To my mind, there can be few more perfect games than backgammon. Equally at home in an Iraqi teashop or played atop a fur in a plutocrat’s ski chalet, it is a game punctuated with bitter glares, bemused chuckles, and outrageous reversals of fortune. For those not yet initiated, the aim is to race all your men (pieces) to your home section and off the board first, avoiding their being knocked off the board and sent back to the beginning, while delaying your opponent’s men as much as possible. It blends luck and skill, and is at times infuriating, but always fun. 

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The name we know dates to 1635, but it has been played under other names and variants for at least 1600 years – 5000 if you think The Royal Game of Ur is close enough. Variants of boards appear in paintings by Bosch, Bruegel, and Caravaggio, and it makes an appearance in Shakespeare (it is said of elderly wit Boyet in Love’s Labour’s Lost that ‘when he plays at tables, [he] chides the dice/In honourable terms’. Gambling, complaining, and cheating are the game’s keenest bedfellows (side-games if you will), and were the world turned to rubble, it wouldn’t take long for a variant........

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