Players are able to eliminate opponent's pieces by jumping over them with the ultimate goal of capturing all his pieces or leaving him without any legal moves. Each player is given 12 checkers which he will move diagonally forward as the game progresses. A highly strategic game despite its apparent simplicity, Go has been the focus of major international competitions and titles for decades and national recognition in east asian countries for centuries.Ĭheckers (also known as draughts in the United Kingdom) is a two player game played on a 8 by 8 board of alternating colored squares. An opponent's stone or group of stones can be captured and removed if it is completely surrounded by the player's stones of opposing color. Each of the two players choose a color and lays down stones with the object of covering more of the board than their opponent. The traditional Go board consists of a 19 by 19 grid with 181 black stones and 180 white stones, enough to cover the entire board. Go originated in Asia more than 2500 years ago. The doubling cube which is used to raise the gambling stakes of the game had its first recorded introduction to the game in the 1920s in gaming clubs in New York City. The first player to remove all his checkers from the board wins the game. After a player moves all his checkers to his home board, he may start removing them (called bearing off). The two player game involves moving 15 checker pieces around a horse shoe-shaped track by a roll of two dice. Variations of the game have been found in Egyptian and ancient Roman cultures and believed to have spread to India where dice games were a favorite diversion. Backgammon was played in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.