Filipino Dama: Rules and the Street-Corner Tradition

Ask for a board game in the Philippines and someone might hand you actual checkers pieces. Just as often, they’ll hand you a fistful of bottle caps and point at chalk lines on a table. Filipino dama is a real, rule-complete checkers tradition, closely related to the Brazilian game, and it’s also one of the more informally played dama variants covered on this site. Both things are true at once, and that’s most of what makes it worth its own guide.

The rules: Brazilian mechanics on a mirrored board

Filipino dama, also recorded under the older name Derecha, is played on an 8×8 board with 12 men per side, set up on the dark squares of the three rows closest to each player. White moves first.

Where it departs from the Spanish tradition on this site’s board is the capture direction. A Filipino man can capture both forward and backward, jumping an enemy piece in any of the four diagonal directions rather than forward only. Spanish dama’s men never get that option; a Spanish man that can’t capture forward simply can’t capture at all that turn. Filipino dama shares this backward-capture rule with Brazilian dama, and the two traditions are close relatives mechanically.

The rest of the ruleset follows the same pattern as its Brazilian cousin:

  • Capturing is mandatory, and when more than one line is open, you must play whichever one takes the most pieces.
  • A man that passes through the far row while mid-capture keeps capturing rather than stopping to promote; it only crowns if its move actually ends on that row.
  • Captured pieces stay on the board until the whole sequence finishes, the same way Spanish dama handles it, so nothing can be jumped twice in one turn.
  • Once crowned, a king flies: it slides any distance along an open diagonal and can capture from a distance, landing anywhere past the piece it jumped.

The one structural difference from the Brazilian board itself is orientation. Brazilian dama sets up with a dark square in each player’s near-left corner, the same layout American checkers uses. Filipino dama mirrors that, putting a light square there instead, the same relationship Spanish dama has to the American board.

Filipino dama is also, per game researcher Sultan Ratrout’s survey of checkers traditions, sometimes played on a board that only marks the diagonal lines a piece can actually travel along, rather than a full checkerboard grid. The rules don’t change; the board just gets drawn differently.

A game that lives as much in the street as on a shelf

Formal sets exist, and Filipino dama is documented as a proper rule-complete tradition in checkers research the same way Spanish or Turkish dama are. But multiple independent accounts of the game describe it as something played just as often with whatever’s on hand. Bottle caps, known locally as tansan, and even small stones or scraps of bamboo turn up repeatedly as substitute pieces, called pitsa, in descriptions of casual games (LuffyKudō’s rundown of Filipino checkers; a Philippine board-game blog’s account of the game; Discover the Philippines’ roundup of traditional games).

Crowning gets improvised too. Where a Western set has actual king pieces or crown-marked discs, players using bottle caps mark a promotion by stacking a second cap on top of the first, or by flipping the cap over so its underside, blank instead of printed, signals a king. It’s a workaround that keeps the game playable with whatever a corner store happens to sell, and it’s been described the same way by more than one source writing about the tradition.

Dama grew into a math class, too

The clearest documented example of dama’s reach into Filipino daily life isn’t a street game at all. It’s a classroom one. In the 1970s, a teacher in Sorsogon province named Jesus Huenda, working from an idea in a 1975 student project called “Dama de Numero,” reworked ordinary dama into a hybrid game called Damath: a checkers board where captures also work as arithmetic problems, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the game. The first organized Damath tournament ran in Sorsogon in 1980, and the Philippine Department of Education has promoted it as a teaching tool in schools since. We can’t say exactly how many classrooms use it today; Wikipedia’s own entry flags that detail as disputed. What’s solid is the origin story: a street-and-bottle-cap game that got adapted into a lesson plan by a working teacher, not handed down by a curriculum board.

Not playable on this board, but close in spirit

There’s no Filipino dama option on this site’s game yet; the board here runs Spanish dama’s forward-only capture rules. If you want to feel the closest thing to it that is playable here, the Spanish dama board shares the flying-king mechanic, even though its men capture forward only. Our full rules page spells out exactly where Spanish dama’s capture rules diverge from the backward-capture rule Filipino dama uses.

For how Filipino dama fits alongside the other four traditions that share the name, our guide to all five dama games is the place to start. And if you’re trying to work out whether “dama,” “checkers,” and “draughts” are really the same word for the same game, our breakdown of those three terms covers exactly where they split.

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