rulesculturetavla
Most people who say they play backgammon play one of a dozen related games. The board is the same, the checkers are the same, and then the rules fork: in one version you hit an enemy checker, in another you pin it, and in a third you never touch it at all.
Knowing which one is on the table saves an argument, and the differences are genuinely interesting, because each variant is a different answer to the same question about how much aggression a game should allow.
What is the standard international game?
The one played in tournaments, and the one the word backgammon means without qualification. Fifteen checkers each, opposing directions of travel, a lone checker can be hit and sent to the bar, and the doubling cube governs the stakes. Every variant below is best understood as this game with one rule changed.
It is also the game Orion plays. We considered offering the regional variants and decided that one game played by everyone, on a single ladder, was worth more than several smaller pools that could never meet.
What are the three Greek games?
In Greece the board holds three games, not one, and tavli means the set of them. They are played in rotation, usually best of five or seven, and a player who is good at one is not automatically good at the next. That rotation is the point: it rewards range.
- Portes, which is the standard game: opposing directions, hitting allowed, the version an international player sits down to without needing anything explained.
- Plakoto, where a lone checker is not hit but PINNED: your checker lands on top of it and it cannot move until you leave. Trapping the opponent's back checker on their own one point can decide the game in the opening minutes.
- Fevga, where nobody is ever hit and both players travel in the SAME direction. It becomes a pure race for space, and a single checker is enough to block a point.
Plakoto is the one that surprises people most. Because a pinned checker is immobilised rather than sent home, a bad early position is not a setback you can recover from by re-entering. It simply sits there, and you play the rest of the game a checker short.
What is acey-deucey?
An American variant with a naval history, popular in the United States services through the twentieth century. Checkers start OFF the board and enter as they would from the bar, which turns the opening into its own contest, and a roll of one and two is special: you play the one and the two, then choose any doubles you like, then roll again.
The effect is a game with a much wilder swing than the standard one. That extra roll after a chosen double can undo a comfortable lead in a single turn, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on who you ask.
What are nackgammon and hypergammon?
Both are deliberate experiments with the starting position rather than the rules.
- Nackgammon, devised by Nack Ballard, moves a checker so that each side starts with two checkers deep in the opponent's home board instead of one. Games last longer, back games are far more common, and the opening theory of the standard game mostly does not apply.
- Hypergammon gives each player three checkers instead of fifteen. It is short, sharp, and completely solved: the perfect play from any position is known, which makes it a strange and useful thing to study.
What is narde, and why is there no hitting?
Narde, played across Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, starts with all fifteen checkers stacked on a single point and forbids hitting entirely. Like fevga, it is a race decided by blocking rather than by contact, and like fevga it demands a completely different kind of patience from the international game.
The family resemblance across all of these is the clue to how old the game is. When a design survives five thousand years and crosses that many borders, it does not arrive anywhere unchanged. Each region kept the board and rewrote the one rule it cared most about.
Which variant should I learn first?
The standard game, without hesitation. It has the deepest published theory, the largest pool of opponents, and every concept it teaches transfers: the pip count, timing, the value of a made point, and how to use the doubling cube. Learn it first and plakoto will take you an afternoon.
Learn a regional variant first and the reverse is not true, because the standard game asks you to weigh a risk that fevga never presents and plakoto resolves differently. Start where the theory is, then go and enjoy the rest. The door at orion.arthea.ai/go carries the App Store and Google Play links and always shows what is available right now.