He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth. --Shakespeare / The Merry Wives of Windsor

Capers!

Play checkers against the computer and study draughts games from books.

I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of Chess. --Poe / The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Download Debian package for easy installation on Ubuntu and other Debian based Linux distributions; dependencies should be cleared automatically.

Probably, its more an office application than a game: a game would let the user enter a small café, and with the aid of a waiter, sit down at some table, join a game, have a chat, get up, and settle on another table, to play another opponent.

Still, capers tries its best, to give you a pleasant time with Martin Fierz' strong checkers engines that search a given board for the 'best' move. Most commands are in the buttons, yet there are some more and powerful ones hidden in the context-menu (right-mouse-click).

Capers is free software: you are invited to share and tinker; if in doubt, see accompanying file COPYING for details on distribution and derivation.

Changes

golden master (Dec 2014)

Packaged for debian/ubuntu/&c 64bit Download capers_1.0_amd64.deb. Source @ github.

fifth beta (Dec 2014)

Engines now pre-compiled for 64bit machines. (Dropped support for endgame-database in cake though.) Download capers-beta5.tar.gz.

fourth beta (Apr 2005)

Package now includes cake engine! (Please beware that the cake engine only runs on 32bit hardware.) Download capers-beta4.tar.gz.

third beta (Jan 2005)

Features: play games, save game to pdn, browse games played in this session or read from file, copy/paste games, board editor; archive unpacks as a rox appdir.
Deficiencies: pdn files with more than a couple hundred games are slow to load.
Download capers-beta3.tar.gz.

System requirements

Capers depends on python and gtk, and pygtk, which glues them together, version 2.4 of pygtk at least; also, it needs gnome canvas to display the board, and python-ctypes, to talk to the engines.

It should work in most linux distributions, provided the dependencies are met and sufficiently recent. It might also work in Windows, if you manage to collect all the above packages.

Recommended

You may want to visit Martin Fierz' checkers page http://www.fierz.ch/checkers.htm.

Screenshots

Disclaimer

• A game, for which there is no engine, cannot be played, as capers does not know how to take pieces and crown kings - not even for the English rules (that's different from Martin Fierz' CheckerBoard).
• Unlike earlier versions of capers, this one is made with a toolkit. the python bindings make working with gtk quite bearable. documentation is, except in parts, very clear and accurate.
• This follows the object oriented design. still, there are just procedures. they are organised in classes, to not have to come up with clever names for functions and globals, and to more easily build on the fine work others have done.
• No care has been taken to make the objects reusable outside of this context. they all depend one on the other; though most of the work gets done in the "game" class.

This page is http://arton.cunst.net/capers/index.html.

Send suggestions, bug reports and bug fixes to pch(a)myzel.net