Turkish Dama: Rules, and Why the Pieces Move Straight
Set up a Turkish dama board and the first thing you’ll notice is what’s missing: the checkerboard pattern. Every draughts game most people know, American checkers, Spanish dama, international draughts, uses only the dark squares of an 8×8 board. Turkish dama uses all 64. There’s no light-dark alternation to guide the eye, because pieces here don’t move diagonally at all.
The board and the setup
Turkish dama (Türk daması in Turkish) is played on a plain, uncheckered 8×8 grid. Each side fields 16 men, four more than the 12 you’d set up in Spanish or American checkers, filling the second and third rows counted from that player’s edge. The very back row starts empty. White moves first.
That extra rank of pieces isn’t cosmetic. With 32 men on a 64-square board at the start, compared to 24 men on 32 usable squares in a diagonal game, Turkish dama opens with a noticeably more packed position, and the extra density shows up in how early the captures start.
How the pieces move
A man moves one square forward or sideways, never diagonally and never backward. Captures work the same way: a man jumps an adjacent enemy piece by moving straight over it into the empty square beyond, in any of the three directions it’s allowed to move (forward, left, or right).
Once a man reaches the last row, it’s promoted to a king, and a Turkish king plays almost nothing like a Turkish man. Rather than a single square, it slides any distance in a straight line, forward, backward, left, or right, the way a rook moves in chess. It captures the same way: sliding down a rank or file, jumping an enemy piece anywhere along that line, and landing on any open square beyond it. If you’ve read our piece on flying kings across dama traditions, the “flying” idea should feel familiar. This is a flying king. It just flies in straight lines instead of diagonals.
Captures: mandatory, and gone the instant they happen
Capturing is compulsory in Turkish dama, the same as in every dama tradition. When more than one capturing line is available, the rule is maximum capture: you have to play whichever sequence takes the most pieces.
Where Turkish dama really splits from its diagonal cousins is in when a captured piece leaves the board. In Spanish dama, a piece you jump stays sitting on its square, blocking movement, until the whole capturing sequence finishes. Turkish dama removes it the instant it’s jumped. That single difference changes how a multi-jump sequence can bend around the board, since a capturing piece can pass back through squares that were just cleared rather than routing around pieces still technically “in the way.”
There’s one more wrinkle specific to the last rank. If a man is in the middle of a capturing sequence and that sequence would carry it onto the crowning row, it doesn’t stop and promote right away the way a Spanish man does. It keeps capturing along that last rank first, and if it ends up sitting next to an undefended enemy king, it’s required to take that king before the promotion is allowed to complete. Only once the sequence genuinely runs out of captures does the man finally crown.
One more rule worth knowing if you’re actually playing: a piece can’t reverse straight back the direction it just came from within the same capturing turn. And in the rare case where the board comes down to a single piece against a single piece, the game is a draw.
Where this rule set actually comes from
Turkish dama is played widely across Turkey and the wider Middle East; BoardGameGeek records tournaments in Turkey, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Uzbekistan, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Estonia. Mats Winther’s research into checkers variant lineages notes the argument that Turkish dama developed out of an older medieval German game known as Gothic checkers.
You can play this variant here now
An earlier version of this post said Turkish dama was out of reach here. That is no longer true. Every square in play, straight-line men, rook kings, immediate removal of captured pieces and delayed crowning are all implemented. The board is at Turkish dama, against the computer at four strengths or a second person on the same device.
The diagonal side of the family is still worth a look for contrast. Spanish dama shares the flying-king idea even though the direction it flies is completely different, and our full rules page covers its diagonal ruleset in detail. Reading the two together makes Turkish dama’s straight-line logic easier to see.
How different is this, really?
Different enough that a Spanish or American checkers player sitting down to a Turkish board for the first time will misjudge almost every threat on it. A diagonal player’s eye is trained to scan diagonals for danger; on a Turkish board, danger comes down ranks and files instead. Sixteen men a side instead of twelve changes the opening too, since there’s simply less open board to maneuver into before the two sides make contact.
For the bigger picture of how Turkish dama fits alongside Spanish, Italian, Brazilian, and Filipino dama, our guide to all five dama traditions walks through each one. And if the naming itself is what’s confusing you, whether dama, checkers, and draughts are the same thing or not, our piece untangling those three words sorts out exactly where they overlap.
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