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The history of backgammon
Backgammon is one of the oldest board games still played today. Its ancestors were played by Roman soldiers, Persian kings and medieval merchants, and the rules you use now were settled only about two centuries ago.
Ancient roots
Games where players race pieces along a track by throwing dice are very old. The Royal Game of Ur, found in royal tombs in Mesopotamia and dated to about 2600 BC, is the oldest such game with rules that survive, although it is a distant relative and not the same game. Another set found in Jiroft, Iran, about 5,000 years old, is among the oldest game sets ever found. These games share the idea that makes backgammon: a race on a track, steered by dice.
Rome and Byzantium: tabula
The Romans played Ludus duodecim scriptorum, “the game of twelve lines”, which the poet Ovid mentions around the turn of the era. It later developed into tabula, the ancestor of the modern game. A famous epigram by the Byzantine Emperor Zeno (reigned 474 to 491) describes a game of tabula with its dice throws and moves, which allows historians to reconstruct the rules. Tabula and similar games were called tables games, a name that survives in Greek tavli, Turkish tavla and Arabic tawla, all words for “table” or “board”.
Persia and nard
In Persia a game called nard, short for nardshir (“brave Ardashir”), is attested between the 3rd and 6th centuries. Tradition credits the sage Bozorgmehr with inventing it, as told in the Persian epic the Shahnameh, written about the year 1000. Nard spread across the Muslim world and the Caucasus, and versions of it are still played from Iran and Turkey to Georgia and Russia. See names and variants.
Medieval Europe and the English game
Tables games reached France by the 11th century. They became so popular, and so tied up with gambling, that King Louis IX banned them in 1254. In England, a close relative called Irish was played in the 16th century. The word backgammon itself first appears in a letter of 1647 by James Howell, who spells it “Baggammon”; it probably comes from “back” and the Middle English word for game, perhaps a reference to checkers that have to go back to the start when they are hit.
Early rules were written by Francis Willoughby around 1672 and by Charles Cotton in 1674. In 1753 Edmond Hoyle, the best-known English writer on games, published A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon. By around 1850 the rules had reached the form we know now, including the bar.
The doubling cube
The biggest change in the modern era came in the 1920s, on New York's Lower East Side, where players introduced the doubling cube. It added the element of nerve and bluffing that makes today's game. Read more in the doubling cube guide. The first world championship was held in Las Vegas in 1967. Match play, the Crawford rule and the Jacoby rule were developed to make matches and money games fair.
Backgammon and computers
In the early 1990s Gerald Tesauro's program TD-Gammon taught itself to play at close to the level of the best humans by playing against itself, and its play changed some ideas in opening theory. Later programs such as GNU Backgammon and eXtreme Gammon are stronger than any human and are used by players to check their moves and cube decisions. Today millions of games are played online.
A game that lives in families
Despite the computers, backgammon in much of the world is still a game for the cafe, the veranda and the family carpet, played with a loud slap of the checkers and plenty of talk. That is the spirit we built BackgammonTalk to keep, putting live voice into the game so that the groan travels with the dice.
Frequently asked questions
How old is backgammon?
Its ancestors, the tables games, are at least 1,600 years old, and board games raced with dice are much older still. The modern rules took shape in England between the 1600s and about 1850.
Where does the word backgammon come from?
It is first recorded in English in 1647. It probably combines “back” and the Middle English word for game, although the exact origin is uncertain.
When was the doubling cube invented?
In the 1920s, by players in New York City. It is now an essential part of tournament and online backgammon.