Chinese Checkers
For your own edification, Grant really is
buried in Grant’s tomb. But Chinese Checkers aren’t really Chinese,
that’s just a name that sounded a lot catchier to game manufacturers in
the late 1920’s. And you can’t really blame them either, because
originally this little number was called “Halma,” a word that sounds
more like a medical condition than a game.
Anyway. Halma was a European leisure time diversion that was
developed in the late nineteenth century, some say by Victorian
Englishmen and some say by the famous German game company Ravensburger.
Whoever was responsible, Halma made its way across the Atlantic and was
played a bit on U.S. shores in the late 1800’s, but in 1928, early game
guru J. Pressman introduced it in earnest. Re-christened Chinese
Checkers, the game became a veritable craze in the 30’s. As the years
passed, other companies made the game as well, including L.G. Ballard,
who made a version of the game called “Star Checkers,” and Milton
Bradley, who produced it the early 40’s.
Chinese Checkers could be played by two, three, four or six people.
Each player started the game with a set of colored marbles (usually
ten) that were gathered at one of the star’s points. The goal was to
move all your pieces across the board and to the star point opposite
you. A player could move his marble to an adjacent square, or hop his
marble over other pieces, including those of his own color. This
“jumping” movement was what tied the game to regular checkers, except
unlike checkers, a player didn’t pick up the opponent’s pieces after
jumping over them. In Chinese Checkers, all the marbles stayed on the
board—and your enemies’ pieces were there not to collect, but to leap
frog over. The beginning of each game held limited movement
possibilities, but later, when the marbles reached the middle of the
star, the jump lengths increased. Double jumps, triples, and on up…if
you were the type who could see the big marble picture. The player to
get all of his marbles across the board first was declared the winner.
Having fully entered "classic game" status, Chinese Checkers is
played widely today. You can’t bark out “King Me!” like you can in
traditional checkers, but that clack-clack-clack sound of your marbles
jumping from spot to spot on that wood playing board is still pretty
nice.
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