How to play backgammon

What is backgammon?

Backgammon is a two player game of dice and position. Each player has fifteen checkers, and each is trying to bring all fifteen around the board and off it before the other one does. The dice say how far you may move. You say which checkers move. The first player to take all fifteen checkers off the board wins the game.

That is the whole objective, and it is why the game is often called a race. It is only half true. Along the way you can land on a lone enemy checker and send it back to the start, and you can wall off the points it needs to come back through. So backgammon is a race in which both runners are allowed to trip each other, and where a game that looks lost can turn on a single roll.

It is also very old. Boards of the same family have been dug up from Persia and Mesopotamia dating back roughly five thousand years, which makes it one of the oldest games still played in essentially its original form. The one genuinely modern piece is the doubling cube, invented in New York in the 1920s. More on the long version of that story in five thousand years of backgammon.

Tavla, tawla, tavli, shesh besh: the same game, different names

Backgammon travels under a different name in almost every country where it is loved, and if you learned the game from a grandparent you may never have heard the English word for it at all. The common ones:

• Tavla in Turkey, where it is a daily fixture of tea houses and one of the loudest games you will ever hear played.
• Tawla across the Arabic speaking world, from Morocco to the Gulf. The word simply means table. In Egypt and the Levant you will also hear tawla zahr, table of dice.
• Shesh besh in Israel and much of the Levant, named after the roll of six and five, from the Persian word for six and the Turkish word for five.
• Tavli in Greece. Greek tavli is really three games played as a set, portes, plakoto and fevga. Portes is the one that matches international backgammon exactly; the other two have their own rules for what happens when you land on a lone checker.
• Takhteh nard in Iran, usually shortened to takhteh. Nard is the classical Persian name for the game and the root of several others.
• Nardy in Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Short nardy is the game described on this page. Long nardy is a relative in which nobody is ever hit, so do not assume the two sets of rules are interchangeable.
• Tavola reale in Italy, and plain backgammon in France and Spain, where the older local variants jacquet and tablas reales have largely given way to the international game.

The rules below are the international ones: what tournaments use, what clubs use, and what serious apps implement. If you grew up on a regional variant, this is the version that lets you sit down with anyone in the world. We wrote about the journey those names took in one board, many names.

The board: points, quadrants and the bar

A backgammon board has twenty four narrow triangles, called points, twelve along each long side. They alternate in colour, which is decoration and nothing more: what matters is which points are occupied and by whom. A ridge down the middle, the bar, splits the board into two halves.

The four quadrants have names. The six points nearest you on your side of the bar are your home board, also called your inner board. The six beside them, across the bar, are your outer board. Directly opposite sit your opponent’s outer board and, in the corner diagonally across from your own, their home board. Both home boards sit on the same side of the table, usually the right.

Each player numbers the points from their own side, one to twenty four, starting in their own home board. Your 1-point is the point furthest into your home board; your 24-point is the far corner, deep inside your opponent’s home board. The crucial consequence: the two of you use different numbers for the same triangle. Your 1-point is your opponent’s 24-point, and their 6-point is your 19-point. Whenever a backgammon player names a point, they mean their own numbering unless they say otherwise.

Direction follows the numbers. You always move from higher numbers to lower ones, that is, from the far corner around toward your own home board. Your opponent moves the opposite way around the same track. You never move backwards, not even to escape.

A full set is: the board, thirty checkers (fifteen of each colour), two pairs of dice, dice cups, and one doubling cube.

The starting position

Every game begins from the same setup. Reading it as your own side of the board, with your home board at the bottom right:

Your fifteen checkers start like this:

• Two on your 24-point, the far corner, inside your opponent’s home board.
• Five on your 13-point, at the far end of your opponent’s outer board.
• Three on your 8-point, in your own outer board.
• Five on your 6-point, the point in your home board nearest the bar.

Two, five, three, five. Fifteen checkers in four stacks. Your opponent’s fifteen mirror yours exactly, which is why the diagram looks symmetrical when it is turned around. If you only remember one thing: the two checkers furthest from home, sitting in the enemy’s living room, are called your back checkers, and most of the drama in a game of backgammon is about whether they get out.

If the board in front of you is a physical one and you just want the position checked, the same four stacks are laid out on their own page, with the ten second test that proves the board is right and the four mistakes that account for almost every board that is wrong: the backgammon setup, checker by checker.

How a game starts

Each player rolls one die. The higher number goes first, and that player plays the two dice on the table as their opening move: not a fresh roll, the two numbers you and your opponent just rolled. If both dice show the same number, roll again. That is why the first move of a game can never be a double.

After that, players alternate. On your turn you roll both dice, play your move, and pass the dice across. If you want to know what to do with those first fifteen possible opening rolls, they have been studied to death and the answers are settled: see the best opening rolls.

How the dice move your checkers

The two dice are two separate moves. A roll of 5 and 3 does not mean eight; it means one move of five and one move of three. You may play them with two different checkers, or move a single checker five and then three, in either order.

You may move a checker onto any open point. A point is open unless your opponent has two or more checkers standing on it. An empty point is open. A point with one enemy checker is open, and landing there does something specific, covered in the next section. A point with two or more of your own checkers is open to you and closed to them, however many of yours are already stacked there. The rules put no limit on how many of your own checkers may sit on one point.

When you play both numbers with the same checker, it is really two moves in sequence, so the point it touches in between must be open too. With 6 and 4 you cannot leap ten pips over a blocked landing spot; you must be able to stop at one end or the other on the way.

Doubles are worth four moves. Roll 4 and 4 and you play four moves of four: one checker four times, four checkers once each, or any combination.

You must play both numbers if there is any legal way to do it, and all four on a double. This is a rule, not etiquette. If only one of the two numbers can be played, you must play it, and if either could be played but not both, you must play the higher one. If nothing at all is legal, you forfeit the turn and pass the dice. Beginners often want to skip an awkward number to keep a position tidy. You are not allowed to, and good players will build positions specifically to hand you moves you hate.

Blots, hitting and the bar

A point with exactly one checker on it holds a blot. A blot is vulnerable. If your opponent moves a checker onto it, the blot is hit: it comes off the point and goes onto the bar, in the middle of the board.

Nothing is captured for good. A hit checker is not lost, it is sent back to the beginning of its journey, and it can be a devastating loss of ground: a checker hit two moves from home has to travel the entire board again.

A checker on the bar must come back into play before you may move anything else. It re-enters in your opponent’s home board, which is the quadrant furthest from your own. Roll the dice, and each number names a point there, counting from your opponent’s edge: a 1 enters on their 1-point, a 4 on their 4-point. In your own numbering, those are your 24-point and your 21-point respectively. You may enter on that point if it is open, which is to say if your opponent does not have two or more checkers standing on it.

If both of your numbers name points your opponent holds, you cannot enter at all, and you forfeit the entire turn. Players call this dancing, or fanning. It is where games are lost. If you have several checkers on the bar, every one of them must enter before you may make any other move, and if you can only enter some of them, you enter as many as you can and forfeit the rest of the roll.

Once a checker has entered, any number left on the dice is played normally, and it may be played with the checker that just came in.

This is why leaving blots matters, and why it cannot always be avoided. Learning to see which blots your opponent can actually reach, and how likely that is, is most of what improving at backgammon means. There is a whole note about reading those threats in reading the board.

Making points, primes and anchors

Two checkers on the same point make it. The point is now yours: your opponent may not land there, and your checkers there cannot be hit. Making points is the constructive half of backgammon, the half that is not about the dice at all.

Six consecutive made points form a prime, and a prime is a wall. The largest number on a die is six, so no enemy checker trapped behind six points in a row can jump over it, whatever they roll. It has to sit and wait for you to break the wall down, which you eventually must, because you also have to bring your checkers home.

A point you hold in your opponent’s half of the board is an anchor. Your two back checkers start on one, your 24-point. An anchor is a safe house: your back checkers cannot be hit there, and you can take risks elsewhere knowing they have somewhere to stand. The 5-point, yours and theirs, is the most valuable point on the board and is sometimes called the golden point, because it does the most work both as a block and as an anchor.

Bearing off

Once all fifteen of your checkers are inside your home board, on your points 1 through 6, you may start bearing off, which means taking them off the board entirely. Every checker you bear off is one closer to winning, and the first player to remove all fifteen wins the game immediately.

The rules of bearing off are exact, and they are where casual players most often go wrong:

• A number bears off a checker from the point of that number. A 3 takes a checker off your 3-point.
• If the point named by a number is empty, you must make a legal move inside your home board with that number instead, from a higher point.
• If the number is higher than any point you still occupy, you bear a checker off your highest occupied point. Roll a 6 with your highest checkers sitting on the 4-point, and a checker comes off the 4-point.
• You are never forced to bear off when a legal move inside your home board exists. Playing a checker down instead is often correct, because it avoids leaving a gap.
• Doubles bear off four checkers, if you have four to take, subject to the same rules.

You can still be hit while bearing off. If your opponent has a checker anywhere behind you, an awkward roll may force you to leave a blot in your own home board. If they hit it, that checker goes to the bar and must re-enter and travel the whole way home again before you may bear off another checker. Games are won from a hopeless position exactly this way, and it is why the trailing player so often refuses to concede.

Both players usually bear off at the same time, and the last stretch is a pure race. If you want to know who is actually ahead in that race, count pips: pip counting for beginners is the arithmetic that turns a hunch into a number.

Winning: single, gammon and backgammon

Not every win is worth the same. There are three sizes of victory:

• A single game is worth 1 point. You bore off all fifteen checkers and your opponent had borne off at least one of theirs.
• A gammon is worth 2 points. You bore off all fifteen and your opponent had borne off none at all.
• A backgammon is worth 3 points. You bore off all fifteen, your opponent had borne off none, and they still had a checker on the bar or inside your home board at that moment.

This is why a player who is clearly losing still races to bear off one single checker: it turns a two point loss into a one point loss. And it is why the doubling cube, in the next section, multiplies rather than adds. A gammon at a cube value of 4 is eight points, from a game that opened worth one. The arithmetic and the strategy that follows from it are worked through in gammons and backgammons.

The doubling cube

The doubling cube is the big die that is never rolled. Its faces read 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64. It starts each game in the middle of the board, belonging to nobody, and by convention the game is worth 1 point while it sits there.

At the start of your turn, before you roll, you may offer to double the stake. Turn the cube to the next value and pass it across. Your opponent has exactly two answers:

• Take. The game continues, now worth double, and the cube goes to their side of the board. They own it.
• Drop. The game ends at once. They concede, and pay the value the cube had before your offer. A dropped opening double costs them 1 point, not 2.

Ownership is the part beginners miss. After a take, only the owner of the cube may double again. You have handed away the right to raise the stakes, and you get it back only if they redouble and you take. Redoubles climb the same ladder, 2 to 4 to 8, and each level doubles the cost of being wrong.

When is taking correct? Ignore gammons for a moment. Dropping costs you 1 point, every time. Taking makes the game worth 2: you lose 2 when you lose, win 2 when you win. Play the same position four times and win it once, and the two choices cost you exactly the same. So the break even point is roughly one game in four, about 25 percent, and anything better than that is a take. You are allowed, and often required, to accept doubles in games you expect to lose. Gammon danger moves that number, because some of your losses will now cost double.

When should you double? There is a window. Too early and your opponent takes comfortably and owns the cube. Too late and they simply drop and you collect a single point from a position that had grown worth far more. And if your position is so strong that a gammon is likely, doubling can actually be the wrong move, because it gives them the chance to escape for one point. That situation has a name, too good to double. The full treatment is in the doubling cube, explained properly.

Three optional rules travel with the cube. They are agreements between players, not part of the core game, and tournaments generally do not use the last two:

• The Jacoby rule, common in money play: gammons and backgammons count as a single game unless the cube has been turned. It stops players grinding out an undoubled gammon in a dead game.
• Beavers: a player who is doubled may take and immediately redouble while keeping ownership of the cube. Money play only, and only by agreement.
• Automatic doubles: if the two opening dice tie, the stake doubles before the re-roll. Fun, expensive, and usually capped at one per game.

How a match is scored

One game is rarely the whole story. Serious backgammon is played as a match to a target score, and the target is conventionally an odd number: 3, 5, 7, 11 and up. Each game pays its value, quality times cube, into the running score. The first player to reach the target wins the match, and points scored beyond it do not carry anywhere.

The arithmetic of a single game, in one line, is win type times cube value:

• Single win, cube never turned: 1 point.
• Single win, cube on 2: 2 points.
• Gammon, cube on 2: 4 points.
• Gammon, cube on 4: 8 points.
• Backgammon, cube on 4: 12 points.

The Crawford rule governs the end of a match and is used in essentially every tournament. The moment either player first reaches one point short of the target, the very next game is played with no doubling at all. That single game is the Crawford game. Without it, a player who was hopelessly behind could simply double at the first opportunity every game and turn the match into one coin flip.

After the Crawford game, the cube is live again. This stretch is called post-Crawford, and the trailing player normally doubles immediately in every remaining game, because a single point is no longer enough to save them.

Money play works differently. There is no target score; each point is simply worth an agreed stake, every game stands on its own, the Jacoby rule usually applies and the Crawford rule never does.

Your first game, step by step

Everything above, in the order you will actually need it:

• Set up the board: 2 on your 24-point, 5 on your 13-point, 3 on your 8-point, 5 on your 6-point.
• Each player rolls one die. Higher goes first and plays both dice as they lie. Ties re-roll.
• On your turn, roll two dice and play both numbers, four numbers on a double, moving toward your own home board and only onto open points.
• Landing on a lone enemy checker sends it to the bar. If yours is hit, bring it back in through your opponent’s home board before you do anything else.
• Make points where you can, especially your 5-point and the points around it, and try not to leave blots your opponent can reach.
• Bring all fifteen checkers into your home board, then bear them off.
• Take all fifteen off first and you win: 1 point, 2 for a gammon, 3 for a backgammon, multiplied by the cube.

Five habits that will save you more points than any opening theory:

• Hit when you are behind in the race. It is the cheapest way to gain ground you have.
• Fight for your 5-point early. It blocks and it anchors, and it is worth a small risk.
• Do not stack six checkers on one point. Stacked checkers do no work; spread them and make points.
• Before you double, count the pips. Confidence is not equity.
• Do not drop every double you are behind in. Around one game in four is a take, and folding early is how good players quietly beat you with the cube alone.

The mistakes that cost beginners the most are catalogued in common backgammon mistakes, and every term on this page is defined in the backgammon glossary.

Common beginner questions

Where to practise

The fastest way to learn the movement rules is to play a few games where the board enforces them for you, so an illegal move is simply not offered. That is what Orion does: legal moves only, both numbers enforced, entry from the bar enforced, bear off handled by the book, including the highest point rule that trips up almost everyone the first time.

Orion is a modern online backgammon game for iPhone, iPad and Android, free to play, with the full international rules, the doubling cube, ranked seasons across twelve destinations, and coins that are virtual and carry no real world value.

One thing worth knowing before you play backgammon anywhere online: you are trusting somebody else’s dice. Orion seals every game’s dice with a published cryptographic commitment before the first roll and reveals the seed when the game ends, so anyone can recompute every roll afterwards. You can do it right now, in your own browser, on a real finished game, at the verifier. There is more on why that matters in can online backgammon be rigged.