About GameDama

Our mission

GameDama exists to make every draughts variant in the world playable and discoverable online — for free, in multiple languages, with accurate rules and rich context for each game.

Why GameDama?

Draughts (checkers) is one of the oldest board games on Earth, yet most online implementations only cover one or two variants. Millions of people grow up playing Turkish dama, Russian shashki, Ghanaian damii, or Malaysian dam haji — and finding their game online, let alone learning about related variants, is surprisingly hard. GameDama fixes that.

The collection

We currently feature 17 playable variants spanning five continents, from the 12×12 Canadian giant to the speedy 8-piece Thai makhos. Each variant has its own dedicated page with accurate starting positions, full rules, historical background and strategic notes — all playable against a friend or our built-in computer opponent.

Languages

The site is fully translated into English, Turkish, Russian and Arabic. Arabic pages use right-to-left layout. We plan to add more languages in the future.

Accuracy

Rules are based on the official regulations of the relevant national and international federations where these exist (FMJD for international draughts, TDF for Turkish draughts, etc.) and on well-documented historical sources for traditional variants. A small number of tournament-level edge cases (rare draw rules, specific priority tie-breaks) are simplified in our interactive implementation; where this is the case it is noted on the game page.

Technology

GameDama is a static website — no server, no database, no login. The rules engine runs entirely in your browser in JavaScript. The computer opponent uses minimax search with alpha-beta pruning, scaled to each board size for a playable response time.

Contact

See our Contact page to get in touch, report a bug, or suggest a new variant.