CheckerBoard base package and add-ons by Martin Fierz
CheckerBoard 1.7 (2054 KB) with
setup program.
Package with CheckerBoard 1.7, Cake 1.81, a 93'000 move opening book for Cake,
the 4-piece endgame database for Cake, Easy Checkers, Simple Checkers (+ source code), Dama (+ source code), Kingscourt Cake, Suicidal Cake,
a game database with hundreds of games by Marion Tinsley, and a checkers tutorial for beginners by
grandmaster Richard Pask.
- CheckerBoard 1.7 64-bit (2154 KB) with
setup program. The same as the above, but for 64-bit Windows.
- The huge opening book for Cake (13'375KB).
This opening book is the result of over 4 years of computation on high-end machines, and contains
1'869'199 opening moves.
Installation instructions and more information
- The opening book for Suicidal Cake (336KB).
An opening book for Suicidal Cake, generated with the 8-piece suicide checkers endgame database. It contains 35'649 positions.
The installation is the same as for the huge opening book for Cake.
- Cake endgame databases for use with Cake. You must extract the zip-files into the 'db'
subdirectory of your CheckerBoard directory. Cake will display which databases it is using
when you click 'Engine - About'. Cake will play even stronger with these additional
endgame databases installed.
Warning: when you install one of these databases, you must also install all smaller databases, i.e. if you install the 7-piece database you MUST install the 5- and 6-piece endgame database too, or Cake will crash. Note that you can also generate the 5- and 6-piece databases from within CheckerBoard. If you did this, you don't have to download them.
The Cake endgame database also works with KingsRow, and you should prefer it over the Chinook database - the Cake database is about 20% smaller, therefore it can be accessed more efficiently.
There are two alternative ways of getting the Cake 8-piece endgame database: You can also download it on emule here, or you can get it on CD against a nominal fee: Bob Newell, author of the wonderful checker webzine Checker Maven is kindly offering my 8-piece database for purchase on CD's. It costs 10$ including shipping in the US, you can read the details here. Thanks for distributing, Bob!- The 5- and 6-piece endgame database (21.9 MB)
- The 7-piece endgame database (170 MB)
- 8-piece database part I: 4m-4m, 1k3m-4m, 2k2m-4m, 3k1m-3k1m (313 MB)
- 8-piece database part II: 2k2m-1k3m (499MB)
- 8-piece database part III: 2k2m-2k2m and 3k1m-4m > (338MB)
- 8-piece database part IV: 1k3m-1k3m(308MB)
- 8-piece database part V: 1k3m-2k2m (456MB)
- 8-piece database part VI: 1m+3k-1m+3k, 4m-4m, 4m-3m+1k, 4m-2m+2k, 4m-1m+3k, 4m-4k (393MB)
- Cake Manchester 1.09d (148KB), the predecessor of Cake
1.8. I'm leaving it here for 'historical reasons'.
This is a .dll file which you can save in your CheckerBoard folder. Use your right mouse button to click on the link, choose
the menu option "save target as..." and navigate to your CheckerBoard folder, then choose
the subdirectory "engines" to save the
file there. To use it in CheckerBoard, you will have to change your primary engine to cakeM109.dll in the engines dialog. On Windows
Vista and Seven, you will have to run CheckerBoard with administrative rights to use this engine, because it writes its logfile in the
CheckerBoard folder which is forbidden on newer Windows versions.
- Cake Sans Souci 1.04 (140KB), the predecessor of Cake
Manchester. It is not as good as Cake Manchester, but I'm leaving it here for 'historical reasons'.
This is a .dll file which you can save in your CheckerBoard folder. Use your right mouse button to click on the link, choose
the menu option "save target as..." and navigate to your CheckerBoard folder, then choose
the subdirectory "engines" to save the
file there. To use it in CheckerBoard, you will have to change your primary engine to cakeM109.dll in the engines dialog. On Windows
Vista and Seven, you will have to run CheckerBoard with administrative rights to use this engine, because it writes its logfile in the
CheckerBoard folder which is forbidden on newer Windows versions.
- Kingscourt opening book (~2MB).
Kingscourt is a checkers variant where the first player to crown a king wins. Unlike regular checkers this means that there is always a
winner! I solved the game of Kingscourt on January 17 2006;
white wins in approximately 62 half-moves. This opening book contains a partial solution - it goes as
deep as necessary so that the Kingscourt engine will be able to find the final win within a couple of
seconds on a fast computer. To install, extract this opening book into your engines subdirectory of the CheckerBoard folder.
3rd party add-ons
- Open Checkers Archive 2.0 (2.36MB). OCA
is a PDN file with over 20'000 games compiled by Hans l'Hoest. Since his website is currently down,
I am offering it for download here for the moment. Hans did a lot of work on this archive, but many
other people contributed too, in particular Jim Loy who contributed about half of the games of the archive.
- Saltare (236 KB) as a ZIP-archive. This Italian checkers engine by Paul
Shields comes from Australia, and plays about as well as my own Dama engine. To install, unzip the archive
into your engines directory and choose "saltare.dll" in the engine dialog.
- KestoG 1.1 (58 KB) as ZIP-archive. KestoG was written
by Kestutis Gasaitis from Lithuania and plays Russian checkers. To install, unzip the
archive into your engines directory and choose "kestog.dll" in the engine dialog.
- You can download KingsRow and an opening book for KingsRow on
Ed Gilbert's webpage. KingsRow is a very strong engine for CheckerBoard.
Source Code
I decided to publish the source code to CheckerBoard, and also the source code for my endgame database. All of these are Visual C projects, which you can open with the free express version of Microsoft Visual C. You may use this source code in any way you like. Please note: The quality of my code ranges from sensible at best to crappy at worst. I'm sorry about this, I guess I should have studied computer science instead of physics ;-) I wanted to clean up this code before publishing it, but then I realized that I would never release it if I waited until it was cleaned up - my motivation for cleaning up is way too low! So without further apologies, here goes:- CheckerBoard 1.7 source code
(149 KB) as zipfile.
- Endgame database generator source code
(30 KB) as zipfile.
- Endgame database compressor source code
(19 KB) as zipfile.
- Endgame database access source code
(13 KB) as zipfile.
-- December 21, 2009