Villager Checkers

Initial release.

Added

• Play Checkers button on every villager's trade screen - challenge any villager to a full game of checkers (you play red and move first).
• Difficulty scales with the villager's trading level, and each level thinks differently rather than just deeper: Novice walks into forced-capture traps → Apprentice sees the traps but misses the shots → Journeyman sets and finds 2-for-1 shots → Expert understands the endgame → Master converts won endings.
• Full American/English draughts rules: compulsory capture with free choice, multi-jump chains played to exhaustion, kings, the 40-move quiet rule, and threefold repetition. A man crowned mid-jump stops immediately, as English rules require.
• capture-rule=optional in config/villagercheckers.properties for anyone who would rather be able to decline a jump. Standard mandatory capture remains the default; a started chain must still be finished either way.
• Hop-by-hop multi-jump entry with continuation highlights and faded doomed pieces. Picking a piece up only ever highlights its options - capture is compulsory, but choosing which capture to make is the player's call. Once the first hop is committed, remaining hops with no branch finish themselves. Right-click cancels a half-entered sequence.
• Forced captures are shown, not just enforced: the pieces that can take are outlined, and clicking a piece that can't flashes it red.
• Abandon handling: walking more than 16 blocks away, the villager dying, or disconnecting abandons the game; closing the board resigns.
• From-scratch pure-Java checkers engine (negamax + alpha-beta + iterative deepening with a per-level capture horizon) running on a background thread; move generation is perft-verified to depth 8 against published reference counts.
• Fully server-authoritative: the server owns all game state; clients only send hop paths.
• Pieces are drawn procedurally rather than from a sprite sheet, so the board stays crisp at every size and the mod ships no piece art.
• The trade-screen button stacks below other Villager Games mods' buttons instead of overlapping them.