Classic Board Games
The best board games have lasted for centuries because their rules fit on a single card while the strategy keeps unfolding for a lifetime. This page gathers the family classics you may remember from a cupboard at home: checkers, mancala, backgammon, dominoes, nine men's morris, gomoku, reversi, dots and boxes and sea battle. Each one plays free in the browser against the computer or a friend sitting next to you, with no download or sign-up.
Every family trains a different kind of thinking. Checkers and mills reward looking a few moves ahead, backgammon mixes planning with dice odds, and line-up games like gomoku are about building threats faster than your opponent can block them. Chess, shogi and xiangqi have their own page of chess variants. For a quick start, read how to play checkers, how to play Mancala, chess vs checkers: which to learn first or why strategy games are good for you.
Checkers and draughts
Diagonal moves, forced jumps and the race to crown a king. Start with English rules on the familiar 8×8 board, then try the bigger 10×10 international game or Russian draughts, where kings fly across the board.
Mancala
The ancient counting game: sow stones around the board, land in your store for an extra turn and capture from the pit opposite. Every move is a small sum, which makes it great number-sense practice.
Backgammon and race games
Games where you race your pieces home. Backgammon adds dice, so good players think in odds as well as moves; corners and halma are dice-free races that come down to clever jumps.
Dominoes
Match the open ends and empty your hand first. Besides the classic 28-tile game you can try spider and sausage layouts, a historic Viennese set and dominoes with triangular tiles.
Line-up games
Get your pieces in a row before your opponent does: three in a row for the youngest players, a row of four, the five-stone race of gomoku, the mills of nine men's morris and the disc-flipping battles of reversi.
Pencil-and-paper classics
Games people have always played on a scrap of squared paper, now with the computer keeping score: dots and boxes, a territory game of surrounding dots, and sea battle.
Classic board games FAQ
Can I play these board games against the computer?
Yes. Most games on this page have a computer opponent and a two-player mode for a friend on the same device, and several of the duel versions can also match you with an opponent online. They all run free in the browser with no download.
What is the difference between checkers and draughts?
They are the same family of games. Checkers is the American name and draughts the British one for the 8×8 game with 12 pieces each. International draughts is played on a 10×10 board with 20 pieces each, kings can move any distance along a diagonal, and ordinary pieces may capture backwards.
Is checkers a solved game?
Yes. In 2007 a team at the University of Alberta used the program Chinook to prove that checkers ends in a draw when both players make no mistakes. Nine men's morris was shown to be a draw with perfect play in 1993. Neither fact helps much at the table, because no human plays perfectly.
Which board games are best for kids?
Tic-tac-toe and dots and boxes are good first games because a turn takes seconds. Checkers and 4 in a row come next and teach planning ahead. Dominoes practice matching numbers, and backgammon is a fun way to meet adding dice and thinking about chances.