Crownfall: checkers in your browser, against a computer that actually looks ahead

01  What Crownfall is

Crownfall is checkers — the 8×8 game also called English draughts or American checkers — in a browser tab. Twelve men on the three rows nearest you, twelve across the board from them, and thirty-two dark squares, which are the only squares anyone ever uses. You move first and play up the board; Crownfall plays the dark pieces coming down. There is nothing to install and no account to create: the page loads, the board appears, and you choose an opponent.

Everything after that happens on your own device. The board, the pieces and the rules are part of the page, so a game does not depend on a server staying up or a connection staying clean, and your record — wins, current streak, best streak, your fewest-moves win — is written to your own browser rather than to an account. There is no leaderboard to climb and no history of yours sitting on someone else’s machine.

The name and all of the artwork are original: the board, the ceramic pieces, the crown that drops when a man is promoted. Checkers itself is centuries old and public domain, so what is borrowed is the rules and nothing else. If there are two of you in the room, Pass & play puts both sides on one device.

02  Four difficulty tiers, and what they actually change

Difficulty here is not a label on the same opponent. It is how far ahead the computer looks. The engine is a negamax search with alpha-beta pruning, iterative deepening and a per-move time budget, which in plain terms means it builds the tree of continuations, assumes you will answer with your best move, and picks the line that leaves it best off. Easy searches three moves deep in about a quarter of a second. Medium searches seven in roughly 600 milliseconds. Hard goes twelve deep in about 1.2 seconds. Expert reaches sixteen in about 1.8 seconds — a longer think than the others, and on a busy phone the difference is visible.

What that feels like in practice: Easy plays honestly but shallowly and will let things slide. Medium is a decent club-casual game. Hard punishes a loose move, and you will feel it two moves later. Expert rarely hands you anything, and beating it has to be earned rather than waited for.

The search runs on a background thread, so the board never freezes while the computer thinks, and the status line always tells you whose move it is. What it searches is judged on material, how far each man has advanced, whether a back-row guard is still standing, centre control and how much room its kings have.

03  The rules, including the one that decides games

Standard American checkers, unmodified. Men move one square diagonally forward. Captures are mandatory — if a jump exists, a quiet move is not legal that turn, and the pieces that have to move are marked on the board with a pulsing ring so you are never left wondering why a move was refused. Once you start a multi-jump chain you must finish it. Landing on the far row crowns the man and ends the move right there, even in the middle of a chain. A king then moves and captures one square diagonally in any of the four directions. This is not the international game: there are no flying kings that slide across the board, and no 10×10 variant hiding in a menu.

You win by leaving your opponent with no legal move at all. That usually means taking every piece, but blocking the last one counts too, and it is a real way to lose a game you thought was comfortable. If neither side captures anything or advances a man for forty moves each, the game is a draw; so is a position that occurs three times.

The mandatory capture is what makes the game interesting, and it is worth understanding before your first move. Because you cannot decline a jump, a piece offered in the right place is an instruction rather than a gift: you take one, and the reply takes two back. It is also worth knowing what is *not* enforced: when several capture chains are on offer you may take any of them, so the longest jump is never compulsory.

04  Playing it: touch, mouse and keyboard

Tap or click a piece and its legal destinations appear as dots on the board — larger ones where a capture is waiting. Tap a destination to play the move. The squares of the last move stay highlighted, so if you look away for a moment you can see what just happened. Slides and jumps are animated, captured pieces fade out as they are jumped, and a promotion dims the board briefly while the crown lands.

It works with a keyboard too, which matters if a trackpad is not the tool you want. The canvas is focusable: arrow keys walk a dashed cursor across the dark squares, Enter or Space picks up and places, and U or Backspace undoes. The cursor moves diagonally because the playing squares are diagonal neighbours, so four arrows are enough to reach every square on the board.

Undo is more generous than it sounds. Rather than leaving you a move behind and letting the computer decide again, it rolls back both your move and its reply, so you land on your own turn with the position you meant to have. It is disabled while the computer is thinking or a piece is mid-animation. There is a mute control for the slide, jump and crowning sounds, and a reduced-motion mode that honours your operating system setting and collapses the animations to quick crossfades.

05  What happens when the game ends

The end of a game gets a proper moment: an overlay with a result card showing the moves played (both sides counted), the pieces you captured, the pieces you still had, and your current streak at that difficulty. Then Rematch, Share, Download, or back to the menu.

Share uses your device’s own share sheet where there is one, image and all. On a desktop, where there is no share sheet, it copies a line like “I beat Crownfall checkers on Hard in 34 moves” along with a link — and that link carries the difficulty you were playing, so whoever opens it lands on the same tier already selected. The card itself is a 1080×1350 PNG, which is the size social platforms actually want, and Download keeps it either way. It is a screenshot, not a broadcast: nothing is posted anywhere on your behalf.

Records are kept separately for each tier, and the stats strip on the menu shows current streak, best streak, total wins and your fewest-moves win at whichever level you have selected. Pass & play games are left out of the record on purpose — they are for two people in a room, not for your score.

06  Habits that win more games

Checkers rewards a handful of habits far more than it rewards clever individual moves, and most of them come back to the fact that captures cannot be declined.

• Count the trade before you jump. Taking one piece and losing two is a losing exchange however good the jump looked, and the forced-capture rule means you can offer a piece knowing exactly what your opponent is allowed to do about it.
• Keep your back row standing as long as you can. Those guard squares are what stop a man walking to the far row, and the computer pays a bonus to keep its own.
• Do not crown a man just because the chance is there. A king is worth roughly 1.6 men, but a man on the king row is still guarding the row, and sometimes the guard is worth more than the crown.
• Look for the man that cannot move. A piece with no forward square and no capture is nearly dead weight; the engine scores it as a liability, and so should you.
• Trade when you are ahead. With more pieces on the board, every exchange is progress toward the position where your opponent runs out of legal moves.
• When the board is blocked, remember that a draw is a real result. Two kings shuffling with no capture for forty moves each, or one position repeating three times, ends the game level rather than as a loss.

07  Questions people ask

Is Crownfall free, and do I need an account?

Free, and no account. The page is supported by advertising and there is no paywall, no sign-up and nothing to install. It runs in the browser you already have.

Can two people play checkers on the same device?

Yes — choose Pass & play on the menu and the board becomes a two-player game on one screen, telling you whose turn it is. Those games are not added to your streak record, since they are not you against the computer.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. The board scales to the width of whatever you are holding, and the controls are taps rather than drags, so it plays one-handed in portrait. On a laptop the same board takes clicks, or the arrow keys and Enter.

How is this different from international draughts?

Crownfall plays the 8×8 English or American ruleset. Men capture forward only, and kings move and capture a single square in any direction — there are no flying kings, and no 10×10 board variant.

Is checkers a solved game, and does that make Crownfall unbeatable?

Checkers is solved in the research sense: the program Chinook proved that perfect play leads to a draw. Crownfall does not play perfect checkers. It plays a deep, honest search at whatever difficulty you pick, which is why Expert is beatable — just not casually.

Where are my wins and streaks stored?

In your own browser, separately for each difficulty. Nothing there is tied to an account, which also means the record does not follow you to another device, and clearing your browsing data clears it.

08  More from the shelf

• Tilewright — Draw seven tiles. Outword the AI.
• Chess — Beat the engine. Post the win.
• Dominoes — Match the ends. Block them out.
• Backgammon — Roll the dice. Race the engine home.

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