Halma and Friends

Halma, an early iteration of Chinese checkers, is a board game invented by George Howard Monks and Thomas Hill in 1883 or 1884. Monks was a thoracic surgeon at Harvard Medical School, and Hill, the father of Monks’s sister-in-law, would later become president of Harvard University. Halma, whose name comes from the Greek for “jump,” was inspired by the British game Hoppity.

Historically, there had been many similar games, which, like Halma, were played on square grids. For example, Ugolki is a two-player game that originated