Dama vs. Checkers vs. Draughts: What's the Actual Difference?

Short version: checkers and draughts are the same game. Dama is not.

“Checkers” is what an American calls the 8×8 game with 12 men a side, forced jumps, and short-stepping kings. “Draughts” is what a British or Commonwealth player calls that exact same game. Same board, same pieces, same rules, two accents. “Dama” (or “damas”) is a different animal: it’s what Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, and the Philippines each call their own branch of the wider checkers family, and those branches genuinely play differently from each other. Mix them up and you’ll set up a board wrong or lose a game you didn’t know you’d already changed the rules of.

Checkers and draughts: one game, two labels

Start with the easy pair. Checkers and draughts describe the identical game, just from opposite sides of the Atlantic. It goes back to the same 12th-century European family, played today under near-identical rulebooks by the American Checker Federation on one side and the English Draughts Association on the other. Two governing bodies, one set of moves. Men step diagonally forward, capturing is mandatory whenever it’s available, and a man that reaches the last row gets crowned into a king that can move one square in any diagonal direction. Nobody has to relearn anything crossing that ocean.

Where the word comes from is really the only difference. “Checkers” points at the board: a checkered pattern of alternating squares, the same root that gives you a “checkered flag.” “Draughts” points at the move itself. An old sense of “draught” meant something drawn or pulled, and a game built entirely out of sliding pieces across a board picked up that name. Say it out loud and it comes out “drafts,” silent gh included.

So if someone asks whether draughts and checkers are different games, the answer is no. Ask instead which country they learned it in, and you’ll know which word they reach for.

Dama is not one game. It’s a family of them

This is where it gets interesting, and where a lot of pages online quietly get it wrong by treating “dama” as just another word for checkers. It isn’t. “Dama” (Italian, Turkish) and “damas” (Spanish, Portuguese) are the local words for the crowned piece, the king, and in several countries the whole game took its name from that piece, the way a deck of cards might get called “the kings” somewhere. Sultan Ratrout’s survey of checkers families, cross-checked against BoardGameGeek and Mats Winther’s variant catalog, ties this naming pattern directly to Spain’s role in draughts history, including the piece’s connection to a queen or “dama” figure on the board, the same idea English gets at less directly with “king.”

The problem for anyone trying to learn “dama” as a single ruleset is that the traditions sharing the word split into at least three different mechanical families:

  • Spanish dama (juego de damas) plays on an 8×8 board, mirrored so the light square sits at each player’s left corner instead of the dark one. Its signature move is the flying king: once a man promotes, it can glide any distance along a diagonal and land on any open square past the piece it just captured, not just the square directly behind it. You can play Spanish dama free right now to feel the difference yourself, and the full rules page covers the mandatory-capture and tiebreak details.
  • Turkish dama doesn’t move diagonally at all. Pieces sit on all 64 squares of an uncheckered board, 16 to a side, and both move and capture in straight lines: forward, back, and sideways, like a rook that hasn’t quite learned chess yet. We cover exactly how that reshapes the game in our Turkish dama guide.
  • Filipino dama, closer in lineage to the international branch of the family, allows men to capture backward as well as forward, a rule Spanish dama’s men don’t get. Street games across the Philippines often use bottle caps instead of proper pieces, which is its own kind of interesting; more on that in our Filipino dama piece.
  • Italian dama stays diagonal like the Spanish and American games, but caps its kings at a single square per move rather than letting them fly, and adds a rule found almost nowhere else: a man cannot capture a king. If a king is standing in a man’s capture line, the man simply can’t take it.

Five countries, one borrowed word, several distinct rulebooks. None of them are “wrong” versions of each other. They just diverged the way regional cooking diverges from a shared base recipe.

Is dama the same as checkers?

Loosely, yes, in that dama belongs to the same broad checkers-and-draughts family: diagonal movement, forced captures, promotion to a king. Exactly, no. Sit down expecting American checkers rules and you’ll be surprised the first time an opponent’s king slides four squares to take a piece in Spanish dama, or moves in a straight line at all in Turkish dama. If you want the fuller picture of what “dama” covers before picking a tradition to focus on, What Is Dama? One Word, Five Games walks through all five side by side.

What’s the difference between dama and draughts?

“Draughts” is the umbrella term for the whole diagonal-capture family in British English, the way “checkers” is in American English. “Dama” only ever refers to specific regional branches of that family (Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Filipino, or Portuguese and Brazilian damas), never the base English/American game. A British player who says “I play draughts” and a Spanish player who says “juego a las damas” aren’t describing the same ruleset, even though both games are, at some distance, cousins.

So which name do you use?

If you’re setting up a board with 12 pieces on a plain 8×8, kings step one square, capture is forced: call it checkers or draughts, whichever side of the Atlantic you learned it on, and you’ll be understood everywhere. If a king can glide the length of the board, or the pieces move like rooks, or a man is barred from taking a king: you’re playing a dama tradition, and it’s worth naming which one, because “dama” alone tells another player almost nothing about which rules you’re using.

That’s exactly the confusion this site exists to sort out. Start with Spanish dama on the board here, free and no download required, then branch out into the other traditions once you’ve got a feel for how a flying king actually moves.

Play dama free →