Chinese Checkersचाइनिज चेकर

The board

The board is a six-pointed star with 121 holes: a hexagon of 61 holes in the middle, and a triangle of ten holes on each of its six sides. The triangles are the star's points.

The holes lie in straight lines in three directions, so every hole has up to six neighbours.

Setting up

Each player has ten marbles of one colour and puts them in the ten holes of their own point. The point straight across the star is their target.

• Two players sit in opposite points.
• Three players take every other point, so every target starts empty.
• Four players take two pairs of opposite points and leave one pair empty.
• Six players fill the whole star.

The first player moves first, and turns go clockwise round the star, to their left.

Moving

On your turn you must move one of your marbles, in one of two ways:

• A step: one hole along a line to a neighbouring hole, if it is empty.
• A hop: over one marble right next to yours, of any colour, your own included, into the empty hole straight beyond it. The marble you hop over stays where it is.

After a hop, the same marble may hop again from where it landed, in any direction, as often as it can. You may stop after any hop. A chain may not land on the same hole twice, or back in the hole it started from, and a step and hops never go together in one move.

Marbles move in any direction, forwards, sideways or back.

Where a marble may stop

A move may end only in the middle hexagon, in your own starting point or in your target point. A chain of hops may pass through any other point on the way, but it may not stop there, even in a point nobody uses.

Once a marble is in your target point, every move it makes must end inside that point again. It may still step or hop about within it.

Winning

You finish when all ten holes of your target point hold your marbles. The first player to finish wins, and the game ends there.

Leaving marbles at home cannot block the player opposite for long. Their target is your starting point, and once everyone has had 30 turns, your marbles still in it fill holes for them: when all ten holes are full, some with their marbles and some with yours, they have finished. This is the common anti-spoiling rule. The wait is there so that it cannot end a game early, when a marble slips into a point that is still full of the other player's marbles.

So a move can make someone else finish. If you move a marble back into your own point and that fills the opposite player's target, that player wins. And a target already full of both players' marbles counts the moment everyone has had 30 turns, whoever moved last.

Everyone else is placed by how many of their own marbles are in their target, and then by how far the rest still have to go.

If nobody finishes

If you have no legal move on your turn, you pass. That hardly ever happens.

So that every game ends, it stops after 200 turns each. Then the player with the most marbles home wins, and a tie goes to whoever has the least distance still to go. Players level on both share the place.

Where these rules come from

Chinese Checkers was invented in Germany in 1892 as Stern-Halma, star halma, and took its English name in the United States in 1928. Tables differ in the details. This one plays:

• Ten marbles each, for two, three, four or six players, with steps and chains of hops over single marbles of any colour, no captures, and never a step and hops in one move: as in the Wikipedia article and on Board Game Arena.
• Chains may pass through other points but not stop in them: Board Game Arena's rule, and one of the house rules in the Chess'n'Boards guide. That guide also lets marbles rest in points nobody uses; here they may not.
• A marble in its target point stays there: the Chess'n'Boards guide.
• Marbles left in their own point count towards filling the target of the player opposite: the anti-spoiling rule in the Chess'n'Boards guide. The wait of 30 turns each before they count is this table's own. The guide's other answer, swapping your marble with the one in the way, is not played here.
• The game ends when the first player finishes and the rest are placed by how far they got, as on Board Game Arena, rather than playing on for second place.
• Long hops follow the Super Chinese Checkers variant described on Wikipedia.
• Passing when you cannot move, and the stop after 200 turns each, are also this table's own rules, so that every game ends.

Long hops

Choose long hops before the game, as in Super Chinese Checkers. A hop may then go over a marble further along a line, as long as it lands as far beyond that marble as it started before it, with every other hole on the way empty. It still hops one marble at a time. Long chains can cross the board in a turn or two, and the game is quicker.