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Backgammon is the oldest game still played in its recognisable form. Chess is about fifteen hundred years old. Go is perhaps four thousand. Backgammon — or something very close to it — is at least five thousand, with physical boards found in archaeological sites across Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Indus Valley. No other game has survived that long while remaining popular enough to be played every day in coffee shops, park benches, and now web browsers.

The Royal Game of Ur

The oldest board game artefact ever found is the Royal Game of Ur, excavated from a royal cemetery in southern Iraq and dated to approximately 2600 BCE. The board is inlaid with shell and lapis lazuli and was clearly a prized possession. The game involved racing pieces along a track according to dice rolls, with opportunities to knock opponents backward — a structure that is unmistakably the ancestor of backgammon.

We know the rules because a Babylonian clay tablet from 177 BCE, written by a scribe named Itti-Marduk-balāṭu, describes how the game was played. The tablet is one of the oldest surviving rulebooks for anything, and the game it describes would be recognisable to any modern backgammon player.

Tabula and the Roman Empire

By the time of the Roman Empire, the game had evolved into tabula, played on a board with twenty-four points — exactly the structure of modern backgammon. The Emperor Claudius was famously obsessed with it and reportedly had a board built into his chariot so he could play while travelling. Emperor Nero gambled enormous sums on tabula, reportedly wagering the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.

The Roman version introduced the concept of bearing off — removing pieces from the board once they reached the home quadrant — which remains the core mechanic of the modern game. The Romans also standardised the use of three dice rather than the four-sided knucklebones used in earlier versions.

Nard and the Islamic Golden Age

After the fall of Rome, the game thrived in the Islamic world under the name nard (also nardshir, named after the Sassanid founder). The rules were essentially modern backgammon, and the game spread from Persia through the Arab world, North Africa, and into Moorish Spain.

During the Islamic Golden Age, nard became a subject of mathematical study. Muslim scholars wrote about probability in the context of dice games centuries before European mathematicians formalised the field. The game was accepted by most Islamic jurists as permissible entertainment, unlike pure gambling games, because it combined skill with chance — a distinction that backgammon retains to this day.

Medieval Europe and the name "Backgammon"

The game entered medieval Europe through both the Moorish conquest of Spain and the returning Crusaders, who brought it back from the Middle East. In England it became known as "tables," and it was widely played in taverns and courts alike. King Louis IX of France attempted to ban it in 1254, apparently without success — a pattern that would repeat across centuries as authorities tried and failed to suppress the game.

The name "backgammon" first appeared in English in 1645, most likely derived from Middle English "gamen" (game) with the prefix "back," referring to pieces being sent back to the bar when hit. By this time the rules were essentially identical to the modern game.

The doubling cube and modern play

The single most important innovation in backgammon's modern era was the introduction of the doubling cube in 1920s New York. The cube — a die marked with the numbers 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 — allowed players to raise the stakes of a game at any point. The opponent could accept the doubled stakes or resign immediately. This simple device transformed backgammon from a racing game into a deep strategic contest where reading the position and judging equity became as important as moving the pieces.

The 1970s saw a backgammon craze, driven partly by the doubling cube and partly by high-profile tournaments in Las Vegas and Monte Carlo. Prince Alexis Obolensky organised the first major world championship in 1964, and by the mid-1970s backgammon was one of the most popular games in the Western world.

Computers and neural networks

In 1992, Gerald Tesauro at IBM created TD-Gammon, a neural network that taught itself to play backgammon at world-class level through self-play. TD-Gammon was one of the first demonstrations that neural networks could master a complex game, predating the deep learning revolution by two decades. Modern backgammon AI, including the engines used on sites like PlayVersusAI, descend from these ideas.

Today, computer analysis has settled many longstanding strategic debates in backgammon. Positions that experts argued about for decades have been resolved by running millions of simulated games, and the best human players now study AI rollouts the way chess players study engine lines.

Play the 5,000-year-old game

Five thousand years of evolution have produced a game with a perfect balance of skill and luck, deep enough to spend a lifetime studying and accessible enough to learn in five minutes. Try it against our AI and join a tradition that stretches back to the dawn of civilisation.