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Backgammon for Beginners

If you've never played backgammon — or you played a few times years ago and the rules have faded — this page is the soft on-ramp. The full reference lives on the backgammon rules page; here we cover the game in 15 minutes: what's on the board, how a turn works, how you win, and the three early decisions that decide most games.

You won't memorise everything on first read. You don't have to. By the end of this page you'll have the working vocabulary to follow a real match, understand what the experienced player at the next table is doing, and start playing your first games with confidence.

The 90-second version

Backgammon is a two-player race game played on a long rectangular board. Each player has 15 checkers (the round pieces, sometimes called pieces, men, or stones) and rolls two dice each turn.

The goal is simple: move all 15 of your checkers around the board and off the other side, before your opponent does the same with theirs. The first player to take all 15 checkers off wins the game.

The board has a layout that looks complicated but is regular: 24 narrow triangular points arranged six per quadrant, with a raised bar down the middle separating the two halves. Your checkers and your opponent's checkers travel in opposite directions — you're not racing on the same track, you're racing on overlapping tracks that pass through each other.

Two layers sit on top of this simple race. The first is hitting — landing on a single opposing checker sends it to the bar and forces it to re-enter the game from the start. The second is the doubling cube — a small numbered die that lets either player raise the stakes mid-game, with the opponent choosing to accept the raise or concede. Those two layers are what turn backgammon from a folk race into a piece of formal decision theory.

What's on the board

A backgammon board is a long rectangle divided into four quadrants by the central bar. Each quadrant holds six points; the points alternate light and dark colour purely for visual contrast — the colour has no rule meaning.

From your own perspective, the four quadrants are:

The 24-point is the corner farthest from your bear-off tray. The 1-point is the corner nearest it. Checkers move from your 24-point toward your 1-point, then off the board.

Every checker on the board sits on a point. A point can hold one checker (a blot — vulnerable), two or more checkers of the same colour (a made point — safe), or zero checkers (an open point that either player can land on).

The starting position places exactly 15 of your checkers on four points: 2 on your 24-point, 5 on your 13-point, 3 on your 8-point, and 5 on your 6-point. Your opponent's setup is the exact mirror image. The full visual setup with a board photo is on the backgammon setup page.

How a turn actually plays out

Each turn follows the same pattern:

  1. Roll both dice. The face values determine how many points (pips) you can move.
  2. Move two checkers, or one checker twice. The dice give two separate moves — you can use each die to move a different checker, or use both dice on the same checker (treating it as two consecutive moves of the values shown).
  3. Doubles play four times. If you roll the same number on both dice (e.g., 4-4), you play that number four times — so 4-4 lets you make four moves of four pips each, in any combination across your checkers.
  4. You must use both dice if it's legal to do so. You can't deliberately waste a die by making only one of two possible moves. If only one die can legally be played, you play that one and forfeit the other.

A move lands a checker on a point. The rules for what's legal:

The first time you hit an opposing checker, the rhythm of the game changes — they're now playing catch-up, and you have a few free turns to consolidate. The first time you get hit, you'll learn how it feels to enter from the bar against a half-closed home board.

Three decisions that decide most games

Once you understand the mechanics, the game becomes a sequence of decisions. Three of them — repeated every game, in roughly the same order — decide the outcome of most matches.

1. What to do with your back checkers

The two checkers on your 24-point are deep behind enemy lines. Every game, you'll face the question: do you escape them quickly, or anchor them somewhere safe and use them as a defensive base?

Escaping is faster but exposes them to being hit. Anchoring (making a point with both checkers on the same square) is safer but slower. The decision depends on the dice you roll early and the structure your opponent is building.

The opening rolls page tabulates the best play for every possible opening roll.

2. Whether to make the 5-point — the golden point

The 5-point in your own home board is the single most valuable point in backgammon. Players call it the golden point. Making it early — getting two checkers onto your 5-point — restricts your opponent's escape options and gives you a structural foundation for everything else. The opening roll 3-1 has one canonical play, taught to every backgammon student: bring one checker from the 8-point and one from the 6-point to the 5-point.

The deeper treatment of the golden point's strategic value is on the golden point page.

3. When (and whether) to double

The doubling cube sits in the middle of the board, on top of the bar, showing the number 64 (which represents the current cube multiplier of 1). Either player can, at the start of their own turn, propose to double the stakes by turning the cube to 2 and offering it to the opponent.

The opponent then chooses: take (accept the double, keep playing at twice the stakes, and retain the option to redouble later), or drop (concede the current game at the current stakes — typically 1 point — and start a new game).

Knowing when to offer a double, when to accept one, and when to drop is the single deepest skill in the game. The full treatment with worked examples is on the match equity page and the Crawford rule page.

How you actually win

A backgammon game ends when one player has borne off all 15 checkers — moved them all from their home board off the board into the bear-off tray. The winner scores points based on how decisively they won:

If the cube has been turned (e.g., to 2), a gammon at that cube value is worth 2 × 2 = 4 points. That's the lever the doubling cube gives the leading player.

A match is a sequence of games played to a target score — most commonly 5, 7, or 9 points. The first player to reach that target wins the match. The cube and the gammon multiplier interact with the match score in ways that change every cube decision — that interaction is the world that the match equity table maps.

Now that you have the structure, the three pages to read in order:

For specific terms you encounter mid-read, the backgammon glossary has a definition for every piece of vocabulary in the modern game — from ace-point to XG.

And if you want the historical context for why this game has been continuously played for 5,000 years, the backgammon history page traces the line from the Royal Game of Ur through Roman tabula to Edmond Hoyle's 1743 rulebook to the doubling cube's invention in a Manhattan club in 1925.

Welcome to the game. It's older than chess, deeper than most people realise on the first read, and you'll spend the rest of your life finding new positions in it.