The History of Backgammon
Backgammon belongs to a family of race games played with dice that goes back about 5,000 years. The rules we use now took shape in Europe a few hundred years ago, and the doubling cube arrived only a century ago.
Ancient race games
Some of the oldest known board games are race games: players roll dice or throwing sticks and move pieces along a track. At Shahr-e Sukhteh, the "Burnt City" in south-east Iran, archaeologists found a board with game pieces and dice dated to roughly 3000 BCE. It is often described as an early relative of backgammon.
The Royal Game of Ur, found in royal tombs in southern Iraq and dated to around 2600 to 2400 BCE, is another race game for two players. Its rules were pieced together from a much later clay tablet. In Egypt, the game of senet was played for well over a thousand years. None of these is backgammon, but they share its core idea of a race decided by dice and choices.
Rome: the game of twelve lines and tabula
The Romans played ludus duodecim scriptorum, the "game of twelve lines", on a board with three rows of twelve spaces. Over time it gave way to tabula, played on a board very like a modern backgammon board, with two rows of twelve points and three dice.
One famous position survives from the year 480 CE. The Greek writer Agathias recorded a game of tabula played by the Byzantine emperor Zeno, in which a single unlucky roll left him with several checkers exposed. It is one of the oldest written records of a specific position in any board game.
Persia and the East: nard
In Persia the game was called nard. A well-known story in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh tells of the sage Bozorgmehr inventing nard in reply to the game of chess, sent as a challenge from India. The story is legend, but it shows how old and how respected the game already was. Versions of nard are still played across Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East, and in Turkey the game is known as tavla.
Medieval Europe: "tables"
In medieval Europe, games on a backgammon-style board were known as tables. There were many variants with different starting positions and rules. King Alfonso X of Castile described several of them in his Book of Games, finished in 1283. Tables was popular across all classes and was often played for money, which brought regular bans from church and state.
The name "backgammon"
The word "backgammon" first appears in English in the middle of the 1600s. Where it comes from isn't certain. The usual explanation is "back" plus the old word "gamen" (game), because checkers are sent back to the start when they are hit.
In 1743 Edmond Hoyle, famous for his books on card games, published a short treatise on backgammon. It set out rules close to the ones used today and helped settle the game in its modern form.
The doubling cube
The biggest change to the game in centuries came in the 1920s, in the gaming clubs of New York, when someone introduced the doubling cube. Nobody knows who. The cube let players raise the stakes during a game, and it turned backgammon from a game mostly about checker play into one where judging your chances matters just as much.
The backgammon boom
In the 1960s and 1970s backgammon became fashionable. Prince Alexis Obolensky organised an international tournament in the Bahamas in 1964, and he is often called the father of modern backgammon. Clubs, tournaments and books followed. Paul Magriel's book Backgammon, published in 1976, is still seen as a classic.
Computers change the game
In the early 1990s, Gerald Tesauro at IBM built TD-Gammon, a program that taught itself backgammon by playing against itself hundreds of thousands of times. It reached the level of the best human players and found moves experts had written off. Later programs such as Jellyfish, Snowie, GNU Backgammon and eXtreme Gammon went further.
These programs could play a position out thousands of times, called a rollout, to measure which move really wins more often. That changed opening theory. Some moves that had been standard for decades turned out to be worse than moves few people played.
Backgammon today
Backgammon is now played in cafés and on boards passed down in families, in world championships, and online by millions. The computer players on this site follow the same basic idea as the big programs, on a much smaller scale: our Extreme level plays out its best candidate moves before it chooses one.