The Fascinating History of Backgammon: Myths and Facts

Few games come with as many legends attached as backgammon. Popular articles repeat that it is "5,000 years old," that pharaohs played it and that ancient Roman villas all had a board. Some of these claims are close to the truth, some are stretched and some are simply wrong. This page looks at the most common ones. For a straight chronological account, see our history of backgammon.

Myth: backgammon is 5,000 years old

Race games played with dice on a track are indeed very old. Boards from around 3000 B.C. have been found in the region of ancient Persia, and the famous Royal Game of Ur from Mesopotamia dates to the third millennium B.C. But these were different games with different boards and rules. What can fairly be said is that backgammon belongs to a family of race games with a very long history, not that the modern game has been played unchanged for five millennia.

Myth: the pharaohs played backgammon

Egyptian tombs, including that of Tutankhamun, contained game boards, and tomb paintings show people playing. The game in question, however, was mostly senet, a race game on a board of thirty squares. It shows how popular dice-and-track games were in Egypt, but senet is a cousin of backgammon at best, not the same game.

Closer to the truth: Rome

The Romans played a game called tabula, and here the family resemblance is strong: two players, dice, checkers racing around a board. Tabula is widely seen as a direct ancestor of backgammon, and the word "tables" stayed in use for backgammon-like games in Europe for centuries. The Roman writer Suetonius reports that the emperor Claudius was so devoted to dice games that he wrote a book about them. That book has not survived, so we do not know exactly what it covered.

Fact: medieval Europe knew the game as "tables"

Through the Middle Ages, many variants of tables were played across Europe and the Middle East, while related games such as nard developed in Persia and beyond. The name "backgammon" itself appears in English only in the seventeenth century. Its origin is uncertain; one common explanation links it to the older English words for "back" and "game," since checkers can be sent back to start again.

Fact: the rules were written down in the 1700s

Edmond Hoyle, the English writer best known for card game rules, published a treatise on backgammon in 1743. Works like his helped standardize play in England, and the game we recognize today is close to the one described in that period.

Fact: the doubling cube is a twentieth-century invention

The biggest change in backgammon's long history came in the 1920s, when the doubling cube appeared in New York clubs. Its inventor is not known. The cube lets a player propose doubling the value of the game, and the opponent must either accept or concede. It turned backgammon into a game where judging your chances matters as much as moving checkers, and it is now central to match play. Our doubling cube page explains how it works.

Fact: the game has had several revivals

Backgammon enjoyed a strong wave of popularity in the 1970s, with clubs and tournaments spreading across the United States and Europe. The World Championship in Monte Carlo has been held since 1979. Later, computers changed the game again: programs trained with neural networks began to play at a world-class level, and players started using them to study.

Why the myths persist

Myths survive because they make a good story, and backgammon really does have deep roots. The honest version is still remarkable: a family of race games several thousand years old, a Roman ancestor, centuries of play as "tables," a written rulebook in 1743 and a twentieth-century innovation that made it a game of skill. For more of the people who shaped the modern game, visit backgammon world champions.