About Dameo

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About Dameo

The only game currently representing the theme 'elimination' on an international scale, is international . The game is played on the dark squares of a 10x10 checkered board with 20 men each. Its rules differ from anglo-american Draughts/Checkers in that majority capture precedes, men may capture both forward and backward, and the king is a long range piece. These differences make it far more complicated than its traditional predecessor. The game is very popular in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, several African countries and countries of the former Soviet Union. Players are united in some 60 national federations, under the umbrella of the FMJD, the Federation Mondial du Jeu de Dames, which has its seat in the Netherlands.

One ghost that has haunted Draughts in the last decades is its margin of draws, especially in match play. To remedy this, there are several options, the first two of which were extensively, but rather unsuccessfully, tried out:

More emphasis on tournament play

Balloted openings

More emphasis on tournament play
I remember two successive worldchampionship matches between Dutch grandmasters Harm Wiersma and the late Jannes van der Wal, in which only one decision was reached in forty games. In both cases, Ton Sijbrands, who covered the games for one of the daily papers, ran out of adjectives to describe the draws - thrilling draws, exciting draws, blood-curdling draws, abysmal dangers allowing only the narrowest of escapes, etc. It became really funny when a journalist put all headers together on the backpage. It showed what everyone except draughts players can see: top level Draughts is as dead as the dodo in match play.

Balloted openings
Balloted openings are an established means to counteract draws in Checkers: with a two moves ballot, one black and one white move are chosen at random, but without inducing a capture. This results in 43 balloted openings. Not all of these are equally balanced, therefore they are played in pairs, with players switching sides after the first game. In the more established three moves ballot, two black moves and one white move are randomly chosen under the same premiss (black starts in Checkers), which leads to 150 possible 'initial positions'. Of these, 13 were initially barred because they were considered too advantageous for one side or the other, but after careful investigation and reconsideration 7 of these were allowed after all, while the others remain under ongoing investigation.
These Checkers specifications were taken from Jonathan Schaeffer's book "One Jump Ahead" (Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers, ISBN 0-387-94930-5, Springer Verlag New York Berlin Heidelberg, SPIN 10556786).
The writer continues:

"All this tinkering with the openings to make the game more exciting gives me the impression that something is wrong somewhere. Randomly selecting the opening is a blemish on the elegance of the rules that so appeal to me".

That about sums it up - an unholy remedy!

In this game two kings win against one because kings are subject to the "demotion rule", which constitutes the only difference with the international game. Acceptance of the rule would make sense, but then: draughts players are hooked on opposition - they'll oppose anything.

This game owes its existence to , invented by the Croation mathematics professor and Draughts master Ljuban Dedic, and the writing of Draughts Dissected. That investigation was sparked off by what I considered the obvious superiority of Croda to other forms of Draughts. I didn't intend to invent Dameo, it was suddenly there when I realized linear movement was an option here.
Linear movement fuels . In the process of inventing that game I had considered it as a vehicle for movement in a draughts game. In International Draughts, differences in pace derive from one source only, namely captures. So bringing in a bit of flexibility in these strategic concepts wouldn't hurt. Apart from that it's not hard to see that it would open up a new range of tactics. The reason I didn't do it, is that Draughts is drawish, and introducing linear movement doesn't have any effect on that. Besides it's rather crammed in the opening and I could see forces grinding into interlocking positions, because the direction of movement and capture are the same. This however is not the case in Croda and that makes a big difference in terms of linear movement, because it counteracts, even eliminates, this tendency. That's how Dameo happened, quite unintentionally. It's rules fell into place in less than a minute.

I consider Dameo to be the most modern and the most rewarding of all draughts variants, because of its use of linear movement, and the additional grounds pointed out in Draughts Dissected.