Checkers

Checkers is the sibling to Reversi in Frank Force's LittleJS Arcade collection, built on the same engine and sharing the same menu, options and pause-screen scaffolding. Where Reversi's entire interaction is a single tap on a highlighted cell, Checkers needs one extra step — select a piece, then choose where it goes — and that extra step was the main thing worth testing carefully here.

Select, then move: still a clean touch interaction

Tapping a piece with a legal move highlights it in green and marks every square it can legally reach with a small dot; tapping one of those dots completes the move. That was confirmed directly on a simulated 390x844 touch viewport: selecting a red piece produced exactly one green destination dot, tapping it moved the piece there, and the previous and new squares were both highlighted afterward to show the completed move at a glance. The identical sequence was then repeated with a desktop mouse click and produced the same result, and pressing the U key afterward correctly undid the move and reverted the board to its exact starting position — a real, working keyboard shortcut, not just a label in the footer. Two taps (or clicks) instead of one is a small amount of extra friction compared to Reversi, but it's the correct extra step for a game where the piece you're moving isn't always obvious from the destination alone, and nothing about it was fiddly or imprecise in testing.

The AI thinks. For a while.

Where this build diverges from its sibling is speed. Reversi's AI responds in a second or two; Checkers' "Hard" AI took considerably longer in testing — a live "AI Thinking... NN%" counter was still climbing 15-20 seconds after a move was made, and in one run it appeared to sit at the same percentage across two separate checks several seconds apart before a later, longer-patience test confirmed it does eventually complete every time. That's presumably the cost of a deeper minimax search on "Hard" than Reversi's opponent runs, but it's a real UX cost too: a first-time player without the patience to wait out an unfamiliar progress readout could reasonably conclude the game had hung. It never did, in any test run here, but the wait is long enough to be worth calling out plainly.

Verdict

This is a competent, correctly-implemented Checkers with the same touch-first foundation that made Reversi worth shipping to this shelf: legal moves are always shown, never assumed, and the two-step select-then-move interaction works cleanly across touch, mouse and keyboard alike. The AI's slow "Hard" difficulty is the one real wrinkle, and it's worth a mention in the game's own listing rather than a reason to keep this off the shelf — the mechanic underneath it, which is what this section actually grades, holds up.