Encyclopedia

Checkerboard

Board with an alternating square pattern on which games are played

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors

1 min read
Source updated March 29, 2026

Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

A checkerboard (American English) or chequerboard (British English) is a game board of checkered pattern on which checkers (also known as English draughts) is played. Most commonly, it consists of 64 squares (8×8) of alternating dark and light color, typically green and buff (official tournaments), black and red (consumer commercial), or black and white (printed diagrams). An 8×8 checkerboard is used to play many other games, including chess, whereby it is known as a chessboard. Other rectangular square-tiled boards are also often called checkerboards. In The Netherlands, however, a dambord (checker board) has 10 rows and 10 columns for 100 squares in total (see article International draughts).

01Games and puzzles using checkerboards

Martin Gardner featured puzzles based on checkerboards in his November 1962 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. A square checkerboard with an alternating pattern is used for games including:

Amazons
Chapayev
Chess and some of its variants (see chessboard)
Czech draughts
Checkers, also known as draughts
Fox games
Frisian draughts
Gounki
International draughts
Italian draughts
Lines of Action
Pool checkers
Russian checkers

The following games require an 8×8 board and are sometimes played on a chessboard.

02Mathematical description

Given a grid with $m$ rows and $n$ columns, a function $f(m,n)$ ,

$\displaystyle {f(m,n)}={\begin{cases}{\text{black}}&{\text{if}}\ m\equiv n{\pmod {2}}\,,\\{\text{white}}&{\text{if}}\ m\not \equiv n{\pmod {2}}\\\end{cases}}$

or, alternatively,

$\displaystyle {f(m,n)}={\begin{cases}{\text{black}}&{\text{if}}\ m+n{\text{ is even}},\\{\text{white}}&{\text{if}}\ m+n{\text{ is odd}}\\\end{cases}}$

The element $(m,n)=(0,0)$ is black and represents the lower left corner of the board.

03Encoding

In Unicode, checkerboard characters are encoded at various code points:

U+2427 ␧ SYMBOL FOR DELETE SQUARE CHECKER BOARD FORM
U+2428 ␨ SYMBOL FOR DELETE RECTANGULAR CHECKER BOARD FORM
U+1F67E 🙾 CHECKER BOARD
U+1F67F 🙿 REVERSE CHECKER BOARD
U+1FB95 🮕 CHECKER BOARD FILL
U+1FB96 🮖 INVERSE CHECKER BOARD FILL

Watch videos about CheckerboardExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Checkerboard”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Images, from Wikimedia Commons: