You need a board, twenty-four men, somebody to play, and one evening. Heath says I should say "or a computer to play," and I'll allow it, but a computer never bought anybody a cup of coffee after a good game.

Read this through once. Then set up a board and read it again with the men in front of you, moving them as you go. By bedtime you'll know the game. Knowing it and playing it well are two different things, and the second one takes longer, but everybody starts here.

Lay the board between you so that each of you has a dark square in the corner on your left hand. If you've got a light square there, turn the board a quarter turn. You only ever play on the dark squares.

Each side gets twelve men. Put them on the dark squares of the three rows nearest you. That leaves two empty rows in the middle. In the books the two sides are always called Black and White, no matter what color your set is, and Black moves first.

A man moves one square forward on the slant, to an empty dark square. Forward means toward the other fellow's side. Men never move backward and never move straight ahead or sideways. You take turns, one move each.

That's it for moving. If that's all there was to it, it would be a short evening.

If one of the other fellow's men is right next to yours on the slant, in front of you, and the square just past it is empty, you can jump over him onto that empty square and take his man off the board.

If, after you land, there's another man you can jump the same way, you keep going in the same turn. You can change direction from one jump to the next, as long as each jump is forward. Three or four men in one turn is not unusual. Six or seven is something you tell your grandchildren about.

Now the most important rule in the game: if you can jump, you must. You don't get to decide you'd rather not. If there are two different jumps you could make, you can pick either one, but once you start a jump you have to take every man along the way you chose. You can't stop halfway because you don't like where you're landing.

When I was a young man on the square we played what they called the huff: if a fellow missed a jump he should have taken, you could take his man off the board for it, and say "huff" when you did. The rules did away with that a long time ago. Now you just have to take the jump. Don't play the huff with anybody under seventy. They won't know what you're talking about.

The forced jump is what makes checkers checkers. It means you can make the other fellow do things. You can give him one man and make him take it, so that he lands right where you want him, and then you take two of his. That's called a shot, and there's one on the front page and another one at the bottom of this page.

When one of your men reaches the far row, the other fellow's back row, he's crowned a king. Your opponent puts one of your captured men on top of him, so he's two men tall. (He's supposed to do it for you. If he's slow about it, remind him.)

If a man gets to the back row in the middle of a jump, his turn ends right there, even if it looks like he could keep jumping. He has to wait for your next turn to start acting like a king.

A king moves the same way a man does, one square on the slant, but he can go backward as well as forward. He jumps backward and forward too. That makes a king worth a good deal more than a man. Some countries play a game where a king can slide clear across the board in one move. Not here. Ours go one square at a time.

You win when the other fellow has no men left, or when it's his turn and none of his men can move. Being blocked counts the same as being cleaned off the board.

A good many games between good players end in a draw, where neither one can make any headway and both agree to call it even. Don't be ashamed of a draw. Some of the best games I ever played were draws.

Every dark square has a number from 1 to 32, starting in Black's corner. There's a picture of the numbers on the front page. Write it on a card and keep it by your board until you know it by heart. You will know it by heart sooner than you think.

• A move is the square it started on, a dash, and the square it went to: 11-15.
• A jump uses an x instead of a dash: 25x18. If it keeps going, you keep writing: 25x18x11.

Here's how a game might start. Set it up and play it through:

And so on. Black has seven moves he can make to start a game: 9-13, 9-14, 10-14, 10-15, 11-15, 11-16 and 12-16. White has seven answers to each of them. It goes on from there for a long time.

At the big tournaments they don't let the players pick the first moves. The opening is drawn by lot from a list, and then both players have to play it out from there, whether they like it or not. At the state tournament the first time, I drew one I'd never played in my life. I lost it, too. But I learned it on the bus ride home.

Set this up on your board.

Black: men on 10, 18 and 20.
White: men on 19, 24 and 32.
White to move and win.

White has four moves: 19-15, 19-16, 32-27 and 32-28. One of them finishes the game in two turns. Look for a man you can give away, and ask where the other fellow will have to land when he takes it.

Don't scroll down until you've tried. Clint Hastings would have waited all afternoon.

The answer: 19-16! That steps the man on 19 out of the way and leaves the one on 24 sitting there for the taking. Black has to jump, and the only jump he has is 20x27. Now White's man on 32 jumps 32x23x14x7: over 27 to 23, over 18 to 14, and over 10 to 7. That's all three of Black's men, and the game is over.

See how it's the same idea as the one on the front page? Make him jump, so that his man lands where yours can get at it, with his other men lined up behind it. Once you see a few of these you'll start seeing them in your own games, and then you'll start seeing them coming at you, which is even more useful.

That's your evening. Now go find somebody to play.