My daughter was singing with her choir, so my son had a couple of hours to lose in Denver. We went to the Denver Public Library and of course my son, who was 6 years old, wanted to go to the Children’s Library. We left.

When we walked in, he got excited and his face lit up. She saw a giant game of checkers. Each piece was the size of one of her hands. She wanted to play. Now, I hadn’t played checkers with him before, but I remembered that my grandfather taught me how to play checkers at that age. So, I tried it.

I didn’t just tell him the rules and the game. She was six years old and she didn’t have that kind of patience. I told him that the first two games were just practice games. We played together while she explained the rules to him. He was okay with this plan, and was happy that the first two games didn’t “count.”

What color do you want to be? “My grandfather told me that smoke comes before fire, son, so black goes first.” He liked that little mnemonic and I listened to him repeating it for several days. Naturally, he wanted to be black.

Move a piece one square. You can only go diagonally. I moved a piece diagonally to show you. Then I moved a piece horizontally and vertically and said “you can’t move horizontally or vertically, only diagonally, and your pieces are always on the black squares”.

We moved some pieces and then I told him that the object of the game was to capture the other guy’s pieces and have the last pieces left on the board. He became a little more interested. I showed him how to recognize a jump and how to take a piece.

We played for a while and I set up a double jump for him. Before his turn, I told him how you could do a double and triple jump and asked if there were places like that on the board. He found the double jump and took it.

I eventually got a piece for the other side and asked him to crown my new king. Then I showed him how a king could come and go. He was excited about that feature and decided to get some kings.

Finally, I explained to him that once he removed his finger from the piece, his move was final. So if we weren’t sure about a move, he needed to keep his finger on his chip.

That was the essence of the ground rules. Then we played our first real game that “counted.” I still hadn’t talked to him a bit about strategy yet, but he started telling me things like “well, I can’t move here because you’ll jump me” and “if I get a lot of kings, I should be able to win.”