[3] By the 19th century, however, backgammon had spread to Europe, where it rapidly superseded other tables games like Trictrac in popularity, and also to America, where the doubling cube was introduced.

Its equipment is similar or identical to earlier tables games that have been depicted for centuries in art, leading to the mistaken belief that backgammon itself is much older.

Various other board games spanning the 10th to 7th centuries BC have been found throughout modern day Iraq, Syria, Egypt and western Iran.

[5] The earliest identifiable tables game, Tabula, meaning 'table' or 'board', is described in an epigram of Byzantine Emperor Zeno (AD 476–491).

[8][11] Little specific text about the gameplay of Ludus duodecim scriptorum has survived;[12] it may have been related to the older Ancient Greek dice game Kubeia.

In Spain, the Alfonso X manuscript Libro de los Juegos, completed in 1283, describes rules for a number of dice and table games in addition to its discussion of chess.

Tables games appear widely in paintings of this period, mainly those of Dutch and German painters, such as van Ostade, Jan Steen, Hieronymus Bosch, and Bruegel.

Irish had been popular at the Scottish court of James IV and considered to be "the more serious and solid game" when the variant which became known as Backgammon began to emerge in the first half of the 17th century.

Cigarette, liquor and car companies began to sponsor tournaments, and Hugh Hefner held backgammon parties at the Playboy Mansion.

Board and committee members include many of the top players, tournament directors and writers in the worldwide backgammon community.

The USBGF has recently created Standards of Ethical Practice[37] to address issues on which tournament rules fail to touch.

Backgammon playing pieces may be termed men, checkers, draughts, stones, counters, pawns, discs, pips, chips, or nips.

A backgammon or triple game is worth 3 points and occurs when the losing player has borne off no pieces and has one or more on the bar and/or in the winner's home table (inner board).

If both opponents roll the same opening number, the doubling cube is incremented on each occasion yet remains in the middle of the board, available to either player.

The Murphy rule may be invoked with a maximum number of automatic doubles allowed and that limit is agreed to prior to a game or match commencing.

This encourages a player with a large lead to double, possibly ending the game, rather than to play it to conclusion hoping for a gammon or backgammon.

For instance, only allowing a maximum of five men on any point (Britain)[55] or disallowing "hit-and-run" in the home board (Middle East).

After the opening, backgammon players frequently rely on some established general strategies, combining and switching among them to adapt to the changing conditions of a game.

Many positions require a measurement of a player's standing in the race, for example, in making a doubling cube decision, or in determining whether to run home and begin bearing off.

In practice, the takepoints and doubling points are somewhere in between, since while cube ownership cannot be ignored, assuming maximal efficiency for a re-cube is also not a valid assumption.

[86] A successful triangular backgammon tournament, devised by UKBGF,[87] was hosted in 2025 by the Walbrook Club versus the Haberdashers' & Salters' Companies.

The 2013 season of the European Backgammon Tour featured 11 stops and 19 qualified players competing for €19,000 in a grand finale in Lefkosa, Northern Cyprus.

Before the commercialization of artificial neural network programs, proposition bets on specific positions were very common among backgammon players and gamblers.

[66] Backgammon is considered the national game in many countries of the Eastern Mediterranean:[93] Egypt,[94] Turkey,[95] Cyprus,[96] Syria,[97] Israel,[98] and Palestine,[99] Lebanon[93] and Greece.

[100] The popularity of the game across the region is primarily an oral tradition,[97] and appears to have been strengthened during the era of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the whole Eastern Mediterranean in the early modern period.

Since at least the early 19th century, Damascus became well known as the preeminent location for Damascene-style wooden marquetry backgammon sets that have become famous throughout the region.

[97] A unique feature of backgammon throughout the region is players' use of mixed Persian and Turkish numbers to announce dice rolls, rather than Arabic or other local languages.

Early versions of BKG played badly even against poor players, but Berliner noticed that its critical mistakes were always at transitional phases in the game.

[59] In this method, a Monte-Carlo evaluation of positions is conducted (typically thousands of trials) where different random dice sequences are simulated.

Neural network research has resulted in three modern proprietary programs, JellyFish,[108] Snowie[109] and eXtreme Gammon,[110] as well as the shareware BGBlitz[111] and the free software GNU Backgammon.