Filipino Dama 2023

Filipino Dama (also called dama or Filipino checkers) is the traditional Philippine variant of draughts. It is played on the dark squares of an 8x8 board; each player begins with 12 men placed on the three rows nearest them, leaving the two middle rows empty. The lighter side conventionally moves first.

Men move one square diagonally forward only, but capture both forward and backward by jumping. Captures are mandatory and capturing chains must be completed; when more than one capturing line is available, the line that captures the most pieces must be taken, with a free choice only between lines of equal count.

A man that reaches the far rank is crowned a "dama" — a flying king that slides any distance along open diagonals and captures from range. A dama cannot jump over its own pieces or over two adjacent enemy pieces, and a man promoted in the middle of a capturing chain continues capturing as a dama in the same turn.

A player wins by capturing all enemy pieces or by leaving the opponent without a legal move; a game may also end in a draw (tabla), including under a 40-move no-progress rule.

The game descends from the Spanish game of damas introduced during the colonial era. It is traditionally played outdoors — in plazas, outside sari-sari stores, and in barbershops — often on hand-drawn boards using bottle caps as pieces. It is also the ancestor of Damath, an educational classroom variant that combines dama with arithmetic, devised by a Philippine schoolteacher in the 1970s.