Play Chinese Checkers Against AI
Play Chinese Checkers for free against four levels of AI, from beginner to expert, or watch two computer players battle each other. Everything runs in your browser — there is no download, no sign-up, and no account.
The four opponents are genuinely different programs, not one engine with a handicap dial:
- Easy — a fast greedy bot. It pushes whichever marble gains the most ground toward the far triangle and ignores almost everything else. A good first game.
- Medium — a two-ply minimax search with alpha-beta pruning over the same positional scoring. It looks one reply ahead, so it stops handing you free jumps.
- Hard — the trained neural network, playing the single move its policy head likes best. It has no search at all, but its instincts come from hundreds of thousands of self-play games.
- Advanced — the same network wrapped in a PUCT Monte Carlo Tree Search, guided by the policy head and scored by the value head. This is the strongest opponent on the site and it is not easy to beat.
In Bot Battle mode you pick any two of those levels, choose who moves first, and watch the game play out on the 3D board. It is a quick way to see how much a search layer is actually worth against raw pattern recognition.
How to Play Chinese Checkers
Chinese Checkers is played on a six-pointed star board. You start with ten marbles filling one point of the star, and you win by moving all ten into the point directly opposite. Players alternate turns and make exactly one move per turn. No marble is ever captured or removed — the whole game is a race.
Single Moves
On your turn you may slide one marble into any adjacent empty hole. The board is a hexagonal grid, so every interior hole has six neighbours: two along the row and four on the diagonals. A single step ends your turn immediately, which makes it the move you take when nothing better exists.
Multiple Jumps
Instead of stepping, you may jump a marble over a single adjacent marble into the empty hole directly beyond it, in a straight line. The jumped marble can be yours or your opponent's, and it stays exactly where it is. The real power comes from chaining: after landing, if another jump is available from the new hole you may take it, and keep going for as long as jumps exist. A well-built chain can carry one marble most of the way across the board in a single turn, and learning to see these chains is most of what separates a strong player from a beginner.
Winning
The first player to occupy all ten holes of the opposite triangle wins. A common way to lose a won game is to fill the near edge of the target triangle first and then find you cannot reach the back corners, so fill the deepest holes early.
Chinese Checkers Strategy Tips
Build Jumping Ladders
A "ladder" is a line of marbles spaced two holes apart so that a trailing marble can hop along the whole chain in one turn. Building one costs a few slow moves up front and then pays them back several times over. Because jumps work over any marble, your opponent's advancing pieces are free rungs — moving toward their traffic is often faster than moving around it.
Keep Your Pieces Together
Scattered marbles cannot jump each other, and a straggler left behind in your home triangle can cost a dozen moves at the end of the game. Advance as a loose group, and move your rearmost marble more often than feels natural. The last marble home decides when you finish, not the first.
Control the Centre
The middle of the board is the only place every route crosses, and it has the most jump geometry available. Occupying the central corridor gives you options and quietly denies your opponent theirs. It is also worth avoiding the two side points of the star that belong to nobody in a two-player game — marbles that wander into them take a long detour to get back on course.
About the Chinese Checkers AI
The Hard and Advanced opponents are an AlphaZero-style policy-value network trained entirely by self-play. It began knowing nothing but the rules, played itself repeatedly with Monte Carlo Tree Search, and trained on the results, with each new generation of the network playing the next round of games. There is no book of human openings anywhere in it.
The trained network was exported to ONNX and ships as a static asset, so it runs in your browser with onnxruntime-web rather than on a server. Nothing about your game is sent anywhere — the rules, the legal move generation, the win detection and every AI move are computed on your own machine. That is also why the site works with no backend at all.
Advanced spends a couple of seconds per move running its search, which is the honest cost of the strength. Hard uses a single forward pass and answers almost instantly if you would rather keep the game moving.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Chinese Checkers game free?
Yes, completely. There is no download, no account, no payment, and no ads.
Can I play Chinese Checkers online with no download?
Yes. The whole game runs in the browser on desktop and mobile. The first Hard or Advanced game downloads the neural network once, then it is cached.
How many marbles does each player have?
Ten, filling one point of the six-pointed star. You win by moving all ten into the point opposite.
Can you jump over your own marbles in Chinese Checkers?
Yes. A jump works over any single adjacent marble, yours or your opponent's, into the empty hole immediately beyond it. Chaining several such jumps in one turn is legal and is the fastest way to move.
Does the AI cheat?
No. Every level is restricted to the same legal moves you are, sees the same board, and gets no extra information. The Advanced bot is simply searching.
Can I watch two AIs play each other?
Yes — that is Bot Battle mode. Choose the two difficulty levels, pick who opens, and watch the whole game.
Is Chinese Checkers actually Chinese?
No. The game was invented in Germany in 1892 as Stern-Halma, a star-shaped variant of the older English game Halma. The name "Chinese Checkers" was an American marketing invention from the 1920s and has nothing to do with its origin.