Checkers - American checkers with a 27-rank AI in a Web Worker (Canvas 2D, free)

[oreumgames]

Hi all,

Checkers is the classic 8x8 board game in the browser. Free, no sign-up, American rules with forced jumps and kings.

Play: https://oreumgames.com/en/games/flash/checkers/

Tap a piece and then a square, or drag it. You climb 27 ranks against the computer, from 18K to 9D, and 2 PLAYERS lets two people share one phone or PC.

Tech, since this is a dev forum: plain Canvas 2D, no engine or framework. The AI is a hand-written alpha-beta search with a transposition table and a narrower first look at most moves. It runs in a Web Worker built from the engine function's own source as a Blob, and if the worker cannot start, the same search just runs on the main thread. Before tuning anything I checked move generation by counting every game 8 moves deep, 845,931, against the known number. The first search only looked at about 110,000 positions a second; cutting per-move allocations and adding the position memory roughly doubled that, and 9D now reads around 10 moves ahead in under four seconds. Lower ranks add a little noise to their scores and sometimes miss a recapture, so a beginner can win. All sounds are synthesized with the Web Audio API.

Made by a very small indie team in Korea.

One thing I would like to hear: if you have never played checkers, is 18K beatable on your first try?

Thanks for playing!