The History of Backgammon

The oldest game in backgammon's family with rules we can reconstruct is tabula, which a Roman emperor was playing around AD 480. The 5,000-year age often quoted belongs to older race games such as senet and the Royal Game of Ur, and historians have not shown that any of them is an ancestor.

Race Games Older Than Backgammon

Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Iran had race games long before tabula, but none of them is backgammon. Possible fragments of senet come from First Dynasty burials in Egypt, around 3100 BC, but the last known senet board is more than 500 years older than the first Roman board with three rows of 12.

The Royal Game of Ur is the board most often called backgammon's ancestor. Leonard Woolley found five, dated 2600 to 2400 BC, in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. Each has 20 squares, not 24 points, and the rules Irving Finkel worked out from a Babylonian tablet of 177-176 BC give five counters a side, moved by two knucklebones. The Encyclopaedia Iranica's board-game specialists reject the link: backgammon-type boards were in use alongside 20-square boards, not descended from them.

A board from Shahr-e Sukhteh, the Burnt City in Iran, was reported online in December 2004 as the world's oldest backgammon. Iranica identifies it as Twenty Squares, laid out like Ur's board inside the coils of a carved snake, and accounts disagree on its date: 2700 or 3000 BC.

The earliest board with backgammon's split into sixes rests on one source. Iranica reports stone boards from Jiroft with three rows of 12 fields, each split into two groups of six, and dates the feature to about 2000 BC. No second source confirms it, and the same article calls backgammon's origin "still poorly understood."

Roman Tabula and the Emperor Zeno

Tabula's rules can be reconstructed thanks to one bad throw. A poem by Agathias (about 528-580) describes a game the Emperor Zeno played around AD 480, on a board of 24 points with 15 men a side and three dice. Zeno rolled 2, 5, and 6, had to break up his stacks, and left his men open to capture. The game had no bar and no doubling cube.

Tabula grew out of an older Roman game, ludus duodecim scriptorum, which Ovid mentions between 1 BC and AD 8. Its boards have three rows of 12 spaces, little about its play survives, and tabula was most likely the same game minus the middle row. Britannica calls the older game "identical, or nearly so, to modern backgammon." That goes too far for a three-row board whose rules are lost.

Nard and the Persian Legend

Persia played its own member of the family, nard, and the stories crediting its invention to a king or a vizier are legend. The name comes from new-ardaxshir, "noble is Ardashir." The Karnamag links the game to Ardashir I (ruled 224-241), while the Wizarishn i chatrang credits Wuzurgmihr, better known as Bozorgmehr, vizier to Khosrow I (ruled 531-579).

In the tale, an Indian king sends chess to Persia as a riddle. Bozorgmehr solves it, then invents nard, which the Indians cannot explain. The board stands for the earth, the 30 counters for a month's days and nights, and the die for the turning sky. Ferdowsi retold it around AD 1000.

Panaino, who wrote Iranica's entry on the text, calls the story's historicity "very doubtful." Where nard came from is disputed: Panaino says it was originally a Western game, kin to tabula; Daryaee proposes India; others point to Jiroft. Iranica's earliest physical evidence of nard in Persia is a 7th-century silver bowl.

Tables in Medieval Europe

Medieval Europe played a whole family of games on the backgammon board and called them tables. Jeux de tables appear in France from the 11th century, the Gloucester tabula set found in 1983 dates from the same century, and Germany played tables by the 12th.

The fullest medieval record is Alfonso X of Castile's Libro de los juegos, made in Toledo in 1283, which sorts its games into chess for skill, dice for chance, and tables for both. Of its 14 or 15 tables games, one, Todas Tablas, uses backgammon's starting position and its rules for moving and bearing off.

England called the game "tables" from the 13th to the 17th century and played relatives named Irish, Ticktack, and Sice-Ace. Louis IX of France banned tables in 1254, and Elizabethan laws and church rules banned it in 16th-century England. The story that Cardinal Wolsey had boards burned in 1526 rests on a single account. A tables board was also found on the Swedish warship Vasa, which sank in 1628.

The Name "Backgammon"

The word backgammon first appears in the 1640s, and most sources derive it from "back" and the Middle English gamen, a game. The early use usually cited is a letter in James Howell's Epistolae Ho-Elianae warning a reader who has learnt "Baggammon" not to forget Irish, "the more serious and solid game."

The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1647 as its earliest evidence, several game histories say 1645, and the letter carries a date of 1635. That date is unreliable: Howell published the letters in volumes from 1645, reworked many in prison, and some dates were added in later editions.

The "back" may refer to checkers being sent back. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica called the etymology disputed and recorded two alternatives: Welsh bach, "little", plus cammaun, "battle", and Danish bakke, "tray", plus gammen. Neither has displaced back plus gamen.

Hoyle and the Modern Rules

The first known written rules date from the 1660s or 1670s, and Edmond Hoyle added a guide to playing well in 1743. Willughby recorded the rules of "Back Gammon" around 1672, and Cotton's The Compleat Gamester followed in 1674. By one account, backgammon parted from Irish with three additions: doubles played twice over (four moves), the gammon for a double win, and the backgammon for a triple.

Hoyle's A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon is usually dated 1743, though one source gives 1753. A 1744 printing covers the odds, the 36 throws of two dice, strategy, and the gammon. It has no doubling at all, so the claim that Hoyle introduced the doubling cube is false.

In the United States, Jacoby recalled a committee of New York clubs, among them the Knickerbocker Whist Club and the Racquet Club, drawing up the rules. The full backgammon rules set out the game as it is played now.

The Doubling Cube and the 20th-Century Boom

Doubling began in New York clubs in the 1920s, and the inventor of the doubling cube is unknown. In October 1931 Harper's Bazaar said doubling had started "five years ago", about 1925, and Grosvenor Nicholas's Modern Backgammon of April 1928 describes spoken doubling with no cube at all.

For the cube itself, The New Yorker of 6 September 1930 credited Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, "according to one story." Nicholas claimed the physical cube in 1931, and club histories name John P. Wemple or W. Whitewright Watson. Jacoby and Crawford's The Backgammon Book (1970) credited "some unknown genius", and later historians agree.

A second boom grew around Prince Alexis Obolensky (1915-1986), often called the Father of Modern Backgammon. With Bindy Banker he ran the first international tournament at the Lucayan Beach Hotel on Grand Bahama in 1964, where Charles Wacker III beat Porter Ijams for the Obolensky Cup.

The World Championship began at the Sands in Las Vegas in 1967, and Tim Holland won it in 1967, 1968, and 1971. Carol Crawford became the first woman champion in 1973. The event moved to Paradise Island in the Bahamas in 1976 (some records say 1975), and in 1979 Lewis Deyong merged it with Monte Carlo's European Championship. Monte Carlo became its permanent home, and Luigi Villa won.

Computers, Online Play, and the Game Today

Computers reached expert strength in the early 1990s and overturned the experts' opening play. An earlier milestone came in July 1979, when Hans Berliner's BKG 9.8 beat the world champion Luigi Villa 7-1 in a seven-point exhibition. Berliner admitted the computer rolled better, and later analysis rates Villa's play higher.

Gerald Tesauro's TD-Gammon, built at IBM, taught itself by playing against itself. Version 1.0 (1991) lost only 13 points over 51 games against Bill Robertie, Paul Magriel, and Malcolm Davis. Experts had long answered an opening 2-1, 4-1, or 5-1 with the slot, 6/5; TD-Gammon preferred splitting a back checker, 24/23, and the slot all but vanished from tournaments. Later rollouts restored the 2-1 slot as narrowly the best play. The backgammon strategy guide ranks all 15 opening rolls.

Fredrik Dahl's JellyFish (1994) was the first commercial neural-network program. GNU Backgammon followed in 1999 and eXtreme Gammon in 2009, though some sources give 2001 and 2011. Andreas Schneider opened the FIBS internet server on 19 July 1992, first in Aachen, Germany, then in Sweden from December 1993.

Backgammon is often described as the national game of Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Greece. The name shesh besh means six-five, the 6-5 roll; sources trace shesh to Hebrew or Persian and besh to Turkish. The backgammon variants page covers Greek tavli and Turkish tavla. In Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, nardy means long nardy, and backgammon is "short nardy."