Backgammon History

Backgammon is a game for two players in which the dice decide how far you may move, but the player decides how to use each roll. Luck can win a single game; over a long match the better player comes out ahead. That mix of chance and skill has kept the game alive for thousands of years.

A family of race games

Backgammon belongs to the family of race games: each side tries to bring all its pieces to a destination before the opponent does. Games of this kind are among the oldest known. Boards for race games have been found in ancient Mesopotamia, Iran and Egypt, some of them around five thousand years old. The Egyptian game senet is often named as one of the distant ancestors, although its exact rules are not known.

Rome: the twelve lines and tabula

The Romans played a game called the "Game of Twelve Lines", with three rows of twelve fields. Over time the board was reduced to two rows of twelve points, the layout still used today. This later game was called tabula, Latin for "board" or "table". Roman players threw three dice rather than two.

Persia: nard

In Persia an almost identical game with two dice became known as nard. Persian tradition tells stories about its invention, and the name lives on in the many forms of nardy still played from the Middle East to Russia today.

The Middle Ages

Through contact with the Islamic world, European players took up the two-dice form, and the game came very close to the one we know. In medieval Europe "tables" was played by nobles and common people alike. The Church tried more than once to ban or discourage dice games, without much success.

England and the modern rules

The modern game took shape in England in the seventeenth century, when "tables" became backgammon. Two features gave it its character: a double is played twice over, and a player who bears off all his checkers before the opponent has removed any wins a double game, the gammon. In 1743 Edmond Hoyle published a treatise on the game, one of the first books to set down its rules and advice on play.

Where does the name come from? One explanation points to Middle English: back and gamen, "game", perhaps because checkers that are hit have to go back and start again. Another theory looks for a Welsh origin meaning "small battle". Neither has been proven.

The twentieth century

The biggest change of the modern era came in the 1920s, when players in New York clubs introduced the doubling cube. It added a new layer of decisions to every game and is now an essential part of match play.

Backgammon's popularity rose and fell over the century. A strong revival in the 1960s and 1970s is often linked to Prince Alexis Obolensky, a Russian émigré whose family had left Russia after the revolution. He settled in the United States, organised international tournaments in the Bahamas and co-wrote a book on the game. Since 1979 the World Championship has been held in Monte Carlo.

Computers and the internet

From the 1990s onward, programs based on neural networks began to play backgammon at the level of the best humans and changed how the game is studied. Opening moves that had been played for decades were re-examined, and some were replaced; you can see today's choices in our recommended first moves. Free software such as GNU Backgammon and commercial tools such as eXtreme Gammon let any player analyse his own games. At the same time the internet made it possible to find an opponent at any hour, and players from every continent now meet over the same virtual board.