Free online board games: chess, checkers, backgammon and more

Chess, checkers and xiangqi

Chess is played by the full rules: castling, en passant, promotion to any piece, and checkmate. Draws are called for you, from stalemate and threefold repetition to the fifty-move rule and bare kings, and there is no clock to rush you. Tap a piece and the squares it can reach light up, so it is friendly to someone still learning how the knight moves.

Checkers follows the Russian rules: twelve men each on the dark squares, captures are compulsory, men jump backwards as well as forwards, and a crowned king flies along a whole diagonal. Xiangqi, Chinese chess, has the 9 by 10 board with the river and the two palaces, cannons that capture over a screen and the flying general; its pieces show their Chinese characters, or small symbols if you would rather.

Gomoku, reversi and Four in a Row

These three are quick to learn and hard to put down. Gomoku is five in a row on a 15 by 15 board, by the free-style rules, where a line of six counts too. Reversi (the game many know as Othello) is played on 8 by 8: trap a line of the other side's discs and they turn to your colour, and the one with more discs at the end wins. Four in a Row drops discs into seven columns, and four across, down or diagonally wins.

Backgammon, Ludo and Durak

Backgammon is the standard game without the doubling cube, with the dice rolled by the server so nobody can load them; the same lobby has long nardy, where every checker starts on one point and nothing is hit. Ludo is a quick version for two to four players with two tokens each, so a table of four is over in about ten minutes. Durak is the Russian card game for two to four, podkidnoy or perevodnoy, with a 36-card deck and trumps, and the aim of not being the last one left holding cards.

Against the computer, a friend, or on one phone

Against the computer, a game starts at once. The computer plays each game seriously, looking several moves ahead in the strategy games, so it beats most casual players, but a careful plan or a double threat gets past it, and nothing is ranked, so losing costs nothing. With a friend, open a table and send the link in any chat: they join from Telegram or a browser, the server keeps the board and checks every move, and each turn can wait up to a day, so a game can run alongside your day. Sitting together? Pick the one-phone mode and hand the device across the table; in Durak a cover screen hides each hand between turns.