Setup
The board is a six-pointed star. Each player takes ten marbles of one colour and fills the point nearest them. With two players use opposite points; with three, use alternating ones; with four, two opposing pairs; six players fill every point.
CLASSIC GAMES
Play Chinese checkers online with friends
Also known as Sternhalma
The best of the classics for a bigger group: two, three, four or six can play, the rules take thirty seconds to explain, and nobody is ever eliminated.
- Players
- 2-6 players
- Play time
- 20-40 minutes
- Learning curve
- Explain it in thirty seconds
- What you need
- A browser and a free account
How to play Chinese Checkers
Moving
On your turn you either step one marble into an adjacent empty hole, or hop. A hop jumps a single adjacent marble — yours or anyone's — landing in the empty hole directly beyond it, and if another hop is available from there you may chain it as far as it goes, in any directions. A chain of hops is one turn.
Nothing is ever captured. The whole game is building and borrowing ladders of marbles to travel further than a single step.
Winning
The first player to fill the opposite point of the star with all ten of their marbles wins. Most groups keep playing for second and third place rather than stopping there. One common house rule worth agreeing up front: a marble that has arrived home may not leave again, which stops a finished player blocking the board.
What DiceyTable gives you for Chinese Checkers
DiceyTable gives you the physical game — the board, the pieces and real 3D physics — not a rules engine. Nobody's move is validated and no illegal move is blocked, so house rules and variants cost you nothing. It runs in the browser with nothing to install, it is free, and you share a link to bring people in.
- MarblesA modelled marble, recolourable per player from the palette.
- BowlsSomewhere to keep each colour before the game starts.
Setup is manual: you place the board and pieces from the in-table object library, the same way you would unpack a box. Every player needs a free account — there is nothing to download on any device.
What it does not do
- The Chinese checkers board preset spawns as a plain board today — the star and its holes are not printed on it yet.
- There are no snap-to-hole positions on it, so marbles rest where you put them.
- You and your friends enforce the rules between you, exactly as you would sitting at a real table.
Open a table and set up Chinese Checkers
Start a table, invite your group with a link, and place the pieces from the object library. Free, in the browser, with nothing to install.