How to play backgammon

Two players, fifteen checkers each, two dice and a board. One side moves their checkers one way, the other moves the opposite way, and the first to bring all fifteen home and lift them off the board wins. That is the whole game in a sentence. The depth comes from what happens in between — when to race, when to hit, when to build a wall, and when to risk a checker on its own.

The board

A backgammon board has 24 narrow triangles called points, in four groups of six. The points are numbered from each player's own perspective: your home board holds points 1 to 6, the outer board holds 7 to 12, and the far side runs 13 to 24. The tall divider down the middle is the bar.

Two of those points have names worth knowing from the start. The 7-point is the bar point, and the 13-point is the midpoint — the spot where each player stacks their largest group of checkers. That midpoint will come up again when you learn to count the race.

Each player moves in a single direction, from the 24-point round towards the 1-point, and the two players travel in opposite directions. You are always heading home; your opponent is heading the other way, towards theirs.

The starting position

Every game opens from the same fixed layout. For each player: five checkers on the 13-point, five on the 6-point, three on the 8-point and two on the 24-point. That adds up to fifteen, and it leaves both players with an identical pip count of 167 — the total distance, in points, that all your checkers still have to travel.

The object of the game

You win by being first to bear off — to remove all fifteen of your checkers from the board. Before you can lift a single one, every checker you own must be sitting in your home board, the six points closest to you. Getting them there is the race; stopping your opponent from getting there is the fight.

Rolling and moving

Players take turns rolling two dice. The two numbers are separate moves: a roll of 6-3 lets you move one checker six points and another three, or move a single checker three and then six, so long as each leg lands on a point you are allowed to use. You may land on any point that is empty, holds your own checkers, or holds exactly one of your opponent's.

Doubles are the exception, and they are the engine of a fast game. Roll the same number on both dice and you play it four times. A 4-4 is four moves of four pips. You are obliged to use as much of your roll as the rules permit: if you can play both numbers, you must; if only one can be legally played, you play it, taking the higher number when you have a choice.

Hitting and the bar

A point with a single checker on it is a blot, and a blot is vulnerable. If your opponent's move lands exactly on your blot, your checker is hit. It comes off the point and goes onto the bar, and it has to start its journey all over again from the far side.

This is where backgammon stops being a simple race. A checker on the bar must re-enter before its owner can do anything else. To re-enter, you roll and bring it in on the matching point in your opponent's home board — a 5 enters on their 5-point. If the numbers you roll both land on points your opponent has blocked with two or more checkers, you stay on the bar and the turn is lost. Trapping an opponent on the bar behind a wall of points is one of the most powerful things you can do.

Making points and building a prime

Land two or more checkers on the same point and you own it: the opponent cannot land there, and your own blots are safe there. String several owned points together in a row and you build a prime. The strongest version is the six-prime — six consecutive points — which no checker can jump, because no single die rolls higher than six. A checker stuck behind a full six-prime is going nowhere until the wall breaks.

Most games are a tug-of-war between racing and blocking. When you are ahead, you usually want to run; when you are behind, you look to hit, hold an anchor in the opponent's home board, and build points that slow them down.

Bearing off

Once all fifteen of your checkers are home, you start lifting them off. A roll removes a checker from the point matching the number, and there are rules for what to do when the dice are higher than your furthest checker. It rewards tidy, efficient distribution — wasted pips here lose races that looked won. The full method, including how to play safe when your opponent still holds an anchor, has its own guide: bearing off without wasting pips.

The doubling cube

The cube is what turns backgammon from a pleasant board game into a serious contest. It is a six-sided die marked 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64, and it tracks the value of the game. At any point, before rolling, a player who believes they are ahead may offer to double the stake. The opponent accepts and plays on for the higher value, or declines and gives up the current stake. Used well, the cube wins more points than the checkers do — which is why it has a guide of its own: when to double and when to take.

Winning, gammons and backgammons

A normal win is worth whatever the cube says — one point if it was never turned. But the margin matters. If you bear off all your checkers before your opponent has borne off any, you win a gammon, worth double. If you bear off everything while they still have a checker in your home board or stranded on the bar, that is a backgammon, worth triple. Those multipliers are why a losing position is sometimes worth fighting to salvage even one checker home.

From here

That is enough to play. The fastest way to make it stick is to start a game — pass-and-play with a friend — and let the rules become muscle memory. When you are ready to go deeper, the next steps are learning to read the race with a quick pip count, getting the cube right, and trying the variants, from Nackgammon to the Bulgarian games Tapa and Gul Bara. Anything you do not recognise will be waiting in the glossary.