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At the age of six I had mastered Fox & Geese. My geese were invincible and I was far from reluctant to prove it. In sheer desperation my father taught me to play Draughts. It was my entrance to the world of abstract games. Now I must betray it and explain I'm sorry to say that this is not, as many would have it, a matter of opinion. I do have an opinion however, for those who would like to dismiss these findings as ridiculous. It is this: if by some twist of fate Croda or Dameo had been the dominant draughts form for the last century, you would have naturally accepted that as a child. You might even have become a professional player. If someone had come up with 10x10 Draughts as it is played now, you might well have ridiculed - and this time maybe rightly so - the very game you're defending now. So don't kid yourself. Draughts is so globally recognized that there's hardly any culture that hasn't accommodated it in one form or another. It's all about a simple 'two men three squares' scenario: you put a white man on the first square, a black man on the second, you leap with the white man to the third and remove the black man. That is the bare essence. 
All cultures implement the idea by putting two opposing armies on a square board.
There are dozens of variants. We'll look at the traditionals Checkers,
Shaski, Draughts,
Dama or Turkish Draughts, Armenian Draughts and Brazilian or Spanish Draughts and compare them with four modern games:
Killer Draughts differs in only one respect from the international game: it puts a restriction on the king that allows a lone king to be captured with two kings only! Adapting the rule would affect the marging of draws to no small degree. HexDame also differs in only one respect from the international game: it is a literal translation of Draughts to the hexgrid. Draughts players may shut their eyes for it, but the interest in abstract games is firmly on the decline and Draughts will vanish - not so much as an educational game but as an international sport - within one or two decades. Nothing will replace it either, despite the fact that there are far better games now. We'll compare the games' basics because these have the deepest impact their behaviour.
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