What Is Dama? One Word, Five Different Board Games
Search “what is dama” and the board game barely shows up. You’ll find DAMA International, a professional association for data managers. You’ll find Australia’s Designated Area Migration Agreement, a regional visa program that also goes by DAMA. Look up “what does dama mean” and Merriam-Webster will tell you it’s a genus of deer, the fallow deer specifically, filed under its Latin name Dama dama. A hospital discharge form might use it too: “DAMA” is medical shorthand for a patient leaving against medical advice.
None of that is the dama we’re here for.
The dama that concerns this site is a board game, or rather five of them. Spain, Turkey, Italy, Brazil and Portugal, and the Philippines each have a native tradition that goes by “dama” or “damas,” and the five don’t play alike. Different board sizes in some cases, different capture directions, kings that move nothing like each other. If you searched for “damas game” hoping for one clean ruleset, that’s the first thing to know: there isn’t one, there are five, and this page walks through all of them.
Why one word covers five different games
“Dama” and “damas” are the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese words for the crowned piece, the one an English speaker calls a king. In several countries, the whole game eventually took its name from that piece, similar to how a card game might get nicknamed after its highest-value card. Govert Westerveld, a historian who has written extensively on checkers’ origins in Spain, ties this naming pattern to a queen figure associated with the piece on Spanish boards.
Here’s the part that trips people up: sharing a name didn’t mean sharing rules. Checkers spread from a common medieval root, and each region that adopted it kept some choices and swapped out others. Some kept the board diagonal. Turkey didn’t. Some let a promoted piece glide the length of the board. Italy said no. The word “dama” survived the split intact; the rulebook underneath it didn’t.
Turkish dama (Türk daması): the one that isn’t diagonal at all
Start with the tradition that breaks the pattern hardest. Turkish dama is played on all 64 squares of an unmarked 8×8 board, not just the dark 32 that every diagonal checkers game uses. Each side fields 16 men, filling the second and third rows from their own edge and leaving the back row empty. Pieces move and capture in straight lines: forward and sideways for a man, any distance in any of the four directions once it’s crowned. There’s no diagonal movement anywhere in the game.
A few more things separate it sharply from its diagonal cousins. A captured piece disappears from the board the instant it’s jumped, not at the end of the capturing sequence the way most checkers variants handle it. A man that’s mid-capture when it reaches the last rank keeps taking pieces along that rank before it’s allowed to crown. And if two lone pieces, one per side, are all that’s left on the board, the game is a draw rather than dragging toward a forced win.
Mats Winther’s research on checkers variants notes the argument that Turkish dama developed out of an older medieval German game called Gothic checkers. Whatever its exact path, it ended up mechanically closer to a game of straight-line captures than to anything a Spanish or American checkers player would recognize on sight. We go through the full ruleset, including why the board isn’t checkered at all, in our Turkish dama guide.
Spanish dama (dama española): the tradition you can actually play here
Spanish dama (juego de damas) is the one this site’s board runs. It’s an 8×8 game, 12 men a side, set up on the three rows closest to each player, and it keeps the diagonal movement Turkish dama drops. Its signature is the flying king: once a man reaches the far row, it’s promoted into a piece that can slide any distance along an open diagonal and capture from a distance, landing on any empty square beyond the piece it just jumped rather than only the square directly behind it.
Capturing in Spanish dama is mandatory, and when two capturing lines are both legal, the rules force you to take the longer one. If two lines happen to capture the same number of pieces, you’re required to take whichever one captures more kings, a tiebreak that catches a lot of players who learned checkers somewhere else first. The earliest known book on checkers anywhere was written about this tradition: Antonio de Torquemada published it in Valencia in 1547.
You can play Spanish dama free on this site right now, and the full rules page walks through every mandatory-capture detail in order.
Italian dama (dama italiana): diagonal, but the king stays grounded
Italian dama keeps the diagonal board and forward-only men that Spanish dama uses, so at a glance the two look related. The king is where it splits off. An Italian king never learns to fly. It moves and captures one square at a time, diagonally, in any of the four directions rather than forward-only, but it never gets Spanish dama’s long-range glide.
The rule that actually sets Italian dama apart shows up on the men, not the king: a man is not allowed to capture a king at all. If an enemy king sits directly in a man’s capture path, that man has to leave it alone; only another king can take it. Capture priority also runs a four-step ladder rather than a single rule: take the sequence that captures the most pieces, then prefer one made with a king, then prefer whichever captures the most kings, then prefer whichever captures a king earliest in the sequence. Italian dama is governed today by the Federazione Italiana Dama, and a simplified 8-man version is played with children learning the game.
Italian dama isn’t playable on this site’s board yet, so there’s no dedicated guide to link to here. If you want to see how its short king compares with Spanish dama’s flying one, the rules page lays out the Spanish version in full for comparison.
Brazilian and Portuguese dama: the international cousin
Brazilian dama looks Spanish at first read: 8×8 board, 12 men, flying kings. The difference is in how a man captures. In Brazilian dama, a man can jump backward as well as forward, something Spanish dama’s men are never allowed to do, and its board uses the same corner layout as American checkers rather than Spanish dama’s mirrored one. Portuguese damas is the twist in this branch: despite the language it shares with Brazil, it actually plays by the Spanish family’s rules, with forward-only men on a mirrored board.
Board Game Geek dates the Brazilian federation’s codification of the game to 1930, but the ruleset itself is older than that date suggests. Mats Winther identifies it as Minor Polish draughts, a game already documented in 16th-century Holland and especially popular in Amsterdam. The rules crossed the Atlantic well before Brazil put its own name on them.
There’s no dedicated Brazilian or Portuguese dama guide on this site yet. Our Spanish rules page is the closest point of comparison if you want to see exactly where the Iberian branch’s forward-only capture rule diverges from the backward-capture rule Brazil uses instead.
Filipino dama: Brazilian rules, a mirrored board, a street tradition
The Philippines plays a version close to Brazilian dama: 8×8, 12 men, men that capture both forward and backward, flying kings. What sets it apart mechanically is the board orientation, which is mirrored relative to the Brazilian layout, similar to the relationship between Spanish dama’s board and American checkers’.
What sets Filipino dama apart in practice is where and how it’s actually played. It’s as much a street game as a formal one, with a long history of being played casually rather than at a club table. We cover both the rules and that side of the tradition in our Filipino dama guide.
So which dama are you actually looking for?
If you want to play right now, it’s Spanish dama, above. If a king that glides across the whole board is the part that caught your attention, our piece on flying kings across the dama traditions compares how Spanish, Turkish, and Italian kings each handle that differently. And if you got here wondering whether “dama” and “checkers” are just two names for the same thing, they’re not quite: our dama vs. checkers vs. draughts piece untangles exactly where those words overlap and where they split.
Five traditions, one shared name, and now you know which one is actually on the board when someone says “dama.”
Play dama free →