You can share the same pair of dice if you don’t have enough for both players. If your backgammon set has a doubling cube with numbers on it, you can set it aside for now. You don’t need to play with it if you’re just learning the game.
In a traditional game of backgammon, the home board is on the right side for the white player and the left for the black player.
Lay the checkers out flat instead of stacking them so it’s easier to see how many are on the board. None of your checkers should ever be on the same points as the other player. If you have any spots where your pieces overlap, find the correct points on the board to move the pieces to.
While you’re trying to move your checkers closer to your home board, remember the other player is doing the same. Even though the game is a race to finish, there’s a lot of strategy for positioning and blocking your opponent’s moves.
If you both rolled the same number, roll the dice again until one of you has a higher number. Some backgammon sets have dice cups for rolling the dice, but rolling them inside of the board or on the table works fine too.
Example: You roll a 5 and a 3. You can either move one checker 5 points and another 3 points. Alternatively, you can move a single checker a total of 8 spaces, either by going 5 spaces followed by 3 or 3 spaces followed by 5. If you roll doubles, you get to use the dice roll again. If you rolled a pair of 6s, then you can move up to 4 separate checkers 6 spaces each. You have to move a checker if you’re able to. If you can’t move any checkers because you’re blocked, then you lose your turn.
If there isn’t a checker on the point from your die roll but there are checkers higher than it, you must move those checkers instead. For example, if you roll a 4 but still have a checker on the 5th point, you would have to move that checker to your 1st point. If the point you rolled doesn’t have a checker and there aren’t any higher checkers, then you can bear off a piece from the next highest point. So if you roll a 4, you could instead take a checker off of the 3rd point.
Any player can choose to double the stakes for the first time in the game. You may want to double the stakes if you have a lot of your pieces in your home board and your opponent still has a lot of checkers on the outer boards.
If you refuse the double, you lose the number of points or money for the value before it was doubled. So if the proposed double was a “2”, then you’d only lose 1 point.
If your opponent wasn’t able to bear off any checkers, then they were “gammoned” and you win points twice the value of the doubling cube. When your opponent couldn’t bear off checkers and they still have a checker on the bar, then they’ve been “backgammoned” and you win points three times the value of the cube.
