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Draughts Notation
I've played Draughts ever since I was a kid, but I've never liked its traditional notation system, in which the squares are numbered 1 to 50 as in the table below.
After I invented Bushka, the need for a better coordinate system arose. On the above 10x10 board one can fairly easily count the subsequent squares of a column - say 3-13-23-33-43 - but Bushka was at the time played on a 9x11 board and one would have to count 3-14-25-36-47. Similar 'uneasy' counts appear in 8x8 Draughts variants (3-11-19-27) and in the 12x12 canadian variant (3-15-27-39-51-63). One can easily understand why players of 64 variants tend to fall back on Chess notation!
Pondering the problem I focused on the fact that the diagonal subdomain of a square board is in
fact a square tesselation itself, albeit 45 degrees rotated.
The coordinate system for the overlay is both usual and logical. So why not hang on to it when the board is rotated back, as in the table below!
The resulting notation system is easy to learn, concise and equally well applicable for
every board size, even for a rectangular board like Bushka had in the early days!
A multiple piece-capture does not necessarily keep a particular line and may end on the square
of origin. The 'x' sign comes behind the indices, for instance e8g6x,
eg8x or f6x.
As can be seen throughout the Draughts section, another feature of the diagonal notation system is that the oblique lines can be indicated on the side of the board very much the same way ranks and files are indicated on, say, a Chess board. In the player's section moves may be entered either way.
Signs used in notation are:
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