Checkers is among the oldest games still played in something close to its original form, and it holds a specific place in computing history as the most complex game ever fully solved.
Ancient ancestors
Boards resembling draughts have been found in Mesopotamian sites dating back several thousand years, and the Egyptian game of alquerque — played on a 5×5 grid of intersecting lines with capture by jumping — is documented from around 1400 BC. Alquerque is the direct ancestor: same jumping capture, different board.
The medieval European form
Around the twelfth century in southern France, someone moved alquerque onto a chessboard, using the dark squares and twelve pieces per side. The game was called fierges, and promotion to a more powerful piece came from the chess queen — which is why the promoted piece is a king or dame in most languages.
The compulsory capture rule arrived later, around the sixteenth century, and was contentious enough that the version without it survived alongside for some time. The French called the compulsory version jeu forcé; it eventually won out because it makes the game sharper.
Competitive checkers
By the nineteenth century English draughts had a serious tournament culture, particularly in Scotland and the north of England, with published opening analysis and world championship matches from the 1840s onward.
That analysis became a problem. Top players knew the openings so thoroughly that games between them were almost always drawn, which led to the 'three-move restriction' — a randomly drawn opening imposed on both players to force variety. It is still used in serious play.
The computer story
Checkers has an outsized role in artificial intelligence. Arthur Samuel's checkers program, developed at IBM from 1952, was one of the first programs to learn from experience, and is often cited as an early milestone in machine learning.
In 1994 the program Chinook drew a world championship match against Marion Tinsley, the strongest human player the game has known, who had lost only a handful of games in forty years. Tinsley withdrew because of illness and died shortly after.
Marion Tinsley
Widely considered the most dominant player in the history of any competitive game. Over forty-five years of play he lost fewer than ten games in total.
Solved, 2007
In 2007 a team at the University of Alberta led by Jonathan Schaeffer announced that English draughts was weakly solved: with perfect play from the standard starting position, the game is a draw. The computation took eighteen years and covered around five hundred billion billion positions.
It remains the most complex game ever solved. Chess and go are far beyond current reach by many orders of magnitude.
Does being solved spoil it?
Not in practice. Neither player can play perfectly, so every human game is a contest of who errs less. Knowing the theoretical result changes nothing about the experience of finding a two-for-one shot over the board.