Chinese Checkers

Neither Chinese nor checkers

The name is pure marketing. The star-board game was created in Germany and published in 1892 as Stern-Halma, a six-pointed variation of Halma, itself devised in America in the 1880s and credited to the Boston surgeon George Howard Monks; halma is Greek for leap. The Chinese connection arrived in 1928, when the American firm J. Pressman and Company relaunched the star version as Hop Ching Checkers to ride the decade's mah-jongg craze, and under the settled name Chinese Checkers it went on to colonize seemingly every household game cupboard in the country. Nothing about the rules is Chinese, and since no piece is ever captured, nothing about them is checkers either. What the game actually is: a pure race, and one of the best ever designed.

How the race works

Your pegs fill one point of the star; the computer's fill the point directly opposite. First side to ferry every peg across into the other's triangle wins. On a turn you either step one peg to an adjacent empty hole or jump it over a neighbouring peg into the empty hole directly beyond, and jumps chain: as long as another legal hop is available from the landing hole, the same peg may keep going. Jumped pegs stay exactly where they are, yours and the computer's alike, and you may hop over either. That last rule shapes everything, because a crowded middle is not an obstacle, it is pavement. A full star seats up to six players in the parlour version; head-to-head, as here, you sit in opposite points with the star's full width between you, and that long open middle is what makes the chains spectacular.

Ladders, the whole art of the game

Speed comes from hopping, not stepping. A line of pegs spaced one empty hole apart forms a ladder, and a peg at the back of a ladder can leapfrog rung after rung in a single turn, sometimes crossing most of the board while the computer plods. You build ladders two ways: arranging your own pegs a gap apart as you advance, and borrowing the computer's pegs when they happen to line up. Before every move, trace the longest chain available rather than settling for the first hop you spot; this game rewards thirty seconds of route-finding more than any amount of positional wisdom. The one caution is that ladders are public property. A highway laid across the star carries traffic both ways, so when the computer's pegs start queuing up to use your rungs, spend a move breaking the ladder behind you: shift a middle rung one hole sideways and the road is gone.

Racing tips

• Build ladders, lines of pegs spaced one hole apart, so a single peg can hop across many of them in one turn.
• Move your rearmost pegs first, because a straggler left behind in your home point can cost a dozen moves later.
• Aim your chains through the central spine of the star, then peel off into your target triangle.
• Use the opponent's pegs as stepping stones, since a jump works over any peg, not only your own.
• Do not block your own destination holes; keep the target triangle reachable for your last few pegs.

The endgame is arithmetic

Close games come down to counting, and the counting starts earlier than you would like. A single straggler abandoned in your home triangle can cost a dozen moves to bring home, which is why moving the rearmost pegs early is the most repeated advice in the game and still the most ignored. Fill your target triangle from its deepest point first, the far corner tip, because a peg parked lazily at the entrance blocks the doorway for everyone behind it. And measure your play against the theoretical ceiling: computer searches have put the fastest possible unopposed crossing of all ten pegs at 27 moves, so every step that neither advances a peg nor feeds a future chain is a measurable luxury. When you must choose between a flashy chain for one peg and a dull step that keeps the group compact, count the moves each choice leaves you from home. Compact usually wins the count, and the count wins the game.