Over the years we've featured several Chess games on Board's Eye View, but they've all either been special-feature editions, like Minecraft Chess (The Noble Collection) or Chess with variant boards like Chess 90 Degrees and Chess Diamond (3Joy Games) or variant pieces like Chessplus. Dama tho' is the first time we've featured a Checkers (aka Draughts) variant on Board's Eye View.
Published by Majlis Shabab, Dama has a very distinctive look. It features beautifully fashioned pieces that have a rather more satisfying heft than the flat discs traditionally used in Checkers, and its wooden board eschews the traditional black & white chequered design borrowed from Chess in favour of a simple 8 x 8 grid.
Dama, it seems, is especially popular in Majlis Shabab's native Qatar, so the publishers have modernised the presentation, and they've certainly done a fantastic job.
The rules for Dama are similar to those of Checkers, with adjacent opposing pieces captured by jumping over them to an empty space. Whereas Checkers uses only half the squares on the board (ie: pieces only move on the black squares), Dama uses all 64 squares, with pieces able to move left or right as well as forward. For that reason, set up has each player place out two lines of pieces, so 16 each, in the second and third row of the board. This contrasts with traditional Checkers, where just 12 pieces are used per player - set up in just the black squares in the first three rows.
As in the traditional game of Checkers, capturing an opponent's piece is mandatory but there are differences in the capture rules for pieces that are crowned... In Checkers, if you get a piece to the far end of the board, they become Kings, able to move backwards as well as forwards. In Dama, pieces reaching the far rank become Sheikhs - similarly able to reverse direction but unable to change direction to make multiple captures on a single turn. When a piece becomes a Sheikh, you mark it by placing a ring on top: our one gripe in this otherwise beautifully presented game is that the rings could be more distinctive.
Because Dama uses all 64 squares, you're playing on a board that's effectively twice the size of the board used in Checkers. That, and the different set up, makes for an abstract strategy game with greater depth than the already underrated depth of Checkers. And this beautifully produced edition is one you'll happily want to display when you're not actually playing it.