Steps, jump chains, and how to win the race between two triangles
Despite the name, Chinese Checkers is neither Chinese nor a form of checkers. It began in Germany in the 1890s as Stern-Halma, a star-shaped version of the game Halma, and picked up its English name later through American marketing. The idea is a race: move all of your pieces from your home triangle into the triangle opposite, using single steps and chains of jumps. Nothing is ever captured, and nobody is eliminated — the only question is who arrives first.
The appeal is the jump chain. A well-placed line of pieces becomes a highway that carries a piece across half the board in one turn, and because any piece can serve as a hurdle, your opponent's pieces can help you as much as your own.
The boxed game uses a six-pointed star for up to six players. This version is for two, so it keeps the central hexagon of 61 holes, five along each side, and the two opposite points of the star: a 10-hole triangle above the hexagon and another below. The other four points are left off because nobody would use them. Each triangle has rows of one, two, three and four holes and, exactly as on the standard star, its wide row of four lies against the hexagon. Your home therefore opens onto the board along a four-hole front edge, and the single tip hole at the back of the target is the deepest hole you have to fill.
The Moves counter counts both sides' moves together. Choosing a difficulty starts a new game, and there is no undo.
At the start your ten pieces are packed into a triangle whose front row of four touches five holes of the hexagon. Only that front row can step out, so the opening is about jumps: any piece in the row of three can hop over a front-row piece and land straight in the hexagon, two holes forward. Each such jump also leaves a gap that lets a piece further back hop through on a later turn. A good start is to jump second-row pieces over the front row in turn, keeping the group connected so every move leaves a hurdle for the next. The tip piece at the very back has the longest trip, so free it early.
A ladder is a line of pieces with one empty hole between each. A piece at one end can hop the whole line in a single turn, covering two holes per hurdle, so three spaced pieces give a six-hole jump. Chains can also turn corners, which lets you link two short ladders into one long move. Build them along the route between the entrances, and keep the ladder moving forward like a caterpillar by jumping its rearmost piece to the front. Remember that a ladder works in both directions: the AI is travelling the opposite way down the same corridor and will use any long chain you leave open.
Any piece is a hurdle. Around the middle of the game the two armies pass through each other in the centre, and a dark piece beside one of your own often offers the longest jump on the board. Before every move, look for a chain that starts by hopping an AI piece.
The last few pieces decide most races. A piece left at the back of your home has no hurdles once the rest have gone and must walk every hole — sixteen single steps from the tip of your home to the tip of the target. Bring the rear pieces forward while the middle of the board is still crowded with things to jump over.
The target triangle fills like a bottle. Every arriving piece comes in across the front row of four, so if your first arrivals stop there they block the holes behind them. Send early pieces deep, to the tip and the row of two, then fill the row of three, and take the front row last. A piece waiting in the front row is useful for a while, because an arriving piece can jump over it straight into the row of three, but move it on before it becomes a plug.
The PlayVersusAI Chinese Checkers engine lists every legal move for each of its pieces — single steps and every landing hole of every jump chain — and always takes a winning move when one exists. Otherwise it measures its position as a race distance: how many rows each piece still has to travel to the far tip of its target, how far pieces outside the target are from the nearest empty goal hole, and an extra charge for its rearmost piece so that none is stranded. Because the deepest holes count as the shortest distance, it fills its target from the tip forward.
| Difficulty | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Easy | Adds randomness to every move's score and sometimes plays any forward move, so it wastes turns and misses long chains. |
| Medium | Always the move that shortens its race distance the most, one move at a time, with ties broken at random. |
| Hard | Looks ahead: for its best candidates it predicts your strongest reply and its own follow-up, so it avoids building ladders for you and blocks your lanes when that costs it little. |
| AI Training | Checks your five strongest replies to each of its 24 best candidates, not just the single best-looking one, and assumes you will pick the one that hurts it most. No randomness, about a second a move at most. It beat Hard 18-9 in testing. |
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