Alquerque

Alquerque is an ancient board game of jump capture, played on a cross hatched board of twenty five points, in which pieces move and capture much as men do in draughts. Boards of the alquerque pattern are cut into the sandstone roof of the temple of Kurna in Egypt, built around 1400 BC, though graffiti of this kind cannot be reliably dated to the building itself, so that attribution is disputed; the earliest securely dated reference is the tenth century Arabic compilation Kitab al-Aghani, and the game is recorded under its Spanish name in the Alfonso X manuscript of 1251 to 1282. It is the direct ancestor of draughts, its pieces and jump-capture rule transplanted onto a chequered chessboard in twelfth century France.