Chinese Checkers
It's from 1928, before you were born.
- Maker
- Various (orig. Ravensburger)
- Type
- Board game (abstract)
- Debuted
- 1928
- Note
- Neither Chinese nor checkers
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About
As of 2026, it's 98 years old.
Chinese Checkers is a master class in misleading names: it isn't from China and it isn't checkers. It's a German invention, derived from the American game Halma, that got the exotic-sounding 'Chinese' branding in 1928 by a U.S. manufacturer chasing a marketing fad. The truth is far less romantic than the star-shaped board suggests.
The actual game — hopping your colored marbles across that six-pointed star to the opposite point — is elegant, easy to learn, and genuinely strategic, which is why it's outlived the marketing gimmick that named it. Those little glass or plastic marbles in the dimpled board are pure tactile nostalgia.
Star-shaped, marble-hopping, and entirely mislabeled, Chinese Checkers is the abstract classic whose name is the least accurate thing about it.
