Your roll
One of the oldest board games on earth, and a brilliant marriage of luck and skill. Two armies of fifteen checkers race in opposite directions around twenty-four points, driven by the roll of two dice, each player hurrying to bring every checker home and bear it off the board. But this is a race full of ambushes: land on a lone enemy checker and you knock it to the bar, where its owner must waste throws bringing it back into play. Stack your points to build walls the other side can't pass, leave a blot and pray they miss, and weigh every roll between running, hitting, and holding. Pure chance decides the dice — everything you do with them is up to you. A quick, tense duel against an AI that plays to win.
The board has twenty-four narrow triangles called points. Your fifteen white checkers travel from point 24 down toward point 1, with your home board being points 1 to 6 in the bottom-right; the AI's black checkers travel the opposite way. You move first.
At the start of each turn two dice are rolled. The two numbers are two separate moves: tap one of your checkers, then tap a highlighted point, to move it that many points along. You can play the dice in either order, on the same checker or two different ones, and you must use both numbers if there is any legal way to do so. Rolling a double (two of the same number) gives you four moves of that value instead of two.
A point is 'open' to you unless the AI has two or more checkers sitting on it. If you land on a point holding exactly one enemy checker — a blot — you hit it: that checker is lifted onto the bar in the middle of the board. While you have any checker on the bar you can do nothing else until you re-enter it, by rolling a number that lands on an open point in the AI's home; if both numbers are blocked, you forfeit the turn.
Once all fifteen of your checkers are in your home board, you start bearing them off — moving them off the edge with a die that matches their distance to the exit (a higher roll can bear off a checker from a lower point if nothing sits behind it).
The first player to bear off all fifteen checkers wins the game. Beat the AI to extend your win streak.
Make points, not just progress. Two checkers on the same point form a wall the AI cannot land on. A row of made points in front of its back checkers — a 'prime' — can trap them completely, which is often worth more than racing a single checker far ahead.
Hate leaving blots in range. A lone checker can be hit and sent all the way back to the bar, costing you a fortune in pips. When a roll forces you to expose one, leave it where the AI is least likely to reach it — far away, or behind its blockade — rather than right under its nose.
Know when you're racing and when you're fighting. If your checkers have all slipped past the enemy's, contact is over and it's a pure pip race: just play the most efficient moves home and don't fear blots. If you're behind in that race, do the opposite — hold a point in the AI's home, stay back, and wait for a shot to hit and turn the game around.
Fill your home board from the back. When bearing off, try not to leave awkward gaps; keep your home points evenly stacked so a wasteful high roll always has somewhere useful to go, and you bear off in as few turns as possible.