Before there was checkers, there was alquerque. Long before a red-and-black board sat on anyone's kitchen table, players around the medieval Mediterranean were leaping their pieces over each other on a small grid of crossing lines, capturing exactly the way a checkers player does today. It is one of those games that feels instantly familiar the moment you sit down to it — which is a good clue about where checkers actually came from.
Here is the honest history of alquerque, and a clear guide to playing it.
Where alquerque comes from
The name is the giveaway. Alquerque is a Spanish rendering of the Arabic al-qirq (also written qirkat), and the game seems to have reached medieval Spain the way so much else did — carried west across North Africa and into the Iberian Peninsula during centuries of Muslim rule. The earliest written mention we can point to is from the late 900s, when the scholar Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani referred to qirkat in his enormous Kitab al-Aghani ("Book of Songs"). He named the game but did not record how it was played, so that reference tells us it existed — not what its rules were.
The first surviving rulebook comes later and from Christian Spain: the Libro de los juegos ("Book of Games"), commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castile and completed around 1283. Alongside chess and dice games, it describes alquerque and shows players seated at the board. That manuscript is why we can talk about the game with any confidence at all — and its illustration, painted more than 700 years ago, is the picture at the top of this post.
You will often read that alquerque is thousands of years older than that — that identical boards were found scratched into the stone roof slabs of the temple at Kurna in Egypt, dating it to around 1400 BCE. It is a good story and it may even be true, but it is worth being straight about it: scratched "boards" like these cannot be securely dated, because a line cut into ancient stone could have been made at almost any time since. So while alquerque-style patterns clearly turn up widely across the old world, the confident "1400 BCE" figure is a claim resting on undatable graffiti, not settled fact. What we can say firmly is that the game is documented from the 10th century onward.
The game that became checkers
Alquerque's real claim to fame is what happened next. Somewhere in medieval Europe — the usual reconstruction points to southern France, roughly the 12th to 13th centuries — someone took alquerque's leaping-capture idea and moved it onto the 8×8 chessboard that was already lying around. Twelve pieces per side, diagonal moves, capture by jumping: that new hybrid became the game the French called fierges or dames, and which English speakers know as draughts or checkers. The compulsory-capture rule and the "king" promotion came a bit later.
So checkers is, in a real sense, alquerque wearing a chessboard's clothes. If you have ever played one, the other will come to you in about ninety seconds.
What you need
Alquerque is played on a distinctive board of 25 points arranged in a 5×5 grid, with lines drawn between them. Every point connects to its immediate neighbors up, down, left and right; and roughly half the points — in an alternating pattern — also connect along the diagonals, forming the board's characteristic pattern of crossing X's. The simple rule to remember: a piece may only travel along a line that is actually drawn between two points.
You need 24 pieces total — 12 for each player, in two contrasting colors. Counters, stones, or checkers pieces all work fine.
How to play alquerque
Setup. Each player fills their two nearest rows completely (that is 10 pieces) and then places their last two pieces on their own half of the middle row. This leaves exactly one point empty — the center of the board. That single empty point is what makes the first move possible, so it matters.
- Moving. On your turn, slide one of your pieces along a drawn line to an adjacent empty point. Diagonal moves are allowed only where a diagonal line exists.
- Capturing. If one of your pieces sits next to an enemy piece along a line, and the point immediately beyond that enemy (on the same straight line) is empty, you leap over it and remove it from the board — exactly like a jump in checkers.
- Multiple jumps. If your piece lands somewhere it can immediately jump again, it keeps going, capturing several enemy pieces in a single turn. A chain of leaps can swing a game in one move.
- Capture is required. In the common version, if you can capture, you must. A player who overlooks an available capture traditionally has that piece removed — a penalty called being "huffed."
- Winning. You win by capturing all of your opponent's pieces, or by hemming them in so they have no legal move left. Even, cautious play often ends in a draw — which is part of alquerque's charm as a thinking game.
A note on the rules
It is worth being upfront here, because this is a history brand and accuracy is the whole point: Alfonso X's original text is brief. It gives the board and the essential idea but leaves gaps a modern player expects to have filled — things like whether pieces may move backward and exactly how the huffing penalty works. The clean, playable ruleset above reflects the widely used modern reconstruction (the games scholar R. C. Bell is the best-known source for tidying these edges). Where a rule is a sensible modern convention rather than something Alfonso spelled out in 1283, that is worth knowing — and it does not change the fact that the game plays beautifully.
That is alquerque: a small board, twelve pieces a side, and a leap-to-capture idea so good it outlived empires and quietly turned into one of the most played games on earth.
At Ancient.Games we handcraft the old games — the boards our ancestors actually played on — so you can bring a piece of that history to your own table.
Image: Alquerque players from the Libro de los juegos of Alfonso X, 1283. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.