Filipino Dama — Play Online Free

The Dama Filipinos Actually Play

This is the board you get when you ask for dama in the Philippines. It is a complete, documented ruleset, recorded in checkers research under the older name Derecha as well as the everyday one, and its defining habit is that ordinary men jump backward. A man still walks forward one square at a time, but the moment a capture is available it can take that capture in any of the four diagonal directions, including back toward its own side. Kings fly once crowned, sliding and striking along the full length of a diagonal.

Mechanically it is the Brazilian ruleset played on a mirrored board, which is why every rule here reads the same as Brazilian draughts while the starting position sits the other way round. The game above runs exactly that, with three computer strengths, a hot-seat mode for two people on one device, undo, and a hint button.

Filipino Dama Rules

The board is 8x8 and only its 32 dark squares are ever used. Each player sets 12 men on the dark squares of the three rows nearest them, leaving the middle two rows clear. White moves first and turns alternate from there. The board is mirrored, so the square in your near-left corner is light rather than dark. That orientation changes nothing about how a piece moves; it is only how the board is laid out.

Men move and capture like this:

• A man steps one square diagonally forward onto an empty dark square.
• A man captures in all four diagonal directions, forward and backward alike, jumping an adjacent enemy piece and landing on the empty square directly beyond it.

Capturing is not optional. If any jump is on the board you must take one, and quiet moves are illegal until no capture is left. When several capturing sequences are open, you must play one that takes the most pieces; shorter lines are not allowed while a longer one exists. Filipino dama stops there. Two lines that take the same number of pieces are equally legal, whatever those pieces are. Spanish dama adds a further tiebreak at that point, in favour of the line taking more kings, and this board has no such rule.

During a capturing sequence the jumped pieces stay where they are until the turn is over, and only then come off. They still block the board, so nothing can be jumped twice in the same turn.

A man crowns by finishing its move on the far row. If it merely passes through that row in the middle of a capture, it keeps going as a man and does not crown; it becomes a king only if the sequence actually ends there. A king is flying: it slides any number of empty squares along a diagonal as a move, and it captures from a distance, jumping an enemy piece with any number of empty squares in front of it and landing on any empty square beyond it on that same diagonal.

You win by capturing every enemy piece, or by leaving your opponent with no legal move on their turn. A game is drawn two ways: the same position, with the same player to move, occurs for a third time, or 40 moves pass for each side (80 individual turns in total) with no piece captured and no man moved. Any capture or man move resets that count.

One footnote on equipment. Filipino dama is sometimes drawn on a board that marks only the diagonal lines a piece can travel along, instead of the full checkered grid. That is a drawing convention and nothing more; the rules are identical either way. The board on this page is a normal checkered one.

How Filipino Dama Differs From Spanish Dama

Both traditions share the 8x8 board, the 12 men a side, the mirrored setup and the flying king, so at first glance the two boards on this site look the same. Three rules separate them:

• Backward capture. Filipino men jump in every diagonal direction. Spanish men jump forward only, and a Spanish man with an enemy piece behind it simply has no capture.
• Crowning mid-capture. A Filipino man that reaches the far row with jumps still available carries on as a man. A Spanish man stops on the spot and is crowned, ending the turn.
• The tiebreak. Spanish dama makes you choose the line that captures more kings when two lines take the same number of pieces. Filipino dama has no equivalent rule.

The Spanish dama board is a click away if you want to feel the difference, and the Spanish rules page spells its version out in the same detail as this one.

Bottle Caps, Chalk Lines and a Math Class

Sets get sold, but a lot of Filipino dama is played with whatever is to hand. Bottle caps, called tansan, stand in for pieces, which players call pitsa, and a crown gets improvised by stacking a second cap on the first or by flipping one over so the blank underside shows. The game also produced an unlikely descendant: Damath, a classroom version invented by a Sorsogon teacher in the 1970s, where every capture doubles as an arithmetic problem. Our article on Filipino dama and its street-play culture goes through the sources for all of that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is dama in Filipino?

Dama is the ordinary Tagalog name for checkers. Ask for a game of dama anywhere in the Philippines and you will be offered this board: 8x8, 12 pieces a side, men that jump in any diagonal direction, and kings that slide the whole length of a diagonal. The word travels, though, and it does not mean the same game everywhere. Our guide to the five games called dama sorts them out.

What are the rules of Filipino dama?

Each side starts with 12 men on the dark squares of its three nearest rows, and White opens. Men step one square diagonally forward but jump in all four diagonal directions. Capturing is compulsory, and of the lines on offer you must play one that takes the most pieces. A man crowns on the far row, and a king then slides and captures along a diagonal from any distance.

Is Filipino dama the same as checkers?

It belongs to the same family, but it is not the American game. Filipino men jump backward as well as forward, kings fly along the whole diagonal instead of stepping one square, and you are forced to play the capture line that takes the most pieces rather than picking whichever jump you like.

Can men capture backward in Filipino dama?

Yes. An uncrowned man moves forward only, but it may jump an enemy piece in any of the four diagonal directions, including straight back toward its own side. That single rule is what makes the game feel sharper than the Spanish board.

Is Filipino dama the same as Spanish dama?

No, though they look alike at setup and both use the mirrored board. Spanish men cannot jump backward, a Spanish man that reaches the far row mid-capture stops there and crowns, and Spanish dama breaks ties between equal capture lines by counting kings. Filipino dama does none of those three things. You can play the Spanish board on our dama home page and compare.

What is Damath?

Damath is a classroom hybrid of dama and arithmetic, in which a capture also works as a sum. A Sorsogon teacher, Jesus Huenda, built it in the 1970s from an idea in a 1975 student project called "Dama de Numero," and the first organized tournament ran in Sorsogon in 1980. It is a spin-off, not a way of playing dama itself. Our article on Filipino dama covers what is documented about it and what is not.