How to Play Backgammon: Rules, Setup, and Your First Game

A complete beginner's guide to backgammon: how to set up the board, how the dice and movement work, what hitting and bearing off mean, and how to win your first real game.

If you have ever watched two people stare hard at a board covered in long triangles and a pair of dice, and wondered what on earth they were doing, this post is for you. Backgammon is one of the oldest games in the world — older than chess, older than the modern alphabet — and the rules can be learned in fifteen minutes. The depth is what takes a lifetime.

This is a complete walkthrough of how to play backgammon, from the first checker on the board to the last one borne off, written so that by the end of it you can sit down and play a real game.

The board, the checkers, the dice

The backgammon board has 24 narrow triangles, called points, alternating in color. The board is split visually into four quadrants of six points each by a raised divider down the middle, called the bar. Each player owns 12 of the 24 points — the 12 closest to them — and they will each move in opposite directions: you move your checkers around the board toward your own home, while your opponent moves theirs in the mirror direction.

You have 15 checkers in your color (typically white or black, but on 6proclub they are ivory and oxblood). Two dice are rolled each turn. The doubling cube is a separate die that is its own subject — see our doubling cube guide for that.

The starting position

Before the first roll, the 15 checkers go on these specific points (numbered from your perspective, with point 1 being the rightmost point of your home board and point 24 being the leftmost point of your opponent's home board):

• Point 24: 2 checkers
• Point 13: 5 checkers
• Point 8: 3 checkers
• Point 6: 5 checkers

Your opponent mirrors this exactly. Notice that the position is asymmetric in a useful way — your checkers furthest back are deep in your opponent's territory, and you have to march them all the way home before you can finish the game.

How a turn works

Both players roll one die to start. The higher number plays first, using both dice values from the combined opening roll. Subsequent turns are taken in alternation, each player rolling both dice.

You move one checker by each die value — they are separate, not a sum. A roll of 4-3 lets you either move one checker 4 pips and a different checker 3 pips, or move a single checker 4 pips and then 3 more pips (provided the intermediate point is legal). Each die is its own little sub-move.

You always move toward your own home board. Your home board is the quadrant containing point 1 through point 6.

Where can you land?

You may land on:

• An empty point — fine.
• A point you already own (any of your own checkers there) — fine, and you may stack as many as you like.
• A point with exactly one of your opponent's checkers — also fine. This is called a hit, and it sends their lone checker (called a blot) to the bar.

You may not land on a point with two or more of your opponent's checkers. Such a point is made against you and acts as a roadblock.

The bar

When you have a checker on the bar, you cannot move any other checker until the one on the bar comes back into play. To re-enter, you roll the dice and try to land on a point in your opponent's home board (their points 1–6 from their perspective, which from your perspective are 19–24). If both possible entry points are blocked by your opponent, you lose your turn entirely. This is why blocking your opponent out — building a prime, several made points in a row — is so devastating.

How to win: bearing off

Once all 15 of your checkers are in your own home board (points 1–6), you may begin bearing off — physically removing checkers from the board, one per matching die value. Roll a 5, you can bear off a checker from the 5-point. Roll a 6 with no checker on the 6-point, the 6 must be used to remove the highest occupied point (or if no qualifying checker exists, to move within the home board).

The first player to bear off all 15 checkers wins.

If your opponent is hit during the bear-off, the hit checker goes back to the bar — even if the bear-off was almost finished — and they have to bring it back from your opponent's home board, all the way around, before they can resume bearing off. This is why "leaving a shot" in the bear-off is one of the worst feelings in the game.

For more on closing out the endgame cleanly, see our piece on bearing off in backgammon.

Gammon and backgammon

If you bear off all 15 checkers and your opponent has not borne off any, that is a gammon — worth double the cube value. If you bear off all 15 and your opponent still has a checker on the bar OR in your home board, that is a backgammon — worth triple. Gammons and backgammons are why the score margins in serious match play can be so volatile.

Doubles

If both dice show the same value, you play that number four times. Roll 5-5 and you have four 5-pip moves to spend. This is an enormous swing of board state and one of the reasons backgammon never feels deterministic — even in a position you appear to be losing, a well-timed double of the right number can reshape the race in a single turn.

A worked example: your first opening move

Let us say you win the opening roll with a 3-1. This is one of the strongest opening rolls in the game and has a single canonical play:

• Move a checker from point 8 to point 5 (using the 3).
• Move a checker from point 6 to point 5 (using the 1).

You have just made the 5-point — built a wall of two checkers there — which is one of the most strategically valuable points on the board. From here, the game has properly begun.

For a complete catalog of best opening plays for all 21 opening rolls, see backgammon opening moves: the 21 best plays.

What to do next

Backgammon is unique among classic games in that you can learn the rules in a single sitting, play your first game tonight, and still be discovering new strategic ideas a decade later. The key shapes — making points, building a prime, timing the back game, knowing when to race — emerge from these rules but are not stated in them. They have to be played to be felt.

If you want to start playing, open a room and you will be in a real game against another human in under three taps. Every dice roll is provably fair — meaning the server cannot tweak your luck, and you can verify any roll yourself with a single SHA-256 hash check.

Backgammon is older than the country you live in. It will probably outlast it too. Welcome to one of the few things humans have been doing well for five thousand years.