Roll, race your checkers around the board, send your opponent's blots to the bar, and bear off to win.
Roll two dice and move your checkers around the board toward your home. Land on a point with a lone enemy checker (a blot) to send it to the bar, where it must re-enter before that player does anything else. Get all fifteen of your checkers into your home board, then bear them off. The first player to bear off all their checkers wins.
Backgammon belongs to the oldest family of board games known. Its dice-and-race ancestry reaches back some 5,000 years to Mesopotamia and Egypt, kin to the Royal Game of Ur and Senet. The Romans played a close relative called tabula; through the medieval European 'tables' games it took its modern shape, and the name backgammon appears in English by the 1640s. The doubling cube, now central to the money game, was a 1920s addition from New York.
Backgammon is the timeless dice-and-race board game, here in full with hitting, the bar and bearing off, plus AI, local and online play. Free to play in your browser, made in-house at PlayPendium.