About Play Backgammon Online

Play Backgammon Online is a free backgammon game that runs in your browser. You open the page and play. There's no account, no download and nothing to install.

Why I made it

Hi, I'm David. When I was growing up, my mom was always playing the games that came with Microsoft Windows. Solitaire, Minesweeper, and on Windows XP even a game of backgammon. They were simple, they started straight away, and you could play one quick game or lose an afternoon.

A lot of today's versions of those games are slow, crowded with ads or locked behind an app download. I wanted to bring back that feeling of opening a game and just playing. This site is my take on backgammon, and it's part of a small family of free classic games I build.

Who runs the site

Play Backgammon Online is run by Lunar Interactive Arts Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. I make games for the web and for mobile under the Lunar Interactive Arts name.

How the computer plays

The computer opponent was written for this site. It works out every legal play for its roll, following the full rules (including the rule that you must use the higher die when only one can be played), and then judges the positions it could end up in.

• Easy picks almost any legal play.
• Medium looks only at the race and at whether it can hit.
• Hard judges each position on the race, the points it has made, primes, anchors, and how likely its loose checkers are to be hit.
• Extreme takes Hard's five favourite plays and plays each one forward 24 times, through your reply and its next turn, before it chooses.

The dice are random, drawn fresh for every roll, and the computer never knows your next roll in advance. It plays by the same rules and the same luck as you.

What we store

Your board design, computer level, settings and won and lost record are kept in your own browser, on your own device. They are never sent to us. See the privacy policy for the full details, including analytics and ads.

Get in touch

Found a bug or have an idea? We'd like to hear it. Use the contact page.