How to Play Dama Online (Free, No Download)

Dama is a checkers variant played on an 8×8 board with 12 pieces per side, forced captures, and flying kings that can glide across the whole board once crowned. White moves first, captures are mandatory, and the game ends when one side has no legal move left. You can play it free right here in your browser.

That’s the short version. Here’s the rest of it, plus what to expect if you go looking for other dama traditions online.

The quick rules of Spanish dama

This site’s board plays Spanish dama (juego de damas), the tradition that gave the whole family the name “dama.” The rules, in order:

  1. Setup. Each side gets 12 men, set up on the dark squares of the first three rows closest to that player. The board is mirrored from American checkers, so a light square sits in each player’s bottom-left corner instead of a dark one.
  2. White moves first. This trips people up coming from American checkers, where Black opens. In Spanish dama, White goes.
  3. Men move and capture diagonally, forward only. A man can’t retreat, and it can’t capture backward either. That’s a rule some other dama traditions relax, but Spanish dama doesn’t.
  4. Capturing is mandatory, and you have to take the biggest sequence on offer. If one capture takes one piece and another takes three, you’re required to take three. If two sequences tie on piece count, you’re required to play the one that captures more enemy kings.
  5. Reaching the last row crowns a piece into a king immediately, and stops that turn. Even if the newly crowned king could technically keep capturing, the move ends the moment it crowns. This is the “stop-and-crown” rule, and it’s one of the clearest ways to tell Spanish dama apart from variants where a piece keeps capturing after it promotes.
  6. Kings fly. Once crowned, a piece can slide any distance along an open diagonal and capture by landing on any empty square past the piece it jumped, not just the square directly behind it.
  7. You win by leaving your opponent with no legal move. Either every one of their pieces is captured, or every one of their remaining pieces is blocked in. The online game also calls a draw if a long stretch passes with no capture and no progress, so a stalled-out endgame can’t drag on forever.

That’s the full ruleset in miniature. The complete rules page walks through the mandatory-capture ladder and the endgame draw conditions in more depth.

How to actually play

  1. Go to the homepage and pick a difficulty. The AI opponent has easy, medium, and hard settings, so you don’t need to already be good at this.
  2. Click a piece on the dark squares, then click the square you want to move it to. Squares you’re allowed to move into light up once you select a piece.
  3. If a capture is available, the game only lets you make it. Spanish dama doesn’t give you the option to skip a jump the way some casual house rules do.
  4. Use Undo if you misclick, and Hint if you want the engine to suggest your next move. Both are sitting right there in the game controls.
  5. Play resumes where you left off if you close the tab and come back later. There’s no account to create and nothing to install.

What trips up American checkers players

If you already play American checkers, the two rules most likely to catch you off guard are the flying king and the mandatory White-first order. In American checkers, a king only moves one square at a time and Black opens the game; in Spanish dama, a crowned piece can cross half the board in one move and White opens instead. Neither is more “correct.” They’re just different rule sets that happen to share a family tree. Our guide to dama’s five traditions covers where all these branches split from and how they relate to each other.

Traditions you can’t play here yet

Spanish dama is the only tradition you can actually play on this site right now. Turkish dama moves pieces in straight lines instead of diagonals; Filipino dama allows men to capture backward, which Spanish dama’s men can’t do; Italian dama caps its king at one square per move and won’t let a man capture a king at all. All three are genuinely different games, not just reskins of Spanish dama. Turkish dama in particular would need a different move engine underneath, since nothing about it is diagonal. We write about how each of them actually works, but there’s no playable board for any of them here yet, and we’d rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise.

If what you actually want is a different playable variant right now rather than a rules explainer, that board doesn’t live on this site. Play American or International checkers free at Checkers Online covers those two and several more, with the same no-download, no-account setup as the board here.

Ready to play?

Twelve pieces, forced captures, a king that flies once it’s crowned. Start a game of Spanish dama now. It loads straight into your browser, and the first move is already waiting on White.

Play dama free →