A short history of backgammon
Backgammon belongs to a family of "tables" games played with dice and two sets of checkers. The family is very old, its exact origin is uncertain, and many countries rightly call it their own.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 2600 BC | The Royal Game of Ur, a race game from Mesopotamia, may be an ancestor of tables games. |
| 3rd–6th century AD | The Persian tables game nard (nardšir) emerges. |
| AD 476–491 | An epigram of the Byzantine emperor Zeno describes a game of tabula, the earliest tables game that can be identified. |
| 11th century | Tables games appear in France. |
| 1647 | The earliest known mention of the name, as "Baggammon", in a letter by James Howell. |
| Ottoman era | The game's popularity around the Eastern Mediterranean grows; it is still seen as a national game in several countries there. |
| 1920s | The doubling cube is introduced in New York gaming clubs. |
| 1991 | Gerald Tesauro's TD-Gammon at IBM learns the game with a neural network. |
Nard and the Persian dice names
Nard, from Persia, is the closest well-documented relative of modern backgammon. Turkish players still name every roll with Persian numbers: yek, dü, se, cihar, penç, şeş for one to six, so 6-6 is düşeş and 6-5 şeşbeş. The Turkish dictionary records these numbers as Persian loanwords. See the full list of roll names.
Tabula, tavli and tavla
The Romans and Byzantines played tabula, a close cousin of today's game. In Greece "tavli" is still the name for several tables games. In Turkey the game is tavla; Ottoman Turkish also used the word nerd for it. Turkish tavla keeps a few older-feeling rules, such as rolling the opening again and no doubling cube: see Tavla rules.
The cube and the computers
The doubling cube, added in New York in the 1920s, made backgammon a game of judgement about risk as well as moves. Then computers changed the moves too. TD-Gammon, which taught itself by playing against itself, found that splitting the back checkers (24/23) in the opening was better than the popular "slotting" plays; tournament players switched within a few years.
TavlArena's bots and game review use wildbg, an open-source engine in the same neural-network tradition. Our opening chart comes straight from it.
Questions people ask
Who invented backgammon?
Nobody knows. It grew out of a family of old race games; the Persian game nard (3rd–6th century AD) and the Roman and Byzantine tabula are its best-documented ancestors.
Which country does backgammon come from?
The early history points to Persia and the Eastern Mediterranean, but many countries have played it for centuries and treat it as their own.
When was the doubling cube invented?
In the 1920s, in gaming clubs in New York.