Help

How to play Romanian Draughts here, what to do if something does not work, and how this site is looked after. No technical knowledge needed.

How to play

1. Choose who you are playing under Opponent: Two players shares one screen, Computer plays against you.
2. Against the computer, choose whether you play Dark (first) or Light, and how strong it is: Easy, Medium or Hard.
3. Click (or tap) one of your pieces. The squares it can reach are marked.
4. Click a marked square to move there. A single step finishes your turn straight away.
5. If you jump, you can keep jumping with the same piece. Press Finish move when you want to stop, or Cancel to put the piece back.
6. Press Undo to take back your last move, or New game to start again.

You can also play with the keyboard. The board is a single stop in the Tab order: press Tab once to reach it, then use the arrow keys to move between the playable squares (Left and Right along a row, Up and Down to the next row; Home and End jump to the ends of a row). Press Enter or Space to choose a piece, then arrow to a marked square and press Enter or Space again to move. Escape puts a chosen piece back. Your place on the board is kept while the computer is moving, so you can carry on from where you were. Press Tab again to leave the board for the buttons.

The rules in short

• Each side has eight pieces, and every piece is a king: it moves one square diagonally in any direction.
• A piece can jump over any piece next to it onto the empty square beyond, and keep jumping.
• Jumping one of your own pieces is allowed and takes nothing, which is how you travel. Jumping an opponent's piece takes it.
• Capturing is never compulsory.
• You win by taking your opponent's last piece or leaving them with no legal move.

If something does not work

• Nothing happens when I click. Reload the page (hold Shift while you press reload). The game needs JavaScript switched on. If it still does not respond, tell us which browser you use and we will look into it.
• The board is blank. Same fix: reload the page, then tell us if it persists.
• The computer is slow on Hard. Hard thinks for up to a couple of seconds on purpose. Choose Medium for quicker replies.

How the site is looked after

This is a MediaWright site. The game runs entirely in your browser: it stores nothing about you, uses no cookies and has no adverts or trackers. The only outside service it uses is Google Fonts for the lettering.

Every change to the site is tested before it goes live, and each one is recorded, with its build number, on the site updates page. If you find a security problem, please follow the security policy.

For the team

The technical details are in the project README: how to build the site (npm run build), how to test it (npm test for the rules and build checks, npm run test:e2e for a real browser, including the accessibility scan) and how changes reach the live site (a pull request, checked automatically, then merged into main).