Why a garden board?

Backgammon is played on a wooden board, so this one is a plank board set out on the lawn. The points are long leaves, the checkers are river stones, and the tray at the side is a flower bed. Each stone you bear off turns into a flower there, so your side of the bed blooms as the race ends.

The rules are the standard ones, with one thing left out: the doubling cube, which is used for raising the stakes. Here a game is worth 1, 2 or 3 points, and a match is first to 3 or 5.

A bit of real backgammon history

Backgammon belongs to a family of dice race games called tables, usually played with fifteen pieces a side on a board split into four quarters. Nobody knows exactly where the family began. The Royal Game of Ur, found in royal graves at Ur in Iraq and dated to about 2600 to 2400 BCE, is a much older race game. Some historians think it may be a distant ancestor, but the link is not proven.

The Romans and Byzantines played a tables game called tabula, with three dice instead of two. A Greek epigram describes a game of tabula played by the emperor Zeno, who ruled in the late 400s.

In Persia the game was called nard. A Middle Persian text on chess and nard says the wise minister Bozorgmehr invented it, and reads the board and pieces as a picture of the world, with the stones standing for days and nights. Historians treat the story as a legend.

In medieval England the game was known as tables. The word backgammon turns up in English writing in the middle of the 1600s, though sources give slightly different years. It probably comes from “back” and the old word “gamen”, meaning game, but that is not certain. Edmond Hoyle published a short book on the rules in London in 1743. The doubling cube came much later, in New York clubs in the 1920s.

The garden animals

• Snail: moves its stones almost at random. A good first game.
• Hedgehog: counts pips and grabs every hit it can, but doesn’t mind leaving blots.
• Rabbit: weighs blots, made points, primes and the race before every move.
• Owl: learned the game by playing itself many thousands of times, and looks ahead at every roll you could answer with.

How to play

• Each side has 15 stones. Move yours round the board into your home board, the quarter beside your end of the flower bed. Once all 15 are home, bear them off. The first side to bear off every stone wins.
• To start, each side rolls one die. The higher number goes first and plays both of those dice.
• Each die moves one stone that many points, and one stone can use both. A double is played four times. You must use both dice if you can. If only one can be used, it must be the larger one when that is possible.
• You can’t land on a point held by two or more of the other side’s stones. A single stone is a blot. Land on it and it goes to the bar, and it must come back in before its owner moves anything else.
• When bearing off, a die takes a stone from the matching point. A higher number can take one from your highest point if nothing sits above it.
• A win is 1 point. If the loser has borne off no stones, it is a gammon, worth 2. If the loser also has a stone on the bar or in the winner’s home board, it is a backgammon, worth 3. Your stars match the points.

Tips

Make points, not blots. Two stones on a point are safe. A lone stone in reach of the other side is easy to hit, and being hit costs every pip it had travelled.

Learn a few openers. A 3 and 1 makes your 5 point with 8/5 and 6/5. A 4 and 2 makes your 4 point. A 6 and 1 makes the point just outside your home board.

Count the race. The pip counts above the board show how far each side has to go. Well ahead? Get home safely. Behind? Keep a point in the other side’s home board and wait for a shot.

Your turn

Fifteen cream stones are waiting on the plank board at the top of this page. Start with the Snail and see how many flowers you can grow before the Owl.