Chinese Checkers Rules

Chinese Checkers rules are easy to learn, and there frankly aren’t that many to learn. Most Chinese Checkers rules involve the movement of the checker pieces (marbles) around the checkerboard, including the basic movement rule and how to jump playing pieces.

Other Chinese Checkers rules discuss winning the game and how to move your pieces into the points of the stars. There are few rules that don’t involve the endgame or the movement phases of Chinese Checkers, though we will discuss how to set up the Chinese Checkers board correctly.

Here’s a quick discussion of the rules of Chinese Checkers, which are a little more complicated than regular Checkers, but a great deal less complicated than Chess rules.

Chinese Checkers Setup

Chinese Checkers is for 2 to 6 players. The Chinese Checkers board looks like a six-pointed star. The checkerboard, including each tip of the stars, is filled in with marble-sized divits. Each player is given ten marbles, with each side having differing colored marbles.

At the beginning of play, each player starts with all ten marbles in the tip of one of the stars. (The star point has 10 divits, and therefore exactly fits your 10 playing pieces.) The object of Chinese Checkers is to get all ten of your “Chinese checkers” from the tip of your star to the tip of the star opposite your on the checkerboard.

In a 2-player game, the opposing players line up their checkers exactly opposite on another, so each player is moving their marbles directly towards their opponent. In a 3-player game, players begin play opposite an unfilled star. No two players are therefore opposite an occupied star point, and therefore no one is at an advantage.

In a 4-player game, each opposing player lines up opposite another player’s marbles. Two of the star’s points, which are themselves opposite one another, are not occupied at the beginning of the game. In a 5-player game, one player will not be opposite an opponent and will therefore have the advantage of moving into an unoccupied portion of the board. In this case, that player should be the weakest Chinese Checkers player of the 5, to even the odds a bit.

In a 6-player game of Chinese Checkers, all six points of the star will be filled with marbles. In no Chinese Checkers setup will marbles occupy the no-man’s land in the middle of the board; that is, no marbles will start in the heart of the six-pointed star.

When moving a piece in Chinese Checkers, the marble can only move to an adjacent spot or divet. That means the marble must move one of six different directions, and that marble cannot move more than one divet at a time. Also, on your turn, you can only move one marble.

There is an exception to the one-space movement rule in Chinese Checkers, which is fulfilled when two factors happen at once. One, if a marble is adjacent to the marble you are moving, there is a chance you can jump that marble. Two, if the space directly opposite of the marble you want to move is unoccupied (with a second and adjacent marble in between your original marble position and the unoccupied end position), you may jump the adjacent marble. This is why Chinese Checkers is similar to Checkers, where you can move a checker one spot, unless you’re jumping another Checker.

Unlike Checkers, though, jumped Chinese Checkers are not removed from the board. They must continue to move towards their destination, which is the point of the game.

You can jump either your own or an opponent’s Chinese checker. This means not only that you should move your marbles to create jumping opportunities for your other pieces, but that you should avoid moving adjacent to your opponents’ marbles, at least when there is an unoccupied space that would give your opponent a chance to jump your pieces.

The strategy of Chinese Checkers is to move your checker pieces multiple spaces in a turn, reaching your destination quicker than your opponent can. Movement and positioning is therefore important. In a six player game, all the pieces will be moving across the same stretch of no man’s land at the same time, so jumps can be dramatic.

Like in Checkers, a marble can jump multiple times on one move, provided there is already a space in which to jump. So if the board is set up to let you jump over multiple opponent pieces, you might leapfrog 3 times on a turn.

You’re eventualy goal is to get every Chinese Checkers piece to the other side of the board, so you’ll want to employ strategies that keep your deepest buried marbles from getting stranded behind, where you will have to move it one space at a time.

Also, since you opponent will want to jump Chinese Checkers spaces to get to their final destination, if you let one or two Chinese Checkers lag behind, you might be setting up your opponent to leapfrog your marbles.

Once you have all ten Chinese Checkers marbles in the opposite point of the star to wear you started, you win. The end game can slow down a bit, if you and your opponents pass one another up and you have no one to jump but your own pieces. Of course, if you set yourself up nicely, you might be able to fast-track your marbles and therefore have a quick time moving your pieces into place.

But that information will come in our eventual Chinese Checkers strategy article, which we aren’t likely to get into too much on a Chinese Checkers rules page. Stay tuned for more Chinese Checkers information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Board Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Chinese Checkers Rules

Chinese Checkers Basic Rules

2 Responses to “Chinese Checkers Rules”

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