Backgammon is a game of luck and skill. It is played by two people with 15 checkers each on a board consisting of 24 spaces or points. The checkers are moved according to rolls of the dice. Each player tries to bring his own checkers home and bear them off before his opponent does, hitting and blocking the enemy checkers along the way.

Backgammon is said to be the oldest game in recorded history. Its origin stems from a board game that was first played about 5000 years ago in Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia.

The ancient Greeks played. So did the Romans. The game we know today was refined in England in the seventeenth century, which is also when it acquired the name backgammon. One significant innovation of the twentieth century was the addition of the doubling cube in the 1920s.

Backgammon enjoyed a huge resurgence in the 1970s, then again in the 1990s with the popularity of the Internet. Today, you can play online any time of the day or night with people from all over the world.