Chinese Checkers

Rules and how to play

The Japanese version of Chinese Checkers played on this page is known in Japan as the Diamond Game, and its detailed rules differ between rule sheets and other sources. This page uses the rules below. The next section summarizes where sources differ and what this page decided.

The board is a star with 6 triangles around a central hexagon, and it has 121 spaces for marbles. Marbles move along the lines that connect the spaces. Triangles opposite each other have the same color. Of the 2 triangles in your color, one is your starting triangle, and the opposite one is your target triangle, where you move your marbles.^[5][10][11]

The marbles come in 3 colors: red, yellow, and green. Each player has 15 marbles (14 regular marbles and 1 large king marble). Rule sheets and other sources call the king the “king piece”. At the start, place your marbles on the 15 spaces of your starting triangle, with the king on the tip of the triangle, marked ◎ (a double ring). With 3 players, Red, Yellow, and Green are used. With 2 players, Red and Yellow are used, and Green’s 2 triangles are not used. Red moves first, and players take turns in the order Red → Yellow → Green (clockwise when the board is seen from above), each moving 1 marble per turn.^[1][5]

On your turn, choose one of your marbles and either step it to an adjacent empty space connected by a line, or jump. To jump, there must be a marble on the adjacent space and an empty space just beyond it on the same line. Your marble then jumps over that marble to the space beyond. The marble you jump over can be any color, including your own. Jumped marbles are not captured and stay on the board. You cannot jump over 2 or more marbles in a row, or over a king marble.^[1][5][6]

If you can jump again from where you land, you can keep jumping in the same turn. You may change direction with each jump and stop anywhere. You cannot step and then jump, or jump and then step. A turn is either a single step or jumps only (a single jump or a chain of jumps).^{[1][6][11][12]}

The king marble can jump all at once over any number of marbles lined up in a row on the same line, starting from the adjacent space (even just 1 marble). It lands on the empty space just beyond the row. It cannot jump if there is a king marble in the row, so it cannot jump over a king of another color. Like a regular marble, it can chain jumps or move just 1 step.^[1][2][6]

You cannot enter the triangles of other colors. You can neither stop in them nor land in them during a chain of jumps. However, marbles of any color can stop on and pass through the spaces on the line along the edge of the central hexagon (the hexagon edge). The innermost 5 spaces of each triangle lie on the hexagon edge, so you can enter those 5 spaces even in another color’s triangle. In a 2-player game, you also cannot enter the unused Green triangles, except for the spaces on the hexagon edge.^{[1][2][6][12]}

You win when all 15 of your marbles are in your target triangle and your king is on the tip (◎) of the target triangle. If marbles of other colors remain on the hexagon edge spaces of your target triangle, you win when all 15 spaces of the target triangle are filled with marbles and your king is on ◎ (see the next section).^[1]

Even with 3 players, the game ends as soon as the first player wins, and second and third places are not decided. You pass only when you have no marble that can move, and if all players pass in a row, the game is a draw. The game also ends in a draw when it reaches 800 moves with 2 players or 1,200 moves with 3 players (400 moves per player).

How sources differ, and the rules on this page

In this section, “the rule sheet” means the rule sheet for the 15-marble board in Hanayama’s current set. The differences between sources, and what this page decided, are as follows.

Can the king jump over just 1 marble?

The rule sheet says the king can jump over “any number” of pieces lined up in a straight line. The rule sheet for another Hanayama product, a collection of 20 games, says the king can jump “all at once over 2 or more pieces in a row”. When explaining how pieces move, both rule sheets say a piece can jump over a single adjacent piece and do not exclude the king, so on this page the king can also jump over a single marble.^[1][2]

Turn order

The rule sheet says that with 3 players, play goes clockwise, but does not say which color starts. Japanese Wikipedia gives the order Green → Red → Yellow. This page starts with Red and uses the order Red → Yellow → Green (clockwise). When you play the computer, you are Red and move first.^[1][12]

Stopping on the hexagon edge, and mixing steps and jumps

The rule sheet says you “can pass through” the hexagon edge, but does not say whether you can stop on it. Some sources say you can enter the spaces on the hexagon edge, so this page lets you stop there. The rule sheet also does not say whether you can mix a step and jumps in the same turn, so, as in standard Chinese Checkers rules, this page does not allow it.^{[1][6][11][12]}

When other colors’ marbles remain in your target triangle

With 3 players, the corner spaces at both ends of your target triangle are also spaces of the other 2 players’ starting triangles, and their marbles are there from the start. The rule sheet has no rule for when marbles of other colors remain in your target triangle, and unless those 2 players move their marbles, you cannot get all your marbles into it. So this page combines the winning rule used in research on Chinese Checkers (you win when the target triangle is completely filled with marbles and at least one of them is yours) with the king rule: “you win when all 15 spaces of the target triangle are filled and your king is on ◎”. Following the same research, this page does not allow moves that put another player’s target triangle into this state. Marbles of other colors can enter only the 5 spaces on the hexagon edge, so at most 5 marbles of other colors can be mixed into a target triangle.^[9]

After someone wins with 3 players, and the 2-player setup

The rule sheet says players compete for places by moving all their pieces first, but on this page the game ends as soon as the first player wins, even with 3 players. For 2 players, the rule sheet says to use only the pieces of 2 colors and has no setup diagram. In standard 2-player Chinese Checkers, players often start from opposite triangles and move to each other’s starting triangle. On the Diamond Game board, however, opposite triangles have the same color and you move to your own color’s triangle, so this page uses the 3-player setup with Green removed (Red and Yellow).^[1][10][11]

Moving marbles out of the target triangle, and draws

The rule sheet has no rule on whether a marble that has entered the target triangle can be moved back out, so this page allows it. If a regular marble gets onto ◎, you move it out and then bring in the king. There is also no rule on repeated positions, so the game simply continues, and it ends in a draw when the number of moves reaches 400 per player.

Controls on this page

First, in the panel to the right of the board (below it on narrow screens), choose the number of players (2 or 3), then choose how to play. In “Play vs computer” on Easy, Medium, or Hard, you are Red (first), and the computer moves the marbles of the other colors. In “3 players on this device” (the number is the number of players you chose), players take turns on one device, and people move all the colors.

On the 3D board, press the marble you want to move. The marble lifts up, and a glowing ring appears on every space it can reach. With a mouse, moving the pointer over a destination space shows the path as a dotted arc and the landing spot as a translucent marble, and clicking moves the marble. On phones and tablets, the first tap shows the path and the landing spot, and tapping the same space again moves the marble. For a chain of jumps, you also just choose the destination, and the path with the fewest jumps is used. Pressing another of your marbles changes your selection, and pressing the same marble again or a place that is not a destination cancels the selection.

The board is shown with your own starting triangle nearest you (Red is nearest when you play the computer or play on this device). Drag the board to rotate the view, and use the mouse wheel or 2 fingers to zoom in and out. Switch views with the “Angled” and “Top-down” buttons at the top right of the board. For the last move, an orange ring marks the space the marble started from, and a dotted line shows the path it took (the last 2 moves with 3 players).

The “Button controls” panel to the right of the board (below it on narrow screens) offers the same controls. Each marble button shows the marble’s position as a row (R) and a space (S), for example R10 S1. Rows run from row 1 at the tip of your starting triangle to row 17 at the tip of your target triangle, and spaces are counted from the left within each row. The king’s button is marked “King”. When you press a marble button, destination buttons appear, each showing either 1 step or the number of jumps (for example, 2 jumps) together with the number of rows gained. With a keyboard, move between buttons with the arrow keys, press with the Enter key, and go back to choosing a marble with the Escape key. Even on devices where the 3D board is not displayed, you can play with these buttons alone.

At the bottom of the panel, you can see the last move (for example, “Yellow moved from R10 S1 to R10 S3 (1 jump)”) and the number of marbles each color has in its target triangle. When you have no marble that can move, a “Pass” button appears at the lower left of the board and in this panel. When the 15 spaces of your target triangle are filled but your king is not on ◎, “King to ◎” is shown.

When you play the computer or play on this device, “Undo move” takes back a move. When you play the computer, the game returns to the position before your last move, and the computer’s moves after it are also undone. “Play again” starts over with the same number of players, and “Change mode” returns to the menu. If you press “Resign” with 2 players, your opponent wins. With 3 players, of the remaining 2 players, the one whose marbles are closer to the target wins (the one with the smaller total distance from their marbles to the tip of their target triangle; if tied, the player whose turn comes right after the player who resigned).

To play with friends, choose the number of players, press “Play a friend (send a link)”, and send the link shown to the people joining. The host is Red, and anyone who opens the link and presses “Join” takes a seat with an open color. If you press “Fill empty seats with the computer” before everyone has joined, the computer (Medium) moves for the empty seats. In a 3-player game, “Leave (the computer takes over)” replaces “Resign”, and the computer moves for the player who left. When a player disconnects, the computer moves on their turns starting 45 seconds after the disconnection, and control returns to the player when they reconnect. When a game ends, you can start the next one with “Rematch with the same players” (with 2 players, “Rematch (swap sides)”). In the next game, the seats shift by 1, and a different player plays Red and moves first.

Strategy tips

• Jumping moves you forward faster than stepping 1 space at a time. If you place your marbles on every other space along a line, the marbles behind them can chain jumps along that line. You can also jump over marbles of other colors, so look for lines that use your opponents’ marbles as well.
• Lines you build can also be used by your opponents. If you end your turn leaving marbles on every other space along a line in the direction an opponent is heading, that opponent may move far on their next turn.
• Do not leave a single marble behind. If your last 1–2 marbles stay near your starting triangle, there are no marbles around them to jump over, and you have to move them 1 step at a time, which takes many moves.
• Do not move too close to the edges of the board. You cannot enter the triangles of other colors, so a marble near the edge has fewer directions it can move in.
• The king can jump over a row of marbles all at once, so if you find a line with marbles lined up in front of the king, it can move far in a single turn. However, to win you need to get the king onto ◎, so do not put a regular marble on ◎. If you do, you have to move that marble out before bringing the king in.
• Fill your target triangle from the far end (the spaces near ◎). If you fill it from the entrance, you block the paths of the marbles that come later and the empty spaces they need to jump into.

Origin and history of Chinese Checkers

The Diamond Game grew out of Halma, a game created in the United States. Halma was devised in 1883–1884 by George Howard Monks, a thoracic surgeon at Harvard Medical School. He is said to have taken some ideas from Hoppity, a game his brother Robert Monks had come across in Britain. “Halma” means “jump” in Greek, and the name is said to have been given by Thomas Hill, a mathematician and minister.^[5][7]

The Halma board is a 16×16 grid of squares. Each player uses 19 pieces in a 2-player game or 13 pieces in a 4-player game, and moves all of them from their own camp in a corner of the board to the opposite corner. A piece either moves to an adjacent square or jumps over an adjacent piece, and jumped pieces are not captured.^[5][7]

The earliest known star-shaped board is the one that Ravensburger in Germany published in 1892 under the name “Stern-Halma” (German for “star Halma”). Up to 6 players could play, and with 3 players, the advantage or disadvantage between players was smaller than in Halma on a square board. Unlike Halma, each player had the same number of pieces regardless of the number of players, usually 10 each. The board has 121 spaces, and who designed it is unknown.^[7][8][10]

In the United States, J. Pressman & Co. began selling a game on a star-shaped board in 1928 under the name “Hop Ching Checker Game”, and later renamed it Chinese Checkers. The word “Chinese” was added because interest in things from the East was high in the United States at the time, following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and the popularity of mahjong. Historically, the game has no connection to China or to checkers. In Chinese, it is called tiaoqi (跳棋). Japanese encyclopedias also say that Halma was apparently simplified and then re-exported from the East to Europe and America under the name Chinese Checkers.^{[5][6][8][11]}

In Japan, the company timeline of the toy maker Hanayama says that in 1933 Hanayama’s founder set up the Hanayama Game Research Institute and “released indoor games and toys such as the Diamond Game and Pooley (a Corinthian bagatelle game)”, and the Diamond Game was also included in Katei-ban (家庭盤, “home game board”), released in 1939. The company’s history page says that the founder focused on games coming in from abroad, mass-produced them in a factory, and gave them original names and prices, and it lists the Diamond Game as one of the products still sold today. As a dated example of the word, Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites the entry for August 16, 1940, in the diary of Roppa Furukawa: “played the Diamond Game”.^[3][4][5]

The name “Diamond Game” is described as a Japanese coinage from English words by Digital Daijisen and Japanese Wikipedia, while Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten only says it is a word of Western origin. Nihon Daihyakka Zensho describes it as a game for 2 or 3 players with a star-shaped board and 45 pieces, 15 each in red, yellow, and green, and does not mention a king. The Diamond Game widely sold in Japan has 1 king piece per color that can jump over a row of pieces all at once, and this is a major difference from Chinese Checkers, which has no piece with a special role. English Wikipedia describes the Diamond Game as a variant of Chinese Checkers played in Korea and Japan.^{[1][5][6][11][12]}

Chinese Checkers is also used as a subject of research on game-playing AI. A 2019 paper by N. R. Sturtevant used a computer to determine the outcome of every position in 2-player games on smaller boards (up to 6 pieces per player), and showed that in each of them, the first player can always win with correct play. The paper solved only the smaller boards, and the 121-space board has not been solved. The same paper presents a rule that a player wins when the target triangle is completely filled with marbles and at least one of them is their own, and a rule that does not allow moves that make an opponent win. The winning rule on this page is based on these.^[9]

Sources

1. Hanayama, “ダイヤモンドゲームの遊び方” [How to play the Diamond Game] (instructions for the double-sided board with 15-piece and 10-piece sides, 2018; in Japanese) (opens in a new tab)
2. Hanayama, “ゲームいっぱい！あそべる20 遊び方説明書” [Lots of games! 20 to play: instructions] (Diamond Game section; in Japanese) (opens in a new tab)
3. Hanayama, “沿革” [Company timeline] (in Japanese) (opens in a new tab)
4. Hanayama, “ハナヤマの歴史” [History of Hanayama] (in Japanese) (opens in a new tab)
5. Kotobank, “ダイヤモンドゲーム” [Diamond Game] (entries from Digital Daijisen, Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, Nihon Daihyakka Zensho (Nipponica), Sekai Daihyakka Jiten (revised edition), and others; in Japanese) (opens in a new tab)
6. Abstract Game Museum (archive), “Chinese Checkers ／ ダイヤモンドゲーム” [Chinese Checkers / Diamond Game] (nakajim.net; in Japanese) (opens in a new tab)
7. Bruce Whitehill, “Halma” (The Big Game Hunter) (opens in a new tab)
8. Bruce Whitehill, “The World of Chinese Checkers” (The Big Game Hunter) (opens in a new tab)
9. Nathan R. Sturtevant, “On Strongly Solving Chinese Checkers” (Advances in Computer Games, ACG 2019) (opens in a new tab)
10. Wikipedia (German), “Sternhalma” [Star Halma] (opens in a new tab)
11. Wikipedia (English), “Chinese checkers” (opens in a new tab)
12. Wikipedia (Japanese), “ダイヤモンドゲーム” [Diamond Game] (opens in a new tab)

Frequently asked questions

How many players can play, and which triangles are used with 2 players?

You can play with 2–3 players. Choose the number of players in the menu. With 3 players, Red, Yellow, and Green are used. With 2 players, Red and Yellow are used, and you start from the same triangles as with 3 players (Green’s 2 triangles aren’t used, and neither player can enter them). When you play the computer, you’re Red and the computer moves the other colors. You can also take turns on one device so that people move all the colors.

How does the king (king piece) move?

Like a regular marble, it steps 1 space or jumps, but it can jump all at once over any number of marbles lined up in a row on the same line, starting from the adjacent space. On this page, it can also jump when the row is just 1 marble (some rule sheets allow it only when 2 or more are lined up). It can’t jump if there’s a king in the row, and regular marbles can’t jump over a king either. To win, you need to get your king onto the tip of your target triangle (◎).

Can I enter other colors’ triangles, or spaces on the hexagon edge?

You can’t enter the inside of other colors’ triangles (you can neither stop there nor land there during a chain of jumps). You can enter the spaces on the hexagon edge (the edge of the central hexagon), whichever color’s triangle they belong to.

What happens if other colors’ marbles stay in my target triangle and I can’t get all mine in?

On this page, you win when all 15 spaces of your target triangle are filled with marbles and your king is on ◎, even if marbles of other colors are mixed in. Other colors’ marbles can enter only the 5 spaces on the hexagon edge, so at most 5 can be mixed in. You can’t make a move that puts another player’s target triangle into this state and makes that player win. If the 15 spaces of your target triangle are filled but your king isn’t on ◎, move a marble out of the target triangle to make room, then move the king onto ◎.

Is there a winning strategy? Does the first player have an advantage?

No winning strategy has been found for the 121-space board. For 2-player games on smaller boards (up to 6 marbles per player), checking every position by computer showed that in each of them, the first player can always win with correct play (a 2019 paper). The 121-space board hasn’t been solved, and it isn’t known whether the first or second player has the advantage, or by how much. In 1,000 games each with 2 and 3 players, in which the computer on Medium played against itself on this page, Red, the first player, won 42% of the games with 2 players and 48% with 3 players, and a game lasted an average of 96 moves with 2 players and 134 moves with 3 players (45–48 moves per player). These win rates come from computer-vs-computer games and don’t show the advantage or disadvantage when people play. For practical ideas to use during a game (place marbles on every other space to chain jumps, don’t leave marbles behind, and fill the target triangle from the far end), see the “Strategy tips” section. A game ends in a draw when the number of moves reaches 400 per player.

How do I play with friends online?

In the menu, choose the number of players, press “Play a friend (send a link)”, and send the link shown to the people joining. Anyone who opens the link and presses “Join” takes a seat with an open color. If you press “Fill empty seats with the computer” before everyone has joined, the computer moves for the missing seats. You can play in the browser on phones, tablets, and desktop, with no sign-up and no app to install. A room is deleted 30 minutes after everyone has disconnected, or 24 hours after it was created.

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