Backgammon is a two-player race game on a 24-point board, one of the oldest known board games — surviving sets date to ~3000 BCE. Each side has 15 checkers; roll dice, race them around the board, and bear them all off before your opponent does. Pure dice would make it gambling; the skill comes from blocking, hitting, and pip-count management.
Roll two dice; move two of your checkers (or one checker twice) by those amounts. Land on a single enemy checker to "hit" it back to the bar. Build "primes" of consecutive points to block your opponent. Bear off only after all 15 checkers are in your home board. First to bear off all wins.
Backgammon mixes dice luck with deep tactics. Variance is high per game but skill dominates over a match. Chess is pure perfect-information.
Total distance all your checkers have left to bear off. The lower pip count is winning the race; experts pip-count constantly to decide whether to race or attack.
In stakes and match play, either player may offer to double the stakes; the opponent accepts at the new value or resigns. It's a tournament/money-play device rather than a core rule — this casual single-player build focuses on the movement game and does not use a doubling cube.
Yes — this single-player vs AI implementation, plus a long list of free clients elsewhere. Skill matters most against human opponents at intermediate levels.
You play Ivory, moving from point 24 down to point 1 and bearing off from points 1 to 6. The computer plays Walnut in the opposite direction. Ivory always takes the first turn with an ordinary roll of both dice; there is no opening roll-off. Doubles give four moves. If a roll has no legal move at all, the game says so and passes the turn automatically.
Walnut scores the position left by every complete legal way to play its roll. It does not look ahead to your next roll; it simply picks the highest-scoring result, so with the same position and dice it makes the same choice. The score rewards checkers borne off and opponent checkers on the bar, and penalises its own checkers on the bar. It prefers a lower pip count for itself (weighted 0.5 per pip) over a higher one for you (0.3 per pip), gives a bonus for every point holding two or more checkers (more inside its home board, and for anchors in yours), penalises single exposed checkers (most heavily when they sit in your home board), and adds a bonus for three or more consecutive made points, with an extra reward for a full six-point prime.
Within your own turn, Undo takes back moves one at a time and returns the die. Once your last die is used the turn ends automatically, so the final move of a turn cannot be undone. Games are not saved; reloading the page starts over.
Backgammon is a two-player race on a 24-point board — one of the oldest games in the world. Each side has 15 checkers; you roll two dice, race your checkers home, and bear them all off before your opponent does. The Board Gaming Hub build is single-player versus an AI and focuses on the movement game: this version has no doubling cube, so you can learn the core race without stakes-play complications.
The 24 points split into four quadrants. Each player moves their checkers in the opposite direction toward their own home board (the final quadrant), then bears them off. The standard starting position places checkers on the 24, 13, 8, and 6 points relative to each player. You always move toward your home; you can never move backward.
A lone enemy checker on a point is a blot. Land on it and you hit it — the blot goes to the bar in the center, and its owner must re-enter it in their opponent's home board before making any other move. A point held by two or more enemy checkers is blocked; you cannot land there. Stack six blocked points in a row and you build a prime that a trapped checker cannot jump.
Once all 15 of your checkers are inside your home board, you may start bearing off — removing checkers from the board. A die value bears off a checker from the matching point; if that point is empty, you may bear off from the next-lower occupied point. First player to bear off all 15 wins. If your opponent still has a checker on the bar or in your home board when you finish, you win a double (a gammon).
Prefer perfect-information strategy with no dice? Try Chess (see the free browser chess guide) or the territorial classic Go.