The Story
Where it came from, and why it turned out this way.
OriginAncient Near Eastern race games; Roman tabula (1st c. CE) is already close
Old, but not that old
Backgammon is often described as five thousand years old, on the strength of excavated boards like the Royal Game of Ur. Those are genuine distant relatives, but they played very differently and cannot simply be equated with it. The reliable close ancestor is Roman tabula, around the 1st century CE: twenty-four points, two dice, opposing directions of travel, and lone checkers that can be hit. Everything essential is already there. It then circulated for over a millennium as nard in the Middle East and as shuanglu in China.
The dice are a constraint, not the luck
Filing backgammon under games of chance misreads it. The dice determine how far you may travel, not which checker travels — and the second question is where all the skill lives. The same roll usually admits dozens of plays, of which only one or two are right. More pointedly, the rule that you must use as many dice as possible turns randomness from a freedom into a restriction: quite often you are forced into a move you would never choose.
The doubling cube made it a gambling game
The youngest part of the rules is the doubling cube, generally credited to New York clubs in the 1920s. It changes nothing on the board and only changes what the game is worth, yet it reshaped the game entirely: you must continuously assess how far ahead you are and whether taking a double is still reasonable for your opponent. Without the cube, backgammon is a race. With it, backgammon becomes a negotiation about probability estimates.
TD-Gammon rewrote human opening theory
In 1979 Hans Berliner's BKG 9.8 beat world champion Luigi Villa — the first time a program won a world-championship-level match in any board game, though luck played a large part. The real shock came in the early 1990s with Gerald Tesauro's TD-Gammon, a neural network that learned by playing itself and ended up judging several long-standing human opening conventions to be inferior. Humans adopted its choices and their results improved. This was self-play learning rewriting human theory more than twenty years before AlphaGo.
- The pip count is backgammon's basic quantitative tool: multiply each point number by the checkers on it and sum, and the lower total leads in a pure race.
- A gammon — your opponent has borne off nothing — scores double, and a backgammon, with a checker still on the bar or in your home board, scores triple. The word backgammon names exactly that worst kind of loss.
- The game was hugely popular in Tang and Song dynasty China under the name shuanglu, leaving traces in Dunhuang murals and Tang poetry before gradually fading.
Complete Rules
Start with what a turn allows and how the game is won.
- Board
- 24 points plus the bar
- Checkers
- 15 per player
- Winning conditionboth sides have fifteen checkers travelling in opposite directions around twenty-four points, and whoever first brings all fifteen into their own home board (points 1 through 6) and bears them off the board wins. The dice decide how far you can go; your judgment decides which checker goes — and all the skill in the game lives in that second half.
- The starting arrangement is fixed: five checkers on your 6 point, three on your 8 point, five on your 13 point, and two on your 24 point, with your opponent exactly mirrored. Point numbers are always counted along each player's own direction of travel, the two sides move toward each other, and both must bring every checker into their own 1-to-6 home board before bearing off.
- To open, each player rolls one die and the higher number moves first, using those two dice as the first turn. On a tie the dice are rerolled automatically until they differ.
- After that, each turn rolls two dice and each number is a separate move: one checker may use both numbers, or two checkers may use one each. Rolling doubles gives you four moves of that number.
- You may move onto a point that is empty, holds your own checkers, or holds exactly one enemy checker. Two or more enemy checkers make the point closed, and no roll can land there.
- Landing on a point with a single enemy checker hits it, and that checker goes to the bar. While you have any checkers on the bar, you must re-enter all of them before moving anything else on the board. The entry point is set by the die: rolling a 3 enters on your opponent's 3 point, which is your own 22 point, and if that point is closed by your opponent, that die is wasted.
- You must use as many dice as possible. If any sequence exists that uses both numbers (or all four on doubles) you may not play only one; and if only one of the two numbers can be played, you must play the larger. The board only offers landing squares belonging to legal sequences under this rule, which is why a move that looks reasonable sometimes cannot be clicked.
- Bearing off may begin only once all fifteen checkers — including any on the bar — are inside your 1-to-6 home board. A die showing n bears a checker off the n point. If the n point is empty, that die may bear a checker off a nearer point only when no checker of yours remains on any point farther than n; otherwise the die must be used to move within the home board. A die smaller than a point's distance can never bear a checker off that point.
- If you are hit while bearing off, the checker returns to the bar and you must re-enter it and bring every checker back into your home board before you may bear off again.
- The game ends the instant one side bears off all fifteen checkers. If an entire turn has no legal move, the turn is forfeited, the interface shows that no move is available, and play passes automatically.
Your First Game
Use this order of thought to get through a complete game quickly.
- Think through each turn in a fixed order: first check whether you have any checkers on the bar (if so, entering is all you can do), then check whether both dice can be used, and only then choose among the legal sequences. The same pair of numbers played in different orders can produce completely different positions.
- Opening rolls have well-established replies you can simply copy: play 3-1 as 8/5 6/5 to make your 5 point, 6-1 as 13/7 8/7 to make the bar point, 4-2 as 8/4 6/4 to make the 4 point, and 6-5 as 24/13 to run one back checker all the way to the 13 point. The shared idea is to claim the key points in and around your home board and bar point first, and to bring the two back checkers on the 24 point forward second.
- Making points matters more than moving the farthest. Two checkers on the same point form a safe point your opponent cannot enter; a lone checker is a blot and can be hit back to the bar at any moment. After every move, count how many blots you have left behind.
- To see who is ahead in the race, count pips: multiply each point number by the number of your checkers on it and add it all up, counting each checker on the bar as 25. The pip bar above the board shows this live, and the lower number is ahead in a pure race.
- Before hitting, ask two questions: how many blots will I have after the hit, and how many points have I already closed in my home board? With only one or two points closed, your opponent often re-enters and hits back immediately, and such hits usually cost more than they gain.
Practical Strategy
Move from knowing the rules to playing with a plan.
- From the opening into the middlegame, the main theme is claiming consecutive points. Your 5 point, 4 point, and bar point (the 7 point) are the most valuable; once they form a prime, checkers coming off the bar have a very hard time getting through the blockade.
- Keep an anchor in your opponent's home board, usually on the 20 or 18 point. When you are behind, do not rush to abandon it: it is both a landing spot after being hit and the base for a late counter-hitting comeback.
- When clearly ahead in the race, break contact and bring your checkers home to bear off as fast as possible. When behind in the race, do the opposite — maintain contact, keep your anchor, and keep hitting chances alive, because you have already lost the pure race.
- The value of a hit rises with the strength of your home board. With three or four points closed, one hit often costs your opponent several turns; with only one or two points, hitting is closer to an even exchange of risk.
- While bearing off, keep your distribution smooth with checkers on every point, and try not to leave gaps on the 6 and 5 points — otherwise large numbers get wasted shuffling inside the home board instead of bearing checkers off.
- The doubling decision is not "am I ahead" but "is accepting still reasonable for my opponent." The ideal doubling window is where you are clearly ahead but a pass would still be premature for them. Once they take, the cube belongs to them and only they can double next.
Winning and Special Rules
Details that are easy to miss but can change the result.
- Scores come in three tiers: a normal win at 1 point if your opponent has borne off at least one checker; a gammon at 2 points if they have borne off none; and a backgammon at 3 points if they have borne off none and still have a checker on the bar or in the winner's home board. The final score is that multiplier times the current cube value.
- The doubling cube starts in the middle and either player may double, but only on their own turn and before rolling. If your opponent takes, the cube doubles and becomes theirs, and only they may double afterward; if they drop, they resign immediately and the game is scored at the cube value before the double (dropping at a cube of 1 loses 1 point). The cube tops out at 64, after which no further doubling is possible.
- This site scores each game independently and does not enable the Jacoby, Crawford, or beaver rules: gammons and backgammons still count 2 and 3 even with the cube in the middle, and taking a double only doubles the cube and transfers ownership — you cannot immediately redouble.
- The interface distinguishes the sides as ivory and ink blue, and point numbers are always shown from your own direction of travel: points 1 through 6 are your home board, point 24 is the farthest starting point, and checkers on the bar count as 25 in the pip count.
- Unusable numbers are simply removed from the offered sequences, and if an entire turn has no legal move the interface passes for you after a brief pause.
Common Mistakes
The traps new players fall into most often.
- Not knowing the maximize-the-dice rule, playing a move that uses only the smaller number, and then assuming the interface is broken when the landing point cannot be clicked.
- Trying to move other checkers while one of yours sits on the bar, or forgetting that each checker on the bar counts as 25 in the pip count.
- Assuming during bear-off that a large number can always take a checker from a nearer point. As long as even one of your checkers remains on a farther point, you have to deal with that one first.
- Breaking a safe point into two or three blots in order to hit a lone enemy checker, and then collapsing entirely under a series of return hits.
- Only remembering to double once the position is so good that your opponent must pass, which throws away the doubled game entirely — or doubling before your advantage is solid and handing cube ownership to your opponent.