This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Every history of draughts has to begin by admitting how little of it can be dated with confidence. Boards scratched into the sandstone roof of the temple of Kurna in Egypt, in the pattern still used for the ancestral game alquerque, are commonly said to date to around 1400 BC, the temple's own construction date. But graffiti cannot be dated by the building it sits on: quarrymen, Coptic monks and ordinary visitors used those roof slabs for three thousand years afterward, and several of the Kurna boards sit beside carved Coptic crosses, evidence that at least some of the incisions are centuries later than the temple itself. The earliest evidence historians can actually stand behind is textual, not archaeological: the tenth century Arabic compilation Kitab al-Aghani, whose author died in 976 AD, already describes the game under the name qirkat, and the game appears again, transliterated into Spanish as alquerque, in a manuscript commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castile between 1251 and 1283. Somewhere between a genuinely ancient Egyptian pastime and a securely attested tenth century Arabic one, alquerque was already a mature, named game; which end of that range is right is a live scholarly disagreement, not a rounding error.
Draughts itself, the game played on a chequered board rather than alquerque's plain grid of twenty five points, is a documented invention, not a gradual drift. Sometime in the twelfth century, in southern France, someone took alquerque's pieces and its rule of capturing by jumping and set them down on a chessboard instead, calling the result Fierges and later Jeu Force. The choice of board changed the game more than it might seem to: chess's chequered squares confined movement to the diagonals, and pieces that reached the farthest row were now crowned, borrowing both the name and the move of the fers, the medieval chess piece that would later become the queen. The rule that makes draughts recognizably itself today, that a capture is compulsory whenever one is available rather than merely permitted, was not part of this twelfth century game at all; it was folded in during the sixteenth century, under the French name la forcee, closing the last real gap between the medieval game and the one played under international rules now.
The modern game's two names describe the same rules on the same board: draughts in British English, checkers in North America, a divergence in vocabulary rather than in substance. Its governing body, the World Draughts Federation, was founded in Paris in 1947 by four national federations, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, and today coordinates competitive play across more than seventy member federations, the direct institutional descendant of a game whose own origin its own historians still cannot fully agree on.