Backgammon features
The strategy guides cover how to play well. These are the longer pieces about everything else — where the game came from, why it is built the way it is, and the odd, durable culture that has grown up around a board of twenty-four points.
Backgammon carries more history than almost anything else you can buy in a games shop. Its ancestors were being played in Mesopotamia before writing had settled into an alphabet, and the shape of the thing has barely moved since: a track, two dice, and a race that can be interrupted. Chess has been redesigned repeatedly. Backgammon has essentially been left alone.
That longevity leaves traces, and they are the sort of thing the rules pages never have room for. Why does the game have a doubling cube at all, when no other classic board game has anything like it? Why do club players still use terms — beaver, chouette, the Jacoby rule — that make no sense in a tournament? Why did a five-thousand-year-old game suddenly become fashionable in 1970s Manhattan, and then just as suddenly stop? Each of those questions has a real answer, and the answers tend to be more interesting than the tidy version.
Where features sit alongside the rest of the site
If you want to get better, the strategy guides are the place to start, and the tools will do the arithmetic while you learn to do it in your head. If you want to know what a word means mid-game, the glossary is quicker than any essay. Features are for the reading you do away from the board — on the train, or after a club night, when the question in your head is less "what should I have played" and more "why is this game like this".
They lean on the same sources as everything else here: the historical record where it exists, the published accounts of the people who were in the room where it does not, and a plain admission when a story is contested. Backgammon has accumulated a lot of confident folklore over five millennia. A fair amount of it turns out to rest on a single anecdote repeated for fifty years, and it is usually worth saying so.
Reading around the game
Much of what makes backgammon worth writing about is that it sits on a fault line. It is a game of genuine skill in which the dice can humiliate you for an entire evening, which means it has always attracted two quite different crowds: people who want to think hard, and people who want action. The remarkable thing is how well those two have got along. The players who defined the modern game were usually both at once — mathematicians who liked a bet, or gamblers who took the mathematics seriously.
The same tension runs through the game's furniture. The doubling cube is a piece of gambling equipment that turned out to be the deepest strategic idea in the game. Match play was invented to make tournaments possible and ended up producing a whole second theory of the cube. Even the variants scattered around Greece, the Balkans and the Middle East are mostly local answers to the same question about what should happen when you land on a lone checker. Pull on any thread and you get history.
Common questions
What is the difference between a feature and a strategy guide?
The strategy guides are instructional: they explain a technique and how to apply it at the board. Features are background reading about the game itself, its history and the people who shaped it. Neither assumes you have read the other.
How old is backgammon?
The direct ancestors go back around five thousand years, to race games played in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The recognisable modern game, with its twenty-four points and fifteen checkers a side, took shape in the Roman period as tabula and has changed remarkably little since.
Do I need to know the rules to read these?
No. The features are written to make sense on their own. If a term is unfamiliar, the glossary covers it, and the how-to-play guide takes about ten minutes if you would rather start from the board.