Backgammon History

Every time you set up a backgammon board you take part in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Games in which pieces race around a board according to the throw of dice are among the oldest games known, and backgammon is the best-known survivor of that family. This article follows the main steps from those early race games to the game played in clubs and on computers today.

Early race games

Nobody knows exactly where backgammon began. Archaeologists have found several very old race games in the Middle East. The best known is the Royal Game of Ur, discovered in royal tombs in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during excavations in the 1920s and dated to around the middle of the third millennium BC. In ancient Egypt people played senet, and boards for it were found among the treasures in the tomb of Tutankhamun. These games share the basic idea of racing pieces around a track with dice or throwing sticks, but their rules were different, and they are best seen as distant relatives rather than direct ancestors.

Older books sometimes linked backgammon to Indian race games such as pachisi. Pachisi does share the idea of bringing pieces home, but it is played on a cross-shaped board and belongs to a different family. Closer relatives appear in Persia, where the game of nard was played on a board with 24 points and fifteen pieces per side. Nard is still played today across the Middle East and the Caucasus, and the long and short forms of nardy remain popular in Russia and neighboring countries.

Rome and the Middle Ages

The Romans played a board game called ludus duodecim scriptorum, "the game of twelve lines," and later a game called tabula, played with fifteen pieces per side on a board of 24 points. Tabula was usually played with three dice. It was popular at every level of society, and one position from a game played by the Emperor Zeno in the fifth century AD was described in a short poem that has survived, which lets modern readers reconstruct how the game was played.

From the Roman world the game spread across Europe. In the Middle Ages the whole family of these games was known as "tables," a name that comes from the Latin tabula. Tables was played at royal courts and in taverns alike. Church and civil authorities often frowned on dice games because of gambling, and bans were issued in several countries, but none of them lasted, and the game kept its place in European life.

Backgammon gets its name

The word "backgammon" is first recorded in English in 1645. By then the game being played in England was very close to the modern one. Historian H. J. R. Murray, in his book A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess, traced how the various forms of tables developed into it. Settlers brought the game to North America, and by the eighteenth century it was a common pastime on both sides of the Atlantic; Thomas Jefferson was among its players.

In 1743 Edmond Hoyle published a short treatise on backgammon that set out its rules and gave advice on play. It was one of the first serious works on the game in English and helped fix the rules that are still used today.

The doubling cube

The last major change to the rules came in the 1920s, when players in New York clubs introduced the doubling cube. Its inventor is unknown. The cube let a player raise the stakes during a game and forced the opponent to decide at once whether to continue or concede. It shortened games, added a layer of risk management, and made backgammon a much deeper test of judgment. Learn how it works in The Doubling Cube.

The modern era

Backgammon enjoyed a boom in the 1920s and 1930s, faded somewhat during the Second World War, and then became fashionable again in the 1960s and 1970s. Organized tournaments grew, a large body of strategy books appeared, and the World Championship found its long-term home in Monte Carlo. You can read about one edition of that event in our article on the 2006 World Championship.

The biggest change since the cube came from computers. In the early 1990s Gerald Tesauro's TD-Gammon, a neural-network program that learned by playing against itself, reached the level of strong human players and found new ideas in positions experts thought were settled. Later programs such as GNU Backgammon and eXtreme Gammon play better than any human, and many opening moves taught for decades were revised after computer analysis. Today players of every level use these programs to study, which our software review explains. Online play has also made it easy to find an opponent at any hour, and backgammon is more widely played now than at any point in its long history.