Lasca

Lasca is a two-player draughts variant invented by Emanuel Lasker, the second World Chess Champion, who combined the rules of English draughts with the Russian game bashni after learning of it during nineteenth century chess tournaments in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. It is played on a board of sixty one squares with pieces called officers and soldiers, and unlike standard checkers, a captured piece is not removed from the board but is instead placed underneath the piece that captured it, forming a growing column of pieces that moves and captures as a single unit controlled by whichever color sits on top. This column mechanic means material can change hands repeatedly during a single game, since capturing a column that has an enemy piece buried inside it can flip control of pieces that were captured many turns earlier. Lasker's game was commercially produced starting in 1911, with factory-made sets sold across Europe and the United States under his design.