The History of Backgammon: 5,000 Years of Play

From Mesopotamian royal tombs to Roman taverns to the cafés of Istanbul — backgammon is the oldest game in the world that humans still play seriously. A short tour of how it survived.

Most games have a clear origin story — a year, a designer, a city. Backgammon doesn't. The board, the dice, and the basic race-and-block idea show up independently in cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. By the time recorded history starts, people are already playing some version of it.

Here is the short tour.

~3000 BCE — the Royal Game of Ur

The earliest direct ancestor of backgammon is the Royal Game of Ur, named for the Mesopotamian city where Sir Leonard Woolley excavated five boards from royal tombs in the 1920s. The boards are gorgeous — shell inlay, lapis lazuli, bitumen — and they're playable. The British Museum has one. There is a one-page rules tablet in cuneiform from 177 BCE that explains how to play, which makes Ur the only ancient game we can run today with confidence.

The mechanics: two players race seven pieces around a 20-square board, dice (tetrahedral, not cubic) decide moves, certain squares are safe and others let you knock the opponent back to start. Different details, same instincts as modern backgammon. Five thousand years ago, in a city that no longer exists, people were arguing about whether to leave a blot.

~1500 BCE — Senet in Egypt

A parallel game called Senet appears in Egyptian tombs from the same period. Tutankhamun was buried with four Senet boards. The board is 30 squares in three rows of ten, the pieces are pawns, the dice are casting sticks. The Egyptians put Senet on the walls of tombs the way Mesopotamians put Ur in burial goods — a hint that both cultures took it seriously enough to send their dead to the afterlife with the board.

We don't have a complete rule set for Senet — the cuneiform Ur tablet is unique luck — but the concept is the same: race, hazard, dice, partial information. Some Senet squares have hieroglyphs that look like rules ("the house of beauty," "the house of water"), and that may be the first recorded example of board-as-narrative, the idea that each square does something on its own.

~600 BCE to 500 CE — Greece and Rome

The Greeks played kubeia and the Romans played tabula ("the board"). Tabula is the direct grandparent of modern backgammon: a 24-point board, two players, three dice, and a race home. By the late Roman period the table is the social hub of the wine bar; Emperor Claudius wrote a book on tabula (now lost) that was apparently widely read in court. Boards have been found scratched into the marble floors of public squares and the tombstones of professional players.

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, the game didn't. It moved east with the Byzantines and south with traders, where it would change names and gain its modern form.

~600–1500 CE — Persia, the Islamic world, and "nard"

In Sassanid Persia the game becomes nard, played on the modern 24-point board with two dice. There is a charming Persian text — the Wizārišn ī Chatrang — that frames nard as a counterpart to chess: chess (newly arrived from India) is a game of skill and reason, nard is a game where the player has to accept the dice as fate and play it well anyway. That framing has stuck.

From Persia, nard moves through the Islamic world along the trade routes. The medieval Arabic poet al-Hariri writes about it. Cafés in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad keep the game alive through the centuries when European libraries are still hand-copying manuscripts.

By the time the game returns to Western Europe in the Middle Ages — via Spain, Italy, and the Crusades — it has acquired the doubling cube's distant ancestor (Persian players already bet stakes that doubled mid-game) and the two-dice / 15-checkers-per-side / bear-off-when-home structure that modern backgammon will inherit unchanged.

~1600–1900 — England and the modern board

The English call it "backgammon" by the 17th century. The name is a Middle English contraction, possibly from bæc (back) + gamen (game) — the idea that hit checkers go back to the start. Pepys mentions it in his diary in 1665. By the 18th century it's a coffee-house staple in London, played for stakes, with broadly the rules we recognise today.

The 19th century adds the doubling cube in its modern form. The story usually credited — possibly apocryphal — is that an unknown American player in the 1920s introduced the cube to a New York backgammon club and the idea spread from there. The cube is what turns backgammon from a beautiful race into a game of decisions: at any point, the player who's ahead can offer to double the stakes, and the player who's behind has to decide whether the position is recoverable enough to accept or whether to pay the current stake and quit.

That single addition is why serious money players preferred backgammon to most other games for most of the 20th century.

~1980–today — the computer era

The first computer to play strong backgammon was BKG 9.8 in 1979, beating the world champion Luigi Villa in an exhibition match in Monte Carlo — a result that delighted nobody, including Villa, because the program got lucky with the dice. Twenty years later TD-Gammon, a neural-net trained by self-play, played at world-championship level without lucky rolls and changed how serious players studied. Modern engines (eXtreme Gammon, GNU Backgammon) routinely outplay the best humans in race positions and have rewritten textbook opening theory.

The computer era didn't kill backgammon. It made it teachable. A player today can replay any position against an engine, see the equity loss of each candidate move, and learn cube theory at a depth that 1970s champions could only approximate.

Why it survived

Five thousand years of board games is a long horizon. Chess is younger. Go is roughly the same age but it stayed in Asia for the first two and a half thousand years. Backgammon is the only ancient game with continuous, global, serious play from cuneiform tablets to streaming tournaments.

The reason is in the design: the dice keep it accessible, the cube keeps it strategic, the bearing-off race keeps it elegant. Beginners can start playing in five minutes. Grandmasters spend lifetimes on cube decisions in last-roll positions.

The game we ship at 6proclub is the same game that was on those Mesopotamian boards — with provably-fair dice on top, so the modern player can verify the same randomness Tutankhamun's tomb-decorators trusted in casting sticks.

Five thousand years and counting.