Your first week of backgammon
Most people learn backgammon in an afternoon and spend years getting better at it. Here's what those first days actually look like: the rules that click fast, the concepts that don't, and when the game starts getting interesting.
By Colin B. · Published June 5, 2026
Backgammon has been played for five thousand years. That’s not trivia; it’s a clue. Games that last that long do so because they reward skill without punishing beginners so hard they quit. The rules fit in five minutes. The strategic depth is genuinely bottomless. The gap between those two things is where all the fun lives.
Here’s what your first week actually looks like.
Day 1: The rules take an hour, tops
Set up the board. The starting position is fixed; it’s the same every game, and most boards have a diagram printed inside the case. Learn it once and it becomes automatic.
The movement is simple: you roll two dice and move checkers that many points toward your home board (the lower-right quadrant for the lighter-colored player, lower-left for darker). You can move one checker the total, or two checkers each their own die. You can’t land on a point where your opponent has two or more checkers (that’s a made point, and it’s blocked). If you land on a point where they have exactly one checker (a blot), you hit it, sending it to the bar. They have to re-enter from your home board before doing anything else.
That’s most of the game. The rest is bearing off. Once all your checkers are in your home board, you start removing them. First one to bear off all 15 wins.
Two things that trip up everyone in day one:
Doubles. When you roll doubles, you play each die value twice: four moves, not two. So double-6 means four checkers can each move six points. This changes your planning dramatically when you roll it.
The bar. When your checker is hit, it goes to the bar in the middle. Your next roll must re-enter it before you can do anything else. If all the points in your opponent’s home board are made (blocked), you lose your turn entirely. Getting stuck on the bar at the wrong moment is catastrophic, and fascinating.
Day 2-3: Your first real games
Play five games without the doubling cube. Just learn the movement, get comfortable with the setup, and start noticing patterns: which points are worth making, what it means to have your checkers spread too thin, how getting hit in your opponent’s home board is much worse than getting hit elsewhere.
A few checker principles worth knowing early:
Make points. Two checkers on the same point can’t be hit. You want to build a chain of made points (this is called a prime), and blocking your opponent with a six-prime (six consecutive points blocked) is one of the most powerful positions in the game.
Don’t leave blots in your home board. A checker in your home board that can be hit goes to the bar, and then you have to re-enter from scratch while your opponent is already bearing off. Painful.
Race position matters. Backgammon is partly a race. Knowing roughly how many moves you are from bearing off (your pip count) is how serious players decide whether to accept the doubling cube or drop. You don’t need pip counting in week one, but start noticing whether you’re ahead or behind in the race. Your intuition will develop.
Don’t worry about optimal opening moves yet. Open the game, make the boards you can make, and watch where you end up. The patterns will start repeating.
Day 4-5: Introduce the doubling cube
This is where backgammon becomes a different game.
The doubling cube is a six-sided block with numbers 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. It starts off the board at 64. Before rolling, either player may offer to double the stakes. The opponent accepts (takes), plays on for double the value, and now owns the cube (meaning only they can offer the next doubling). Or they drop, conceding the game for the current stake.
The mathematics of the cube are deep (there’s a whole branch of study around it). For your first week, use this heuristic: double when you have a clear advantage and it will get worse for your opponent if they decline. Accept (take) unless your position looks nearly hopeless.
You will double too early. You will drop positions you should take. That’s fine. The cube is learnable through repetition in a way it simply isn’t through reading alone.
Two situations where the cube is especially interesting:
Gammons. If you bear off all your checkers before your opponent bears off any, you win a gammon, double the value. This makes certain cube positions more aggressive: if there’s a realistic gammon threat, the math shifts toward doubling earlier.
The Crawford rule. In match play (first to N points), when one player is one point away from winning, the doubling cube is not used for one game. This prevents the trailing player from desperately doubling every game to try to catch up in one shot. You’ll encounter this in any organized club play.
Common beginner mistakes, and what they tell you
Spreading your checkers thin early. Beginners try to race immediately, leaving lots of loose blots. Strong players hunt those blots and build primes. In the early game, consolidation beats speed.
Dropping takes too quickly. Most beginners drop any cube offer where they’re not clearly winning. But in backgammon, you need roughly 25% winning chances to take a double (technically it depends on gammon rate, but 25% is a starting heuristic). If you’re dropping anything below 50/50, you’re giving up real equity.
Ignoring the bar. Getting one checker hit isn’t usually devastating. Getting two hit (especially with your opponent’s home board building up) often is. Watch how quickly your position changes when you have checkers stuck on the bar.
Running too early in a back-game. Sometimes you’re losing the race badly. The correct play is often not to race anyway; it’s to anchor deep in your opponent’s home board and wait for a shot when they’re bearing off. This is called a back game, and it’s one of backgammon’s most interesting strategic patterns.
None of these are things to fix in week one. They’re things to notice.
What to do next
After your first week, your game improves fastest from two sources:
Play more. Backgammon Galaxy gives you unlimited games against bots at any strength level, with post-game analysis showing your worst cube and checker errors. Playing 20 online games is worth more than reading 50 more pages.
Read Magriel. Paul Magriel’s Backgammon is the book. Start with the early chapters on checker play; the concepts will click much faster now that you’ve actually played.
Find a club. Most mid-size cities have a weekly backgammon night, often at a bar, low-stakes cash game optional. The US Backgammon Federation lists clubs at usbgf.org. Playing in person with people who are better than you accelerates everything.
You’re not going to be good yet at day seven. You’re going to know the game, have a feel for positions, and be genuinely curious about what you don’t know yet. That’s a great place to be.
Ready to actually buy a set? See our backgammon gear guide for the best starter set, when checkers and dice upgrades are worth it, and what you can skip for now.