diagonal variants as the family's great outlier.

Play a piece of it

The quickest way to understand dama is to play it — a few moves in, the orthogonal logic clicks into place and the rook-like kings start to make sense. There is a computer opponent on three levels if you would rather learn without an audience.

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