The History of Backgammon, and the History of GamesGrid

Backgammon is the oldest board game in continuous play. The lineage runs unbroken from the Royal Game of Ur in Sumer, c. 2600 BCE, through Roman ludus duodecim scriptorum, medieval European tables, the Hoyle codification of 1743, the doubling-cube revolution of the 1920s, the Prince Obolensky world-championship era of the 1970s, and the online server boom that began in the early 1990s. This page traces that arc — focusing on the three moments when the game's popularity exploded, and on the founding and relaunch of GamesGrid itself within the most recent of those moments.

I. Origins: from Sumer to Hoyle

The archaeological record places the earliest direct ancestor of backgammon in the city of Ur, modern southern Iraq, where five game boards excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley between 1922 and 1934 date to approximately 2600–2400 BCE. The Royal Game of Ur is a race game played with binary lot-sticks on a twenty-square board; the British Museum holds rule tablets in cuneiform from c. 177 BCE describing playable variants, written by the Babylonian scribe Itti-Marduk-balatu.

By the late Roman Republic, an evidently related family had spread across the Mediterranean. Tabula and the closely related ludus duodecim scriptorum (the "twelve-line game") used a thirty-piece board, two or three dice, and a hit-and-re-enter mechanic that survives substantially intact in modern backgammon. The Emperor Claudius (10 BCE – 54 CE) wrote a treatise on the game — now lost, but referenced by Suetonius — and travelled with a custom board built into his carriage.

The medieval European descendant was simply called tables. It is the tables of Chaucer and Caxton. The modern name "backgammon" first appears in English in the 17th century, attested in James Howell's Familiar Letters (1645) and in Francis Willughby's manuscript Volume of Plaies (c. 1672). The rules were codified by Edmond Hoyle in A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon (London, 1743), which remained the standard English-language reference for almost two centuries.

The parallel Eastern tradition is just as old. Nard is documented in Sasanian Persia by the 6th century CE — the Vizārišn ī Čatrang ud Nihišn ī Nēw-Ardaxšīr describes its invention as a counter to chess. Tavla in Anatolia and Tavli in Greece descend from the same family. The Greek game is uniquely played as a three-game match: Portes (mechanically identical to backgammon), Plakoto (in which a checker landing on a single opposing piece pins it rather than hits it), and Fevga (no hitting, no doubling, all entry on the same side). In Russia and the Persian-speaking world the game is Nardi: short nardi corresponds to modern backgammon, long nardi has a different starting setup and a no-hit rule.

This is the lineage GamesGrid is part of. Five thousand years. Continuous play.

II. The first hype: New York, 1920–1940

The single largest rule change in the modern era was not invented in antiquity but in a Manhattan club between 1925 and 1928. The doubling cube — a six-sided die marked 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 that lets either player propose to double the stakes, with the opponent's option to accept or concede — was introduced anonymously, but the consensus attribution to "an unknown New York player, c. 1925" is supported by Oswald Jacoby and John Crawford in their The Backgammon Book (1970). The cube transformed backgammon from a folk race game into a piece of formal decision theory. Every modern equity calculation, from Janowski's cube-action formula to the rollout engines inside GNU Backgammon and eXtreme Gammon, exists because of that one cubic die.

The 1920s and 1930s were the game's first commercial boom. The major American newspapers ran weekly columns. Backgammon was the after-dinner game of the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Whitneys; English country houses and Côte d'Azur hotels stocked custom inlaid boards. The first American National Championship was organised in 1931.

The Depression and World War II flattened the social scene that supported it, and from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s backgammon survived primarily as a club game and a serious gambling pursuit in a small handful of cities — Paris, Monte Carlo, Beirut, New York.

III. The second hype: Las Vegas and Studio 54, 1970–1985

The second boom began with one man. Prince Alexis Obolensky — Russian émigré aristocrat, hotelier, and tournament organiser — staged the first major international backgammon invitational at the Lucayan Beach Hotel in Freeport, Bahamas, in March 1964. Three years later, the first event explicitly carrying the title "World Championship" was held at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in 1967, won by Tim Holland. The World Championship returned to the Bahamas — to Paradise Island — in 1975. Obolensky's Backgammon: The Action Game (1969, with Ted James) became a bestseller.

The cultural moment was extraordinary. Backgammon was the in-game at Studio 54 in late-1970s New York. Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine published a dedicated backgammon column. Paul Magriel — a strong amateur chess player turned backgammon analyst — wrote a weekly column for the New York Times (1977–1980) and published Backgammon (1976), the single most influential strategy book ever written on the game and still the canonical reference for positional play. The 1975 World Championship in Las Vegas drew prize pools comparable to high-stakes poker.

This era also produced the formal mathematics that the modern competitive scene still uses. Émile Borel had laid the game-theoretic foundations in Théorie des jeux et les équations intégrales (1921). Edward Thorp — the same statistician who'd written Beat the Dealer — applied formal probability to the doubling cube in a 1978 paper on bearoff equities. William Robertie won the World Championship in 1983 and 1987 and authored the Modern Backgammon and Advanced Backgammon trilogy, which formalised the theory of efficient and inefficient doubles.

By the mid-1980s the casino-glamour wave had receded, but the analytical infrastructure was now in place: a working tournament circuit, a publishing canon, and a body of mathematics ready to feed the next, far larger wave.

IV. The third hype: online, 1992–present

The internet era of backgammon began in July 1992, when Andreas Schneider launched the First Internet Backgammon Server (FIBS) on a Berlin university workstation. FIBS introduced an ELO-style rating system specifically adapted for backgammon's variance, supported live human-versus-human play in real time across continents, and — crucially — produced the first downloadable match-log format that could be fed into analytical engines.

The first of those engines, Jellyfish, was released by Fredrik Dahl in 1994. It was a neural network in the lineage of Tesauro's TD-Gammon (IBM Research, 1992) — the first program of any kind to demonstrate self-play reinforcement learning at superhuman level on any complex game. Jellyfish was followed by Snowie in 1998, GNU Backgammon in the early 2000s (the open-source standard), and eXtreme Gammon (XG) in 2009, which remains the world reference today. Modern PR ratings — the universal currency of competitive skill measurement — are calibrated against XG's evaluations. The full engine timeline is on the Bots & AI page.

Onto that infrastructure came the commercial servers.

This is the era in which GamesGrid was founded, operated, was acquired, went dark, and is now being relaunched.

V. GamesGrid: 1996–2008, 2021–

The GamesGrid timeline, with the major inflection points:

The 2026 product is not a port. The original 1996–2008 client was a Java-and-Win32 application built against a server stack that is long gone. The new platform is a fresh implementation — modern client engineering, modern neural-net bot pipeline, modern integrity tooling — that inherits the original product philosophy and the original bot cast list rather than the original code.

VI. What we kept, what we changed

We kept the bots. Not the binaries — those are gone — but the characters. GG Weasel, GG Raccoon, GG Forever, GGotter, GGbeaver, GGchipmunk, and MrHyperBot are back, recreated from their documented playing fingerprints, and they are joined by a new generation of named bot opponents. The fuller picture of the bot roster and Career Mode will be published closer to launch.

We kept the closed-client model — match data and ratings live on the server, not on the local machine, which means cross-device play and an auditable match history that no individual player can rewrite.

We kept the analytical transparency. Every match is recorded in standard format. Players can export to GNU Backgammon, XG, or BGBlitz for independent post-game review. Player PR is the published rating, not a hidden internal score. The PR methodology is documented.

We changed the business model. The original GamesGrid drifted, after the 2005 poker pivot, into a friction-heavy tournament-entry economy. The 2026 platform is being built on the opposite principle — no coin currency, no pay-to-win mechanics, no rake-disguised-as-membership. Membership and pricing details will be published closer to launch.

We changed the RNG. The original server's roll generator was never publicly documented. The 2026 platform uses Mersenne Twister (MT19937), with audit-logged seed sources and a publicly stated commitment to uniform distribution. The contrast case is documented on Bots & AI — we name the servers that historically rigged their distributions, and we name our alternative.

VII. Where we are in the larger story

A 5,000-year-old game is in its third online boom. The infrastructure that the FIBS-era and GamesGrid-era servers built — open match formats, neural-network analysis engines, public rating systems, world-class published theory — has matured to the point where every serious player can review every move against a world-class oracle for free. Backgammon is in a stronger position than it has been since the Studio 54 years.

GamesGrid is back. The thirty-year arc continues.

Footnotes