Concept

Backgammon

Overview

Backgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back at least 1,600 years. The earliest record of backgammon itself dates to 17th-century England, being descended from the 16th-century game of Irish.

Backgammon is a two-player game of contrary movement in which each player has 15 pieces known traditionally as men (short for "tablemen"), but increasingly known as "checkers" in the United States in recent decades. The backgammon table pieces move along 24 "points" according to the roll of two dice. The objective of the game is to move the 15 pieces around the board and be first to bear off, i.e., remove them from the board. The achievement of this while the opponent is still a long way behind results in a triple win known as a backgammon, hence the name of the game.

Backgammon involves a combination of strategy and luck from rolling of the dice. While the dice may determine the outcome of a single game, the better player will accumulate the better record over a series of many games. With each roll of the dice, players must choose from numerous options for moving their pieces and anticipate possible counter-moves by the opponent. The optional use of a doubling cube allows players to raise the stakes during the game.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

After dinner he played backgammon with my mother, two games being played every night; for many years a score of the games which each won was kept, and in this score he took the greatest interest. He became extremely animated over these games, bitterly lamenting his bad luck and exploding with exaggerated mock-anger at my mother's good fortune.
Charles Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1
Names Backgammon twice; opens on Backgammon.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
In all calculations about cards it is assumed that the cards are thoroughly shuffled, which makes one deal quite independent of another. In point of fact the cards seldom are, in practice, shuffled sufficiently to make this true; thus, in a game of whist, in which the cards have fallen in suits of four of the same suit, and are so gathered up, they will lie more or less in sets of four of the same suit, and this…
Charles S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic
States what Backgammon is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
They have a beginning, middle, and end. In games, rules of order run through various minor acts and bind them into a connected whole. The rhythm, the competition, and cooeperation involved in most plays and games also introduce organization. There is, then, nothing mysterious or mystical in the discovery made by Plato and remade by Froebel that play is the chief, almost the only, mode of education for the child in…
John Dewey, How We Think
States what Backgammon is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Iranian philosophy.

Explore Backgammon in the interactive graph →