Backgammon is not a game apart but the best known of a large family. The board is the same for all of them: twenty-four points, fifteen checkers each, two dice, and the winner is whoever bears all their checkers off first. The differences are few, and every one of them changes the game beyond recognition.
What follows is a survey of the relatives: what exactly each game does differently, and what follows from it. Backgammon itself is set out on the rules and strategy pages.
The four rules to measure against
For the differences to read, the baseline has to be named. In backgammon:
- the checkers travel toward each other, and a lone enemy checker — a blot — is hit, sent to the bar, and has to re-enter;
- a point held by two or more enemy checkers is closed: you cannot land on it with any number, not even midway through a turn;
- scoring has three steps: a plain win is one point, a gammon two, a backgammon three;
- there is a doubling cube, and it turns the game into a game for stakes.
Each relative below breaks one of those four.
Only the name changes
Portes is the Greek name for a game set up exactly like the backgammon in this overview: the same board, the same hitting, the same bar. It belongs to the tavli family alongside plakoto and fevga, but by rules it does not differ from backgammon at all.
Only the setup changes
The mildest kind of variant. The rules stay literally the same and the game does not: the opening position dictates the whole plan.
Nackgammon. Same rules, different start. Two checkers move back to the twenty-third point, standing behind both the opponent’s six-point and five-point — behind the golden point. Everything else, doubling cube and Jacoby rule included, works as in backgammon. The game is named after its inventor, Nack Ballard.
LongGammon. All fifteen checkers start on the opponent’s one-point — the far corner — and the whole game is spent breaking out. The cube is used and the rest of the rules are unchanged.
Hypergammon. Each side has only three checkers, on the one, two and three points; from there standard rules apply.
Eureika. Here the oddity is deeper: the checkers do not travel forward at all. Three each on the one, two and three points and two each on the four, five and six points — and the roll names the point to bear a checker off from. The whole game is a bear-off.
Contact changes: pinning instead of hitting
Plakoto and Mahbusa share the essential thing: a lone enemy checker is not sent away but pinned — your checker sits on top and holds it where it stands. Neither game has a bar, and there is nothing to re-enter from.
In Plakoto all fifteen checkers stand as one stack on the twenty-fourth point, the opponent’s starting point. A pinned checker is freed only when you leave that point; bearing off may begin only once all your checkers have reached the home board, the free ones and the pinned ones alike. Pinning the opponent’s starting point wins at once, and if both are pinned the game is a draw.
Mahbusa is the Arabic game of the same build: fifteen checkers on the opponent’s twenty-fourth point, pinning instead of hitting, and the pinned checker “imprisoned” until the one above it moves. A rule is sometimes added requiring the first checker to come all the way home before any other may move. The neighbouring game Hapis is built almost identically.
Contact changes: no hitting at all
A whole branch of the family does without hitting. A point holding even one enemy checker is simply closed — and the entire fight is about structure rather than checkers knocked off.
Fevga, the Greek game, has no hitting, no bar and no pinning, and both players travel the same way, counter clockwise.
Narde is built the same way: a running game with no hitting, both sides going counter clockwise. It is the closest relative of the Turkish uzun tavla and has a page of its own.
Moultezim is the Turkish game where both players’ checkers start in opposite corners of the board and travel the same way, with no hitting.
Gul Bara differs in the same respect — no hitting — and is also called “Crazy Narde” or rosespring backgammon.
The turn and the dice change
Acey-Deucey. All fifteen checkers start off the board and have to be entered by the roll; otherwise the ordinary rules of hitting, the bar and bearing off apply. After a double you roll again. The roll of 1-2 — acey-deucey — gives the game its name and a privilege with it: having played the one and the two, the player chooses what to play next. Quite how wide that choice is has no single answer: in places any double, in places any roll at all. The game was made famous by the US Navy, the Marine Corps and the Merchant Marine.
Plakoto Express. Pinning as in Plakoto, with two mechanics that exist nowhere else: doubles are handled specially, and an unfinished turn passes to the opponent — the numbers you cannot use, he plays, for himself.
Turkish tavla: same board, different regulations
Tavla is played on the ordinary twenty-four-point board, a blot is hit and sent to the bar, closed points work the same, and all fifteen checkers must reach the home board before bearing off. The difference is compulsion: if the dice allow a checker to be borne off, it must be borne off — moving inside the home board instead is not allowed. Tavla has no doubling cube, and neither does Greek tavli.
Where play differs
Compulsory bearing off in tavla is the one place in this survey where play genuinely differs. The rule looks like a house rule — present in tournament regulations, not always kept in courtyard play.
How many variants there are is answered differently everywhere, and that is coverage rather than conflict: somewhere the count includes Nackgammon and Hypergammon, somewhere Portes, Plakoto and Fevga, somewhere Mahbusa and Hapis. No complete list exists.
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