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Some weeks ago, I shared with the world that I really want to learn backgammon. I got a lot of nice playdate offers, and I actually scheduled my first game to May 1st. This is the day I’m back in Oslo “visiting” my own home where Kjartan lives for some months. So Kjartan volunteered to be my board game teacher, but as he pointed out, that would be a difficult task without a backgammon board…

So now the not very fancy, but oh so magnetic and wonderfully pocket-sized board above is mine. But Eirik (one of my flatmates here in Bergen) and I could not wait to try it out, so my first backgammon game took place yesterday. Sort of. Considering that Eirik was just as new to the game as I was, our focus was more on reading and analysing the rules, than on the strategy. And still, we actually managed to overlook one rule while playing:

(WARNING! Backgammon nerdiness coming up!)

A player may not move any other checkers until all checkers on the bar belonging to that player have re-entered the game. Wikipedia: Backgammon

So we moved other checkers on the board while waiting for a good dice roll to free the checkers on the bar. Probably ruined the gameplay somewhat, but we actually had fun and tried to find good strategies at this point in the game. Later, when we were both at the bearing off part of the game, we felt there was no room for strategy. It ended up in a monotone “I roll the dice, remove two checkers, then you roll the dice and remove two checkers”, with only few exceptions where we were unable to bear off anything. Maybe we misinterpreted some rules there too? Oh well.

At least I have learned some concepts such as the home board, the outer board and the bar, and I do know in which direction I am supposed to move my checkers - although I easily forget. And no matter, we did have fun! My game version did not have a doubling cube “to provide an added dimension for strategy”. But I guess this dimension can wait until I learn to play the individual game according to the rules… Which hopefully will be with Kjartan tomorrow :)

Read more about Backgammon, the rules and common strategies at Wikipedia.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at kl. 12:02 and is filed under English, HappyBook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.