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 to emerge with all three inescapably in tow. 

Backgammon is a strangely forgiving game for the amateur, and a little bit of knowledge goes a long way. Watching pros play, there is little sense of machinations far beyond your comprehension: core strategies are self-evident (there are comparatively few), and you can read a board in a moment. Fate makes fools of those who dare to presume about the next few moves, and you must adapt to the board you’re playing, not the one you wish to play.  

Yet, like most combative mind-games, there is something mystical and even quasi-romantic that cannot be disentangled, hence the game’s popularity with artists. For a brief while your eyes and minds are locked together, each sizing up the other and calling upon fate to side in your favour. I was taught to play by an ex and know of at least two couples who met over a backgammon board – one pair at after-drinks, another at a backgammon social at a trendy bar. It makes sense, given the intellectual tango involved, and if the worst comes to the worst, you can always upend the board in a fit of pique.  

The boards themselves are often intricate, and woe betide the fashionable house without a set. Typically a piece is missing, inelegantly replaced with a bottle cap or pebble. Our family set is a late 19th century trompe l’oeil disguised to look like a bound leather book, and there is something magical in opening it up to reveal the gold inlay and boxwood disks. I get the same enjoyment from well-made roulette sets: the chips have the same satisfying clack when you run a few over in your hand (bakelite are the best), and like Chess and Go, the cream and black can’t help but summon up Borgesian images of good and evil, fortune and doom.  

Woe betide the fashionable house without a set

Woe betide the fashionable house without a set

It is in gambling – and extended gameplay using the doubling die (first introduced in 1920s New York) – that backgammon truly comes into its own. At any moment a player may offer the die to their opponent. If the opponent declines, they concede that game. If they accept, the match is worth twice the number of points. That player may later offer to re-double, further increasing the stakes of that one game (the die may go back and forth up to 64 times the game’s initial value).  

Through this, you get protracted battles of wits that can last for weeks (nay, months), where the game acts as a stand-in for your own intellects. The skill comes from playing your opponent psychologically to find the exact moment to offer the double. A Persian friend (whose father wrote his PhD on the game) and I spent six months of our travels playing increasingly hostile backgammon and gin rummy. After an improbable series of fortunate rolls, he declared that while I had been sleeping, he had ’stayed up all night practicing his luck’. I conceded that game. A ‘gammon’ (taking off all your men before your opponent has removed one), or the elusive ‘backgammon’ (the same but where your opponent has a man off the board or still in your home board) can be truly humiliating. 

Much like tennis, when you find a good opponent, you cherish them. My damnedest foe is my mother’s cousin, who within moments of arriving cracks out a board, and pays for top-grade backgammon software to up his game. Only rarely have I defeated him in a full match. Every backgammon player also harbours an orientalist fantasy of ingratiating themselves in a dusty souk by trouncing a local dignitary. I like to think their terminology is similarly archaic – in the west we talk of ‘hitting a blot’, ‘building a prime’, and ‘bearing off’. The game had a renaissance in the 1960s, led by the father of modern backgammon, Prince Alexis Obolensky; it even reached the Playboy mansion, while James Bond played it in Octopussy. It is about time it has another.  

© The Spectator