Backgammon is younger than the boards it uses
Tables games stretch back millennia, yet the name backgammon appears only in a 1647 letter—emerging from the Anglo-Scottish game Irish. A 1920s New York doubling cube turned parlour play into expected-value strategy. Prince Alexis Obolensky made it a 1960s celebrity fad.
Backgammon is a two-player tables game: fifteen pieces move around twenty-four points according to two dice, racing to bear off first. A triple win when the opponent remains far behind gives the game its name. Strategy mixes with luck; stronger players win more over long series. An optional doubling cube raises stakes mid-game.
Equipment resembles much older games, causing confusion about age. The Royal Game of Ur, circa 2600 BC, may be an ancestor; Byzantine Emperor Zeno's fifth-century Tabula used three dice and fifteen counters but no bar or doubling die. Roman ludus duodecim scriptorum and Persian nard predate medieval European tables games spread through France, Germany, Iceland, and Spain by the thirteenth century.
The modern name arrived in seventeenth-century England. Irish, played at James IV's Scottish court, was the serious tables variant until backgammon emerged in the first half of the 1600s. James Howell's 1647 letter mentions Baggammon; Francis Willoughby wrote rules around 1672. By the eighteenth century clergy favored it over Irish; Edmond Hoyle published strategy in 1753. By 1850 the bar, hit blots, gammon, and back-gammon scoring matched today's conventions.
Twentieth-century New York clubs introduced the doubling cube in the 1920s, forcing probability estimates. Prince Alexis Obolensky co-founded the International Backgammon Association, ran a 1964 Manhattan tournament attracting royalty and press, and sparked a campus and nightclub craze with Las Vegas championships by 1967. Software and internet play arrived in the 1990s; the United States Backgammon Federation formed in 2009 to revive organized play.
Source: Backgammon
