History of Backgammon: From Ancient Race Games to Tables

Backgammon belongs to a family of race games that is thousands of years old. In all of them, players roll dice and move pieces along a track, trying to get home before the opponent. No single inventor or birthplace can be named, and some popular stories go further than the evidence. What follows is what we can say with reasonable confidence, from the earliest race games to the tables games of medieval Europe. The modern story, from the eighteenth century on, continues in That's History.

The earliest race games

The best known early race game is the Royal Game of Ur, named after the city in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq, where richly decorated boards were found in royal tombs dating to around the middle of the third millennium BC. It was played on a board of twenty squares with pyramid-shaped dice. Its rules were partly reconstructed from a clay tablet written much later. The Royal Game of Ur is not backgammon, but it shows that the idea of racing pieces with dice is very old.

Senet: a relative, not an ancestor

In ancient Egypt, people played senet on a board of thirty squares in three rows, with throwing sticks instead of cubic dice. Senet boards have been found in many tombs, including that of Tutankhamun. Senet is often called the ancestor of backgammon, but the link is loose: it is better seen as a distant relative in the same family of race games.

Persia and nard

In Persia a race game called nard became widely played. A Middle Persian text tells a legend in which a wise minister invented nard as an answer to the game of chess, which had arrived from India. In that story the board, the pieces and the dice were given symbolic meanings tied to time and to the movement of the heavens. Nard spread across the Middle East and Central Asia, and versions of it, such as long nardy, are still played today. Archaeologists have also found game boards and dice at Bronze Age sites in Iran, though how closely those games relate to nard is debated.

Rome: from twelve lines to tabula

The Romans played a game called ludus duodecim scriptorum, the game of twelve lines, on a board of three rows. Over time it gave way to tabula, played on two rows of twelve points, which is the same layout as the modern board. Each player had fifteen checkers and used three dice. A sixth-century Greek epigram describes a single, disastrous throw in a game played by the Emperor Zeno, and the position it describes can be set up on a modern backgammon board. Tabula is the closest ancient relative of backgammon that we know.

Asia: sugoroku and other games

Similar games traveled east. In Japan, a version known as ban-sugoroku was played, and in the late seventh century it was banned because of gambling. Related games were also known in China and India. These games show how far the basic idea traveled, even though each region developed its own rules.

Medieval Europe: the game of tables

In the Middle Ages, Europeans played a whole group of games on the same board, known in English simply as tables. A thirteenth-century Spanish book of games, made for King Alfonso X of Castile in 1283, describes several of them alongside chess and dice. Different countries had their own favorites: tric-trac in France, tavole reale in Italy, and in England a version that would eventually be called backgammon. These games shared the board and the checkers but differed in starting positions and scoring.

What carried over

By the end of the Middle Ages, the main features of backgammon were in place: a board of 24 points, fifteen checkers per side, movement by dice and the need to bring checkers home. What came later, such as standard rules, the name and the doubling cube, belongs to the modern history. For how the game is played today, see how to play backgammon.