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Checkers Around the World Invented Checkers Variants
Caribbean Checkers Game
Outwit from 1978
  
This Caribbean checkers game variant was also called ‘Voodoo’, ‘L’Africa’,
and ‘Tomaten
gegen Zwiebeln’ checkers, as its popularity
spread abroad to Germany and France. The Outwit from 1978 checkers game
was published by Parker Brothers, Miro Company,
Two Game Girls or Spielbox.
Outwit (Caribbean checkers game) consisted of a playing board with ninety
squares, including two corners of nine squares
each. Caribbean checker game players used eighteen contrasting light
and dark chips or wooden ‘checkers’.
Each side had nine pieces, where eight of these ‘checkers’ were
undifferentiated, and the last piece, called
the “power
piece” or "power
chip" was painted with a yellow
dot.
The object of this Caribbean checkers game was to be the first
to slide all nine chips into a player’s
own corner or goal square of the board.
The chips were set in the middle of the checkers game
board at the start of the play. The pieces
began on the dots that ran diagonally down
the 9 x 10 board, with the power pieces in
the center on the larger dots. The light and
dark squares in the corners were the goal squares
for each side. No piece could enter the opponent’s
goal area.
One player began with the first move and then
each opponent took alternate turns by moving
a regular chip in a horizontal or vertical
direction only. A power chip could also be
moved diagonally and could stop whenever it
wanted, but must still adhere to the same rules
that applied to the single chip.
Once the opponent had moved the chip inside
his/her own corner, the chip could not be moved
back into the playing area. A regular chip
must be moved horizontally or vertically as
far as it could within the corner, whereas
a power chip could move any number of squares,
within the corner.
The Caribbean checkers power pieces moved as chess queens or
any number of squares orthogonally or diagonally
but without jumping over a game piece. The ordinary
pieces moved as runaway chess rooks; that is,
they could move in any orthogonal direction,
but must move to the farthest legal square
in that direction: that is, the last square
before the edge of the board or before the
edge of the opponent’s goal area or before
a piece. Thus, the ability of the power piece
to stop short in the middle of the board made
it useful as a barrier for a player’s
own pieces. It would have been an unfortunate
strategy to move it into the goal area before
the endgame.
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