Every board game community develops its own language. This glossary collects the terms you'll meet in our rules, lessons, strategy guide, and in game chat on dammee.com.

The board and pieces

Damii: The Ghanaian name for the game itself — draughts as played in Ghana. (Dammee is this platform; Damii is the game.)
Man: An ordinary, unpromoted piece. Each player starts with 20 men on the first four rows.
King: A promoted piece, crowned when a man reaches the far row. In Damii, kings are flying kings.
Flying king: A king that moves any number of empty squares along a diagonal, and captures from a distance by landing on any empty square beyond the captured piece.
Crownhead (king row): The farthest row from a player — reaching it promotes a man to king.
Mirrored orientation: The defining Damii board setup: the board is oriented so the bottom-right playable square is dark, and both players set up identically, producing mirror-image camps. International draughts uses a different (rotational) convention.
Playable squares: The 50 dark squares. All movement and capture happen on the dark diagonals.

Moves and captures

Capture / jump: Taking an enemy piece by leaping over it to an empty square beyond. In Damii all captures are compulsory.
Compulsory capture: The rule that if a capture is available, you must make a capture — you may not play a quiet move instead.
Capture sequence (chain): A series of jumps made by one piece in a single turn, continuing as long as further captures are available from each landing square.
Choice of capture: The Ghanaian convention used on dammee.com: when several capture sequences exist, the player chooses which to play. (International draughts instead forces the sequence that captures the most pieces.)
Backward capture: Men may capture backwards as well as forwards in Damii, even though they only move forwards.
Promotion: A man that ends its move on the crownhead becomes a king.
Quiet move: A non-capturing move.

Tactics

Shot: A forcing combination, typically a sacrifice that exploits compulsory capture: you give one piece so the forced recapture lets you win more back.
Two-for-one (fork): The most common shot — sacrifice one man to win two.
Trap: A move that invites an apparently good reply which loses by force. Because captures are compulsory, Damii traps are unusually binding.
Exchange (trade): A sequence where both sides capture equally. Trading is generally good for the side ahead in material.
Sacrifice: Deliberately giving up material for positional or tactical gain — a tempo, a promotion path, or a bigger counter-capture.
Pin / blockade: Restraining enemy pieces so they cannot advance without being captured. A full blockade can win by leaving the opponent without a legal move.

Position and endgame

Tempo: A unit of initiative — effectively, a spare useful move. "Losing a tempo" means wasting a turn; in blocked positions the side with more spare moves wins.
Zugzwang: A position where every legal move damages your own game — but you must move. Decisive in Damii endgames.
Opposition: A face-off between men where whoever must advance first loses the confrontation.
Hole: A square in your own camp your pieces can no longer defend — a landing pad for enemy jumps.
Runner: A man with a clear path to promotion.

Platform terms

Rated / casual: Rated games affect your skill rating; casual games don't. Guests can play casual games without an account.
Rating: A number estimating your playing strength, updated after every rated game based on results and opponent strength.
Time control: The clock settings for a game — e.g. blitz (fast) or rapid (slower). Run out of time and you lose.
Puzzle rush: A timed run of puzzles of increasing difficulty — solve as many as you can.
Replay: A move-by-move record of a finished game, open from your history.

Missing a term you've heard at the board? Tell us and we'll add it.