Backgammon

Introduction

Backgammon is an interesting online casino game mostly because of the fact that there is a very interesting mix of luck and skill involved in playing the actual game. There are many people that will look at backgammon from the point of view of a game like chess and see the intensive amount of strategy that one could employ in the game and there are also people that will look at backgammon from the point of view of a game like poker and see the dice being rolled and conclude that the game is completely a game of luck. Well, backgammon is similar to poker in that the luckiest player might take a specific game, but over the long run players with higher skills and understanding of the strategies will win more money at the game.

Goal

The goal of the backgammon game is through dice rolls and movements to remove all of your checker pieces from the board. Each player starts with fifteen checkers and through different moves those checkers need to be removed from the board.

The Board

On the board, each side of the board has a number of different triangles on it; twelve to be exact in alternating light and dark colors. These triangles are referred to as points and are connected to each other from 1 to 24 forming the path of a horseshoe from one side of the pathway to the other, with the 24th point being the point furthest from the removal point relative to each player. Each player places their checkers with two on their 24th point, five on their 13th point, three on their 8th point and five on their 6th point. The first six points are referred to as the inner board, with the next six being called the outer board.

Game Play

Backgammon starts with the players each rolling a die to see who goes first, with the higher roller going first.

Each player’s turn will see them roll a pair of dice and then follow through on their moves according to what is on the dice. This means that if a player rolls a three and a six, then they must move one of their pieces forward three spaces and another piece forward six spaces. They can alternatively move one piece forward six spaces and then move the same piece forward three spaces so long as both of those moves are legal moves in and of themselves rather than being legal combined for a nine space jump.

A move is legal if the point that the piece being moved lands on is either a point that is previously unoccupied, a point that is occupied only by the player’s own pieces or alternatively a point that is occupied by at most one of the enemy player’s pieces. If the point is occupied by more than one opponent piece then the move is not legal and is not allowed.

If a point is occupied by one of the opponent player’s pieces, then that piece is considered as being knocked out of play and must be placed on the central area that divides the two halves of the backgammon board. On that player’s turn, they then roll for each knocked out piece to bring that piece back into play in one of the six points closest to their starting gate, with the six points of possible starting positions corresponding to the roll on the dice. It is impossible for a player to move pieces in play until they have brought all of their pieces back into the game.