Backgammon Trivia
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58 free Backgammon trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This backgammon trivia quiz covers the whole board: the rules every player knows, the history most players don't, and the competitive world of cubes, chouettes and neural-net bots. Easy questions ask how many men each side has, how many points are on the board, what a hit piece sits on and what a gammon is worth. From there it moves through the doubling cube's numbers, the beaver and the raccoon, pip counts, opening rolls and the models behind take-points. The history section reaches back through Irish, Trictrac and the tables family to Byzantine Tabula, Roman ludus duodecim scriptorum, Persian Nard and the Royal Game of Ur, then forward to Hoyle's 1753 treatise, the 1920s New York clubs that invented the doubling cube, Prince Alexis Obolensky's 1960s revival, the first world championship in Las Vegas and Monte Carlo's long reign as host. The hard end covers Paul Magriel's X-22 nickname, the Oregon court case that ruled backgammon a game of skill, Hypergammon, acey-deucey in the US Navy and IBM's TD-Gammon. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the game, its variants and its champions before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our chess, poker and classic board games quizzes next.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which TV drama's pilot does John Locke explain backgammon to a boy as two sides, light and dark?
Lost
Lost: Locke calls backgammon 'the oldest game in the world', five thousand years old, an age that fits the game boards dug up in Mesopotamia far better than backgammon itself, first recorded in seventeenth-century England.
Q 02How many points, the triangular spaces, does a backgammon board have in total?
24
24: twelve narrow triangles line each side, six to a quadrant, and a piece that is hit has to start the whole track again from the far end.
Q 03In backgammon, what is removing your pieces from the board at the end of the game called?
Bearing off
Bearing off can start only once all fifteen of your pieces are home, and if one is hit along the way it must travel right round the board before you may resume.
Q 04In backgammon, what is a piece sitting alone on a point called?
A blot
A blot is exposed: an opposing piece that lands on it sends it to the bar, and its owner can move nothing else until it has re-entered through the opponent's home board.
Q 05How do the two players' pieces travel around a backgammon board?
In opposite directions
In opposite directions: each player's home is where the other's journey begins, so the two sides must pass through each other, and that contact is what makes hitting possible.
Q 06In backgammon, what must a player do if one of their two dice lands tilted on a piece?
Throw both again
Throw both again: a roll counts only if both dice come to rest flat in the right-hand half of the board, so one cocked die voids the pair.
Q 07Which backgammon win counts double?
A gammon
A gammon, won when the loser has not taken a single piece off, counts double, and a backgammon triple if the loser still has a piece on the bar or in the winner's home board, so a player far behind races to get one piece off.
Q 08In backgammon, what happens when a player rolls doubles?
The number is played four times
The number is played four times: a 5-5 gives four separate moves of five, so a 6-6 carries a player eight times as far as the weakest roll, 2-1.
Q 09Which numbers are on the six faces of a backgammon doubling cube?
2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64
2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64: the cube is a marker and is never rolled, and because redoubles are unlimited the stake can climb past its highest face to 128 and beyond.
Q 10At the start of a backgammon game, the doubling cube sits between the players showing which number?
64
64 is showing while the cube waits in the middle; either player may then offer the first double, but only at the start of a turn, before rolling the dice.
Q 11In which Roger Moore Bond film does 007 beat the villain at backgammon using the villain's own loaded dice?
Octopussy
Octopussy: Bond turns Kamal Khan's trick dice against him in India, and Khan later sums him up as an Englishman who likes 'eggs, preferably Fabergé, and dice, preferably loaded'.
Q 12Which point on a backgammon board is sometimes nicknamed the "golden point"?
Fifth
Fifth: the five-point earned its golden nickname because it is rated the best place on the opponent's side to anchor, and a very strong point to make early on your own.
Q 13In backgammon slang, which roll is known as "boxcars"?
Double sixes
Double sixes: boxcars is the longest move in the game, but it cannot be declined, and every six that can legally be played must be, welcome or not.
Q 21What is a "prime" in backgammon strategy?
A wall of pieces on consecutive points
A wall of pieces on consecutive points: six in a row makes a full prime, which no piece can jump, because a single die never moves a piece more than six.
Q 22In backgammon, what does a player's pip count measure?
Total distance left to travel
Total distance left to travel: every piece counts the points it must still cover to leave the board, so both sides start at 167 and whoever has the lower count leads the race.
Q 23On the last roll of a backgammon game, a player should take a double with at least what chance of winning?
25%
Q 14In backgammon, if you can play either die but not both, which must you play?
The higher die
The higher die must be played; a player may not duck part of a roll, and whenever some sequence uses both numbers, that sequence is compulsory.
Q 15In backgammon, what officially ends a player's turn, ruling out any more take-backs?
Picking up the dice
Picking up the dice ends the turn; until then there is no touch-move rule as in chess, and a player may try a move, put the pieces back and play something else.
Q 16In backgammon money play, what is an immediate redouble after accepting a double called?
A beaver
A beaver leaves the cube with the player who turned it and the stake at four times its starting value; the original doubler may reply with a raccoon, doubling it yet again.
Q 17In backgammon slang, what does a player do when a roll fails to bring a piece in from the bar?
Dance
Dance: a player who dances loses the whole turn, and once the opponent holds all six home-board points there is no roll that can come in at all.
Q 18Which backgammon money-play rule lets double and triple wins count only once the cube has been turned?
Jacoby
Jacoby: the bridge champion Oswald Jacoby proposed the rule so that a player far ahead would double and end the game instead of dragging it out in hope of a bigger win.
Q 19Which Roman emperor wrote a book on the dice-and-board game alea and had a board fitted to his carriage?
Claudius
Claudius: Suetonius records the book and the travelling board, and a satire attributed to Seneca has him sentenced after death to rattle dice for ever in a box with no bottom.
Q 20In backgammon, what is a chouette?
Three or more players, one versus a team
Three or more players, one versus a team: the lone player, called the box, takes on a side led by a captain, and the seats rotate after every game.
25%: passing costs one point for certain, while taking means playing for two, so a player who wins one such game in four comes out exactly even.
Q 24Doubling revived backgammon in the 1920s and was taken up early at the Racquet and Tennis Club of which city?
New York
New York: nobody knows who invented doubling; one classic history credits 'some unknown genius' in an American club, while a 1931 magazine piece traced it to a game played in Paris in 1926.
Q 25Backgammon is first recorded by name in the 1640s, during the reign of which English monarch?
Charles I
Charles I was on the throne when the word first appears, spelled 'baggammon'; the game itself had taken shape in England only a generation or so earlier.
Q 26Which playwright mocks a courtier who "chides the dice in honourable terms" while playing at tables?
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare: in Love's Labour's Lost, Berowne sneers that the smooth Boyet is polite even to his dice, and 'tables' then named the whole family of such games, as the word backgammon is not recorded until the 1640s.
Q 27Who published A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon in 1743?
Edmond Hoyle
Edmond Hoyle wrote it a year after the whist treatise that made his name, and his rulings on games carried such weight that 'Hoyle' became shorthand for the rule book.
Q 28A tavern wall painting from which Roman town shows two dice players quarrelling in mid-game?
Pompeii
Pompeii: in the next scene the landlord orders the brawling pair outside. Romans rolled three dice, not two, in the board game that was a forerunner of backgammon.
Q 29On the precision dice used in serious backgammon, how are the pips finished?
Filled flush with the face
Filled flush with the face: precision dice are made to weigh the same on every side, with no dimples, and serious players roll them from a lipped cup to keep the throw honest.
Q 30In an old Arab tradition, the backgammon board, with its points, pieces and dice, stands for what?
The calendar year
The calendar year: the thirty pieces are read as the days of a month, and the dice supply the seven days of the week.