Free 3 player checkers, every player for themselves

How to start

1. Open bigboard.games on every device and tap Start a table on one of them.
2. The others join by themselves on the same Wi-Fi; elsewhere, scan the QR code or type the four-letter code.
3. Lay the devices edge to edge, screens up, as the drawing shows, and pick the game.

A board made of three home areas

Three-player checkers needs a different board. Here it is a hexagon built from three home areas of four ranks by eight files, one along every other edge, the same shape as 3-player chess. Each player starts with 12 men on the dark squares of their own three back ranks.

A man climbs his own ranks toward the centre. Once he steps over a border into a neighbour's area, his forward turns round toward that area's back rank, and he is crowned on reaching the back rank of either opponent. Files mirror over every border, so dark squares stay dark, and no diagonal runs through the very centre.

Every player for themselves

Any other player's piece is an enemy, so a capture against one rival can leave you open to the other. Turns go round the table, and a player with pieces but no legal move simply passes. You are out only when your last piece is gone, taken, resigned or lost on time. With a fourth player it becomes 4 player checkers, on an octagon or two against two.

The last player in wins. If that never happens, a repeated position, no progress for 15 or 40 moves by each player, 150 rounds, or nobody able to move ends the match, and the players still in are ranked by material: three for a king, one for a man, ties sharing a place. A player who is out keeps a dimmed device that pieces still cross until the end.

Laying out three devices

A ring is the best shape: three devices in a triangle, top edges inward. Each shows its own home area as a flat grid under a strip split in two, the left half in the left neighbour's colour and the right half in the right one's, each with an arrow toward that device. Turns then go clockwise round the ring. A T works too.

This is not Chinese checkers, the star-shaped race with marbles: it is ordinary checkers with jumps and kings, stretched to three. Two people can share a device, or a bot can take the third seat, and then every device shows the whole hexagon, turned to its own player.

3 players: questions and answers