29 Dec
The backgammon game has been a favorite pastime for most of recorded human history. The fifteen checkers allotted to each player, and the backgammon board with its alternately colored triangular shaped divisions, are well known all around the world. The rules of the game are quite easy to learn. The basic objective is to become the first player to get all their checkers into the area of the board designated as “Home” and from here they “Bear off”, or remove the checkers from the board. Today there is hardly a toyshop worthy of the name without its backgammon set on sale, and the backgammon board game is a popular present for the birthday boy or girl. Generations of children have learned how to play the game and have continued to play the game into their older years.
The ancient antecedents of backgammon might have led to it being rejected by today’s younger generation of players but the opposite has been the case. The development of the Internet has provi
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Backgammon is one of the all time favorite board games and its five thousand years of history is something that few other games can complete with. From its development in the lands of the Near East, the Iran and Iraq of our own times, the backgammon game made its way across the Roman Empire. In the course of time it has reached every corner of the world. The backgammon board with its twenty four triangular-shaped, alternately colored divisions, and the backgammon set of fifteen checkers for each player, dice, and a dice shaker are instantly recognizable to a great proportion of the world’s inhabitants. It might be thought that with the passage of all these years and the appearance of so many different times of board and other games, backgammon would go out of fashion, but that has not been the case. The game has managed to continue to increase its following and is probably more popular today than at any time in its long history.
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If we were to draw up a league table of the most successful board games, backgammon has an excellent claim to a place at the top of the list. First of all, it would be hard to find a game that has been played since the very beginnings of recorded human history. Historians have discovered that the backgammon set and the backgammon game we are familiar with today have their origins in the Fertile Crescent — the area in the Near East that is now divided between Iraq and Iran. Although these backgammon sets used stones for counters, and bone for dice, they would be recognizable to contemporary players. In a similar vein, our ancestors knew how to play backgammon in a way that was not so radically different from how we play it today.
From the Near East, the game spread through the Roman Empire and up into Northern Europe. Although the Roman game of backgammon, or tabula as it was known, has some differences from the game we are familiar with today, it had many common f
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