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lissettegomez88 remembers...oooh cool i loved that game it was better then the usa checkers wait i think thats how theya re ... More »
Posted on 01/23/10
PHOTOS:
Manufacturer:
It’s like something out of “Coffee Talk” with Mike Myers’s Linda Richman. Chinese Checkers: They’re not Chinese and they’re not Checkers. Discuss. In fact, one could take it a step further and say that Chinese Checkers is not even a variation of Checkers or Chinese Chess.
Theories and histories disagree on the origin, some giving credit to a late nineteenth century Victorian Englishman and others recognizing German game manufacturer Ravensburger. However Halma began, it’s evolutionary eventuality adapted over time from the original board into one in the shape of a six-sided star (or stern, in German) with a no man’s land in the middle. Although played here and there in America as early as the late eighteenth century, it wasn’t until legendary game magnate J. Pressman brought it out of obscurity in 1928 that it entered the public conscience. With the name lacking appeal, Pressman made the change to give it less of a German je ne sais quoi, and more of a moneymaking one. Other companies began coat-tailing on Pressman’s success, among them L. G. Ballard, who introduced “Star Checkers” and Milton Bradley with their own version in the early 1940s.
Anywhere from two to six players can play Chinese Checkers (excluding five). General rules give each player ten colored marbles arranged like bowling pins located in one of the star’s points. The object of the game is to marble-by-marble move your way across the hexagonal landscape and fill the star point opposite from the one where you started. Players can move one space at a time or “hop” other pieces, including their own. Despite this similarity to Checkers, traditional Chinese Checkers (sometimes referred to as “Hop Across”) doesn’t allow a player to capture opposing players’ marbles. Strategies abound for crossing the board, most involving ways to create bridges with early pieces so that the following pieces can jump several spaces at a time, sometimes crossing the entire board before stopping. More cutthroat players will play with an aggressive stalling tactic, blocking opponent’s from reaching their base while they try to continue shuttling theirs. However it’s played, the ultimate goal is the move all ten pieces into the opposite base, the first to do so being the winner.
Even though Chinese Checkers is not a derivative of its namesake, it’s still a popular classic that has spawned a few imitators of its own.
