Free board games
Every board game
2 games
Learn the rules
Two games here, and both of them are the kind you would normally need someone else for. The opponent is a computer you can set to a level that suits you, so there is no matchmaking, no waiting for a move and no account.
The rules are the whole point of a board game, so these are implemented completely rather than approximately. Chess includes castling with its through-check restrictions, en passant, promotion, the fifty-move rule and insufficient-material draws — the rules a quick implementation leaves out first. Checkers follows English draughts, where a capture is compulsory and a king moves one square, which is the version most people learned and the one most browser versions get wrong.
Playing against the computer
Chess offers five levels. The lowest is genuinely beatable if you are learning; the highest looks far enough ahead to punish a loose move. Legal moves appear as dots the moment you pick a piece up, which makes it usable if you know the game but not every rule.
Checkers offers three levels and a two-player mode, so you can hand the phone across the table instead. Captures are compulsory, which is the rule that makes a bad-looking move forced and a forcing sequence possible.
Undo is available in both. Playing a line, seeing why it fails and taking it back is a faster way to improve than losing the same game repeatedly.
