History of Backgammon

Backgammon belongs to a family of race games in which two players move pieces around a track according to the roll of dice. Games of this kind are among the oldest known, but modern backgammon, with its fixed starting position and doubling cube, took its present form only in the last few centuries. The story is best told in stages.

Ancient race games

Archaeologists have found boards for dice-driven race games across the ancient Middle East. Egyptian Senet and the Royal Game of Ur from Mesopotamia are well-known examples, but their rules and boards differ from backgammon, so they are better seen as distant relatives than as ancestors. A board with dice and pieces found at Shahr-e Sukhteh, the "Burnt City" in southeastern Iran near the Afghan border, is often cited as one of the earliest examples of a game closer to the tables family, dated to around the third millennium BCE.

Rome and tabula

The Romans played several board games with dice. The one most clearly related to backgammon was tabula, Latin for "table" or "board". Like backgammon, it used a board of 24 points, fifteen pieces per player and the goal of bearing all of them off first. It differed in important ways: pieces started off the board and had to be entered by the dice, three dice were used instead of two, and both players moved in the same direction. A famous position from a game played by the Byzantine emperor Zeno in the fifth century was recorded in writing and shows that the board and rules were already close to the modern ones.

Nard and medieval tables

In Persia a game called nard became popular, and from there related games spread across the Islamic world and into Europe. In medieval Europe the whole family was simply called "tables". The Spanish king Alfonso X included many tables games in his illustrated Book of Games of 1283. Religious and civil authorities sometimes tried to ban dice games, but tables remained a common pastime at every level of society.

The name and the rules

The word "backgammon" appears in English in the 17th century. It is usually explained as "back" plus the Middle English gamen, "game", perhaps because checkers can be hit and sent back to start again. In 1743 Edmond Hoyle published a treatise on the game, one of the first works to discuss its strategy and odds in print. Through the 18th and 19th centuries the rules settled into a stable form, including the familiar starting position.

The doubling cube

The biggest change in modern times came in the 1920s, when players in New York clubs introduced the doubling cube. Letting a player offer to double the value of the game turned many decisions into questions of judgment, not just of moving checkers. Match play with the cube is now the standard form of serious competition; see our page on the doubling cube.

The 20th-century boom and computers

In the 1960s and 1970s backgammon became fashionable in the United States and Europe, and organized tournaments grew quickly. Since 1979 the World Championship has been held in Monte Carlo; see backgammon world champions. In the early 1990s Gerald Tesauro's program TD-Gammon showed that a neural network could teach itself to play at a high level. Later programs such as GNU Backgammon and eXtreme Gammon became standard study tools, and they changed accepted ideas about many opening moves.

For a look at popular myths about the game's past and how it is played across different cultures, read our article on backgammon history.