The Complete Guide to Backgammon

Chapter 1: What Is Backgammon and Why People Love It

Let's start by getting one thing out of the way: backgammon is not chess. It's not a pure test of cold logic where every move can be calculated to certainty. And it's not a roll-and-move luck fest where you just play the board that happens to appear in front of you. Backgammon lives in a wonderfully uncomfortable middle ground. The dice introduce randomness, true, but how you respond to that randomness is entirely up to you. Every roll forces a choice, and those choices accumulate across a match into something that feels far more strategic than you'd expect from a game with two dice at its core.

So what does it actually look like when you sit down to play? Picture a board that folds in half, opening to reveal two halves of four triangular zones each — those are called points. Each player has fifteen checkers, the little discs that move around the board in a horseshoe pattern. There's a vertical ridge in the middle of the board, called the bar, and a set of dice, a doubling cube (a larger die marked with numbers 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64), and two pairs of dice cups. That's the entire physical kit. The point of the game is to move your fifteen checkers from their starting positions, around the board, and eventually off the board entirely — a process called bearing off. The first player to get all