History of the checkers

It is difficult to know what is the origin of the checkers game. It is certain, however, that the ancients have had more or less similar games. On the walls of the pavilion of Ramses II , in Medinet-Abu , is a painting depicting the pharaoh playing one of these games with one of his wives. The diagrammisnos of the Greeks and the latrunculi of the Romans fall in this same category.

The current women's game does not seem to go beyond the XVI th century. The works of the Middle Ages such as the books of Alphonse le Savant and Nicolas de Nicolai which deal with all the games of table then known ( chess , marelles, trictrac, etc.) do not speak of the ladies. But there is, in the middle of the XVI th century, a Spanish treaty drafts by Antonio Torquemada (1547). The first treatise of the game of drafts published in France is that of Pierre Mallet (1668); it is relative to the so-called French game.

The game of checkers currently practiced (Polish draughts) made its appearance under the Regency and was not long in completely supplanting the old French game. The ladies players then met in a cafe which then took the name of Cafe Manoury. Manoury, who was the first boy in this cafe, became himself the strongest ladies player of his time and published in 1770 a highly esteemed treatise, which has been reprinted many times since. Other works appeared in the following years: Blonde, 1798; Lallement, 1801; Dufour, 1808; Everat, 1811, etc. The treaty's most comprehensive published in the XIX thcentury is that of Balrent (Amiens, 1881-1886, 3 vols in-8). There are almost all the drafts published until then, as well as a bibliography and excerpts of the principal works published in the various languages. From that time, there are a number of magazines and newspapers that publish problems of women: the Illustrated World, the Gauls, the Century, Strategy, Evening, etc. Others, such as Gil Blas, Telegraph, Voltaire , etc., gave them for a few years, but had ceased before 1900.

The game of checkers, indeed, although very cultivated, has always counted amateurs less numerous and less passionate than the game of chess which is reputed superior by the variety and the depth of the combinations. However, we must mention the opinion of Edgar Poe who, in a very curious page on the spirit of analysis, declares:

"The high power of reflection is much more actively and profitably brought into play by the modest game of checkers than by the laborious complexity of chess. In the latter where the pieces are endowed with various and bizarre movements, complexity is taken for depth. In nine out of ten cases, the most attentive player wins, not the most skilled. In the ladies, on the other hand, the probabilities of oversight are lower and the benefits won by each player can only be won by superior insight. "

Without discussing these reflections more piquant than fair, let us remember that the skillful chess players understand quite well the whole mechanism of the draughts game to play one or more parts of memory as did Phildor, Kieseritzky, Morphy, etc. It is not the same with the ladies: Philidor, who was very strong, tried to play a part of memory, but towards the twelfth stroke, he scrambled the pieces.

Want You Gone

Art by Amund Bjørnstad

“Boo!”