Alquerque - Rules, History & Strategy Guide

Alquerque reached Europe through Moorish Iberia as el-quirkat, a game already old in the Arab world, and entered the written record in style: King Alfonso X of Castile had its rules and problems illustrated in the Libro de los Juegos of 1283, one of the most beautiful games manuscripts ever made. Boards are scratched into cloister benches and church steps across Spain and the wider medieval world.

Its greatest legacy is its child. Around the twelfth century, players moved alquerque’s twelve pieces and its short leap onto the dark squares of a chessboard, and the result, fierges, evolved directly into draughts and checkers. Alquerque itself lived on in variants across North Africa and the Middle East, and in enlarged forms like the Zuni game kolowis awithlaknannai.

Alquerque is checkers’ wilder grandfather: pieces move along marked lines in any direction, captures are compulsory, and one leap can cascade across the whole lattice.

1. Set up twelve pieces per side on the 5x5 lattice of points, leaving only the center empty.
2. On your turn, step one piece along a line to an adjacent empty point.
3. If an adjacent enemy piece has an empty point directly beyond it along a line, you must leap it; the leapt piece is captured.
4. A leaping piece keeps leaping while fresh captures remain, choosing its direction where chains branch.
5. Win by capturing all enemy pieces or leaving your opponent without a legal move.

• Use the forcing power of mandatory captures: a deliberate sacrifice steers the enemy onto the exact point where your counter-chain begins.
• Calculate chains to the end; because replies are forced, alquerque tactics can be read out like checkers combinations.
• Prize the diagonal points: pieces on the X-crossings command up to eight lines, twice as many as the others.
• Keep a solid back rank early; every hole behind your wall is a future landing point for an enemy leap.
• When ahead on material, trade down aggressively; the mandatory-capture rule makes simplification easy to force.

The alquerque family is wide: de doze (the standard twelve-piece game), larger four-player forms in the Alfonso manuscript, North African quirkat variants, fox-and-geese style hunt games on the same lattice, and expanded boards like the Zuni kolowis awithlaknannai. And of course its most successful variant of all: checkers, played on the squares instead of the points.