Filipino Dama

Filipino Dama is played on an 8×8 board. Pieces occupy only the dark squares. Each player starts with 12 pieces — traditionally tansan (crimped bottle caps), red against bare tin — Light at the bottom, Dark at the top.

1. Movement: Regular pieces move one square diagonally forward only. Click a highlighted piece to select it, then click a highlighted square to move.
2. Capturing: Jump over an adjacent enemy piece to capture it — the landing square must be empty. Unlike Western draughts, you can capture in all four diagonal directions (including backward).
3. Mandatory capture: If a capture is available, you must capture. You cannot make a non-capture move when captures are possible.
4. Multi-jump: After a capture, if another capture is available with the same piece, you must continue jumping. Captured pieces are removed only at the end of the chain.
5. Dama (★): Reach the far end of the board to promote to a Dama. A Dama slides any number of squares diagonally and captures long-range in all four directions.
6. Winning: Capture all opponent pieces, or leave them with no legal moves.

Note: Some rules (40-move draw, mid-chain promotion behaviour) are reconstructed — see Cultural Context for details.

The word dama comes from the Spanish damas — the checkers the Spanish introduced to the islands in the 16th century, damas meaning "ladies." The Philippines and Armenia are often noted as the two places that still call the game dama rather than "checkers" or "draughts," and the same word names the promoted, far-ranging king piece — a double meaning that sits at the heart of the game's strategy.

In its folk register, dama belongs to the street more than the parlour. A board is drawn in white chalk on a barangay basketball court or a sidewalk, or simply scratched into the dirt under an acacia or mango tree beside the sari-sari store. The pieces are tansan — crimped metal bottle caps, classic Coca-Cola red squaring off against bare tin — twelve pitsa to a side. A piece that reaches the far row is promoted to a dama, traditionally shown by stacking a second cap on top of the first, and gains long-range flying movement and capture. Capturing is mandatory, which keeps street games sharp and unforgiving.

It is worth being honest about the board itself. The older folk version is a grid of points joined by diagonal lines, with the caps riding along that network of intersections — the lined lattice you see chalked across this board. The checkered 8×8 you actually play on here is the imported Spanish and Western form, which Filipinos also adopted and which is the same layout later standardized for Damath. Both coexist in Philippine play.

That standardized board gave rise to Damath, the math variant invented by Sorsogon high-school teacher Jesus L. Huenda from student Emilio Hina Jr.'s 1975 game "Dama de Numero." The first Damath tournament was held in Sorsogon in 1980, and the game has since become a Department of Education school competition played nationwide — every capture is scored as an arithmetic operation, turning the old street game into a classroom sport.

Reconstruction note: The core rules (8×8 board, 12 pieces, all-direction capture, Dama long-range) are well-documented. The 40-move no-capture draw rule and the behaviour of mid-chain promotion (ending the jump chain) follow conventions from the broader international draughts family and are marked as reconstructed.