Scoring in Narde is built in steps, as in backgammon. International rules know two steps; at the board people play four.
The two steps everybody knows
A plain win is one point. You bear your checkers off before your opponent, and they have managed to take at least one off the board.
A mars is two points. The winner has borne off every checker and the opponent none at all. Backgammon calls the same thing a gammon, and the value is the same.
Those two are where international rules end: they have neither Coke nor a home Mars.
The two steps you agree on beforehand
Coke is three points. The loser has borne off no checkers at all, and every one of them is still in their starting quarter.
White — borne off: 15
White has borne every checker off; Black still stands where they began.
A home mars is four points. The loser has brought all their checkers home but has not taken a single one off the board. The position is rare: reaching it means arriving and not starting to bear off.
White — borne off: 15
Every black checker is home, and not one has come off the board.
These two steps are house steps in the plain sense — you keep them in mind before the game, you do not take them from a regulation. In some circles Coke does not exist at all and the same position counts as an ordinary mars; a home mars, too, is sometimes just a mars with a special name. Ask about it before the first roll, not after the last one.
The draw, which backgammon does not have
This difference from backgammon is substantial: in Narde a game can end in a draw.
It is scored as half a point each (½–½) or one point each (1–1), depending on the tournament’s regulations. The Nard Federation’s modern tournament rules also allow points to be split on a draw, again by regulation.
How that looks in practice: in one tournament format, a draw after a match to seven points and a match to three is followed by extra matches — to five and to two.
The doubling cube
The doubling cube is used in Narde just as in backgammon: it raises the stake during a game, the player who accepts it earns the right to the next double, and the final price of the win is multiplied by the face that stands up. The mechanics of the cube are on the backgammon page — they are the same for both games.
In some circles the cube is held to belong to the short game only: “classical Narde has no cube.” That has not become the rule: the cube on the table does not change with the board the checkers run on.
A small thing worth stating
Checkers may be borne off only from the points matching the numbers rolled. That is a rule of bearing off rather than of scoring, but it is what decides whether a game reaches a mars at all.
The rules themselves are on the rules page, and what makes Narde different from its relatives on the comparison page.
Comments