Checkers Best Move Calculator

Set up any position on the board below and this checkers solver will work out the best move, rank the alternatives, and tell you who is actually winning. It applies forced captures, multi‑jumps and crowning exactly as the playable game does.

Built by Brian Hamilton

Click a square to place

Whose turn is it?

Search effort

Place some pieces, choose whose turn it is, then press Find best move.

Reading the evaluation

The number beside each move is what the position is worth after that move, measured from the point of view of the side to move. It is scaled so that an ordinary man is worth about 100 and a king about 170. So a score near +100 means the move wins roughly a piece; -200 means it drops about two.

Small numbers are noise. A gap of ten or twenty points between two moves is not a real difference — it is the difference between a piece standing one square nearer the middle. A gap of a hundred or more is material, and worth paying attention to. When the calculator finds a forced win it stops reporting a score and says so instead.

The 32 squares, and how moves are written

Only the dark squares are ever used, so checkers players number those 32 squares and ignore the rest. Numbering runs left to right along each row and then down the board. Every move this calculator gives you is written in that notation, so you can transfer it straight onto a physical board or into a game record.

The numbering every checkers notation uses: Black’s back row is 1–4, Red’s is 29–32. A quiet move is written 22-18; a capture uses an x, as in 22x15.

Multi-jumps are one move, not several

If a jump lands your piece where another jump is available, you must keep going. The whole chain counts as a single move, and the calculator scores it as one. This is the part players most often get wrong when they try to count material by eye, because a position that looks like it loses one piece can lose three.

Red to move. The man on 22 jumps 18, lands on 15, and is then obliged to jump 10 as well.

The result: one move, written 22x15x6, and Black has lost both men.

Why the calculator sometimes offers you only one move

Captures are compulsory. If any jump is available anywhere on the board, every quiet move becomes illegal — and if only one jump is available, you have no choice at all. People often assume the tool is broken when it returns a single option. It usually is not; the rules have simply taken the decision away.

This is also how most checkers games are actually lost. Because a capture cannot be declined, a player can be steered into taking a piece they would much rather leave alone:

Red to move, and the highlighted man on 22 is the only piece that may legally move.

Red has four perfectly reasonable quiet moves here — 6-1, 6-2, 22-17 and 29-25. All four are illegal, because the man on 22 can jump the black man on 18. So Red must play 22x15.

That lands a red man on square 15, directly in front of the black king on 19. The king answers with 19x10x1, taking the man on 15 and continuing over the man on 6. Red captured one piece and lost two. The calculator scores Red’s only legal move at roughly −60, which is its way of saying: this is forced, and it is bad.

The practical lesson: before you offer a piece, check what your opponent is forced to do next, not what they would like to do. A sacrifice that sets up a compulsory recapture is the most common winning idea in checkers, and it is the one this calculator is most useful for spotting.

What the evaluation actually counts

When the search runs out of depth it has to judge the position it has arrived at. It does that by scoring every piece on the board and subtracting the opponent’s total from your own. These are the exact weights this calculator uses:

Piece scoring used by this calculator. Bonuses stack, so a red man in the centre of the board on its fourth row scores 100 + 12 + 9 = 121.
Factor	Points	Applies to
Man	100	Base value of an uncrowned piece
King	170	Base value once crowned
Centre control	0 to +12	Every piece, scaled by distance from the middle four squares
Advancement	+3 per row	Men only — kings gain nothing from marching
Back row held	+8	A man still sitting on its own back row, denying a crown
Edge column	−4	Any piece on the far left or far right file

Two things follow from that table which surprise people. A king is worth less than two men, so trading a king for two pieces is usually good. And a man that has advanced five rows is worth 115 — more than a man sitting at home — which is why the calculator will often push a piece forward rather than defend.

How this calculator works

It is the same engine that plays against you on the Checkers game page, given more time and asked a different question. Rather than picking a move to play, it scores every legal move and shows you the whole ranked list.

Search: minimax with alpha–beta pruning. It assumes your opponent also plays the best move it can find, which is why the recommendation is often defensive.
Move ordering: captures are examined first, longest chains before short ones. This does not change the answer, but it prunes far more of the tree, so the same time buys a deeper search.
Iterative deepening: it searches one ply, then two, then three, keeping the last completed result. When the time budget runs out you get the deepest answer that actually finished rather than half of a deeper one. Fast, Standard and Deep set that budget to roughly 0.8, 2.5 and 6 seconds.
Faster wins rank higher: a forced win carries the remaining search depth in its score, so a win in two moves outranks the same win in six.
Rules applied: compulsory captures, multi-jump chains followed to the end, men moving only forwards, kings moving both ways, and crowning the moment a man reaches the far row — including mid-chain, which ends the chain.

Where it is weak, and what it does not know

Worth being straight about this, because a tool that overstates itself is worse than no tool.

There is no opening book and no endgame database. From the starting position it is guessing along with everyone else, and in a genuinely long king-versus-king ending it will shuffle rather than force the win.
“Best” means best under the table above, to the depth it reached. It is not a proof. Deeper search can and does change the answer, which is exactly why the depth it reached is displayed with the result.
It does not detect draws by repetition. The playable game calls a draw after 80 moves without a capture; the analyser is only looking at the position in front of it and has no history to work from.
Positional judgement is crude. Six numbers cannot capture ideas like controlling the double corner or holding a bridge. Where material is level and the position is quiet, treat a small score with suspicion.

Draughts, checkers, and which rules this uses

The game is called checkers in North America and draughts in Britain, and this calculator uses the rules common to both: an 8×8 board, 12 pieces a side, men that move and capture diagonally forwards only, kings that move both ways one square at a time, and compulsory captures.

It does not cover international or Polish draughts, which is played on a 10×10 board with flying kings and men that may capture backwards. Nor does it cover Turkish draughts or Brazilian rules. If your board has 100 squares, this is the wrong tool.

One rule genuinely does vary between traditions: whether you must choose the capture that takes the most pieces. British and American rules let you take any available capture, and that is what this calculator assumes — every legal jump is listed, and it tells you which one is best rather than forcing the longest.

Play a full game

The analyser works on positions. If you want to play one out, the free Checkers game uses this same engine at three difficulty levels, or as pass-and-play against a friend. You may also like Nine Men’s Morris, Reversi and Gomoku, or the rest of the free online puzzle games.