The Story
Where it came from, and why it turned out this way.
PublishedRavensburger, Germany · 1892 as Stern-Halma
Every word of the name is wrong
Chinese Checkers is probably the most successful piece of misdirection in board game history: it is neither Chinese nor checkers. Its actual ancestor is Halma, invented around 1883–84 by George Howard Monks, a surgeon in Boston, in which pieces travel from one corner of a square board to the opposite one. In 1892 the German publisher Ravensburger released a six-pointed-star version under the name Stern-Halma — literally "star Halma."
The word Chinese came from the marketing department
Around 1928 the American company Pressman began selling Stern-Halma and, to ride the Western enthusiasm for all things Oriental at the time, renamed it Chinese Checkers. The name spread worldwide and was eventually re-imported into China and Japan, so that today many Chinese players quite reasonably assume it is a local game. An American invention, published in Germany and renamed in the United States, thereby acquired Chinese citizenship.
Why having no captures makes it harder
Chinese Checkers is one of the few games in this library with no conflict at all: nobody can take anything, and the count stays ten to ten from start to finish. All of the difficulty sits in route planning — jump chains can bend, they can use your opponent's pieces as stepping stones, and an optimal path often turns two or three times. With no captures there is also no way to stop your opponent; your only lever is moving away the piece they were about to hop over.
The last ten moves are harder than the first fifty
The real skill threshold is in finishing. A piece that enters the target triangle can never leave, so getting the filling order wrong leaves your remaining pieces unable to squeeze into the deep holes, crawling in one step at a time. Experienced players plan backwards from the destination — decide which piece fills which hole, then arrange the departure order. It is why two players who both understand jump chains can finish a dozen turns apart.
- Halma comes from the Greek ἅλμα, meaning "jump," and Stern is simply German for "star." Nothing in the original name has any connection to China.
- The standard six-pointed board accommodates 2, 3, 4, or 6 players; this page implements the two-player diagonal game with ten pieces a side.
- The anti-blocking rule exists to deal with pieces that squat in someone else's target triangle: if all ten holes are full and at least one is yours, you win anyway.
Complete Rules
Start with what a turn allows and how the game is won.
- Board
- 121-hole six-pointed star
- Pieces
- 10 per player in the two-player game
- Winning conditionthe first player to get all ten of their pieces into the ten-hole triangle directly opposite wins. There are no captures and no eliminations anywhere in the game — the piece count stays ten to ten throughout, and your only task is to move your team across faster than your opponent moves theirs.
- This page uses the two-player diagonal setup: Blue occupies the ten-hole triangle at the bottom and moves first, Coral occupies the ten-hole triangle at the top, and each side's target is the triangle directly opposite. The four remaining star points are empty shared holes that both sides may pass through freely.
- Each turn moves exactly one piece, choosing one of two move types that can never be mixed: a single step into an adjacent empty hole in one of six directions, or a jump, which may chain across several hops.
- The full jump condition is this: along one of the six directions, the immediately adjacent hole must contain exactly one piece — yours or your opponent's, it does not matter — and the hole immediately beyond it must be empty, and you land on that empty hole. In other words, the jumped piece and the landing hole must be strictly symmetric about the starting hole; you cannot jump over a gap of two or more holes, nor over two consecutive pieces.
- After landing you may change direction and keep jumping, as long as every hop satisfies the condition above. You may stop at any legal landing hole in the chain — jumping to the end is not compulsory — but within one turn you may not land on the same hole twice, and you may not return to your starting hole.
- A jumped piece is neither captured nor moved; it stays exactly where it was. There is no capturing of any kind in the entire game.
- Once a piece enters the target triangle it may only move within the target triangle and can never leave. If any hop of a jump chain lands inside the target, every remaining hop of that turn must also land inside the target.
- Filling all ten holes of the target triangle with your ten pieces wins the game.
Your First Game
Use this order of thought to get through a complete game quickly.
- Move your back-row pieces — the ones farthest from the target — first, or they will become dead weight in the endgame. Spreading your formation into a diagonal line where pieces can serve as stepping stones for each other is far faster than pushing one piece forward alone.
- After selecting a piece, test all six directions, and especially test the branches that turn after the first hop. The longest jump chains usually bend two or three times, so looking along one direction only misses most of what is available.
- Sometimes a sideways step, or even a step backward, is correct because it builds a longer jump chain for your next turn. Distance covered this move is not the only measure of a good move.
- The central area is a corridor shared by both players, and you may use your opponent's pieces as stepping stones. Watching where their leading pieces land often lets you pick up a free chain of jumps.
- When entering the target triangle, fill the deepest, innermost holes first. Since pieces can never leave, occupying the shallow holes early blocks the entrance for the pieces still coming.
Practical Strategy
Move from knowing the rules to playing with a plan.
- Arranging several pieces into a ladder with one empty hole between each is the most efficient structure on the board, because the same corridor can be reused by every piece that follows.
- Watch for the shared stepping stones your opponent is about to use. Moving away the one piece that serves as the middle of their chain will often cut an entire multi-hop route in a single move.
- Never let your group split into a front and a rear half. Stragglers left behind have no stepping stones to use and cannot serve as stepping stones for anyone else, so they end up crawling one hole at a time.
- Plan the endgame backwards from the holes: decide which piece most naturally fills each remaining hole in the target triangle, then arrange the departure order so the last piece does not have to take a long detour.
- If your opponent has parked a piece in your target triangle, you do not have to wait for them to leave — under the anti-blocking rule you can still win by filling every other hole.
Winning and Special Rules
Details that are easy to miss but can change the result.
- Anti-blocking ruleas long as at least one of your pieces is inside the target triangle and all ten of its holes are occupied — including by an opponent's piece squatting there — you win anyway.
- The one-way restriction on the target triangle applies to both single steps and jump chains: a piece already inside cannot even step out to an adjacent empty hole outside, and can only rearrange itself within the triangle.
- If the two players together reach six hundred moves without a result, the game is a draw.
- Different winding routes that reach the same destination do not produce different positions. This page always keeps one canonical path with no repeated holes and animates that complete path hop by hop. Master hints mark the start, the destination, and every hole passed through.
Common Mistakes
The traps new players fall into most often.
- Treating a jump as a capture and expecting the jumped piece to be removed.
- Checking jumps in only one direction and missing the longer chains that require a mid-route turn.
- Pushing one piece as far forward as possible, leaving the back rows with no stepping stones and the whole team stuck near the start.
- Filling the shallow holes of the target triangle too early, so the remaining pieces cannot squeeze into the deeper holes and have to inch in one step at a time.
- Casually dropping a piece into an edge hole of the target triangle, after which it can only shuffle inside the triangle and is very hard to move to the hole that actually needs filling.