Cabinet · Case VII — The tables family

Backgammon: The Game of Kings

One board, thirty points, two dice and five thousand years: the race game that refused to die, surviving emperors, cardinals and the arrival of cards.

Backgammon has the best-documented family tree of any game on Earth. Its ancestors — the “tables” family — run in an almost unbroken chain from the boards of Ur and Egypt through Rome, Persia, the Islamic world and medieval Europe to the leather boards of today. It has been called the game of kings (Elizabeth I played; Louis XIV’s court played obsessively; James I of England published a treatise on it under a pen name) and the game of sailors (every harbor tavern had a board). Few artifacts of play have that range of company.

Rome: the twelve lines

The Roman Empire gamed on boards of three rows of twelve points — duodecim scripta, “twelve marked lines” — played with three dice, and on the two-row tabula, closer to the modern shape, which the Emperor Zeno famously misplayed in a recorded position that game historians still reconstruct. Boards are incised in stone across the empire, from the baths of Rome to legionary fortresses on Hadrian’s Wall and the sidewalks of Pompeii, where iron nails driven into the marble served as points. Aesop’s fables and Juvenal’s satires complain about the dice cup; the Emperor Commodus, the sources grumble, turned the imperial palace into a gaming house — each in its way confirming that the tables game was Rome’s second religion.

Persia and the Silk Road

The Persian branch is the crucial link. Nard — played on a board of twenty-four points, thirty pieces, run by dice — is described in the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings, which credits its invention to the sage Wuzurgmihr as a riddle for his rival to decode, alongside chess. (The moral of the legend is telling: chess, says the epic, is the game of the rational mind; nard is the game of fate — the first time the two philosophies of play were named against each other.) Islamic civilization took nard west and east; boards travel in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, and the game reaches China as shuanglu and Japan in adapted forms, while dice-and-race boards from Central Asia survive in museum collections from Samarkand to Dublin.

Medieval tables and the war of the church

“Tables” arrives in the European record by the 11th century and becomes the medieval game — a fixture of courts, taverns and cloisters (carved boards exist in English cathedrals, on cloister benches where monks presumably should not have been playing). The Church legislated against it repeatedly; Louis IX of France’s ordinance of 1254 is one of the earliest general gambling bans, and cities from Paris to Kraków issued their own. Meanwhile the game was dignified by the first strategy literature: the Spanish Libro de los juegos (1283), commissioned by Alfonso X the Learned, devotes a third of its illuminated pages to tables variants, giving dates, dice odds and opening plays — the earliest annotated game analysis in Europe, a forerunner of everything in the probability drawer.

Elizabethan and Parisian tables

The modern game crystallizes in Tudor England — the word “backgammon” appears in the 17th century, usually glossed as “back game,” from the rule allowing hit pieces to re-enter from the “bar” — and in the salons of Paris, where trictrac, a French variant as intricate as contract law, was the aristocrat’s game while plain toutes-tables was everyone else’s. Elizabeth I’s court played; so did the salons of Paris, where Madame de Sévigné’s letters report the stakes at Versailles. When playing cards flooded Europe in the 15th century, tables did not fade — the two simply divided the world between them, cards for trickery, tables for the dice.

The doubling cube: game theory walks in

Backgammon’s 20th century is a lesson in how a rule change can remake a game. In the 1920s, players in New York’s card clubs introduced the doubling cube — the right, on your turn, to offer to double the stakes, which your opponent must accept or resign. The cube transformed a racing pastime into a game of continuous judgment about probability, position and psychology; it made backgammon the first classic game to be quietly redesigned around ideas that probability theory had spent two centuries maturing. The world championship era began in the 1960s (Prince Alexis Obolensky’s Bahamas circuit; Lewis Deyong’s books; the Las Vegas and Monte-Carlo tournaments), and when computers arrived, backgammon became — with checkers and chess — one of the first games at which software excelled: the neural-network programs of the 1990s rewrote the human understanding of opening play and cube decisions, exactly as the machines later did to chess and Go.

Why backgammon endures

Historians of the game like to say backgammon is the perfect balance: enough dice for fate to speak on every turn, enough choice for skill to decide the year. Its whole 5,000-year story — from Ur’s rosette squares to the neural nets — is the short history of chance in miniature: humanity learning first to worship the throw, then to gamble on it, and finally to compute it. The physical survivors of that story sit in the collections of the museums drawer; the vocabulary — bar, point, gammon, doubling cube — is defined in the glossary; and its siblings across the world’s cultures are shelved next door, in the world tour.