Backgammon vs Mancala and Other Classic Games

At a glance

Backgammon vs mancala

Mancala is a whole family of "sowing" games — oware, bao, kalah and many others — played across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. You pick up all the seeds from one pit and drop them one at a time into the following pits, capturing according to where the last seed lands. There are no dice: both players see everything and luck plays no part, so mancala is a game of pure calculation, closer to chess than to backgammon.

The visual resemblance — two rows of hollows, counters moving round a board — is where the similarity ends. In backgammon the dice decide how far you move, the fight is about hitting lone checkers and building blocks, and the game ends with a race to bear off.

Backgammon vs the Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur is the real relative. Boards found in the royal tombs at Ur, in today's Iraq, date to roughly 2600–2400 BC. Each player races seven pieces along a track of 20 squares, moving by a throw of four pyramid-shaped dice, and can knock an opponent's piece back to the start by landing on it. A cuneiform tablet from around 177 BC describes rules for it, which is how modern players reconstructed the game.

Race, dice, hitting: that's the backgammon formula, 4,500 years ago. Whether Ur is a direct ancestor isn't known, but it belongs to the same family. The story of how that family led to backgammon and nardy is on the history of backgammon page.

Backgammon vs ludo

Ludo (and its parent, the Indian game pachisi, sold in the US as Parcheesi) is backgammon's closest cousin in the toy cupboard: race your pieces round the board by dice, and send opponents home by landing on them. The big difference is choice. In ludo you usually have one or two sensible moves per roll; in backgammon a roll like 6-4 can often be played a dozen ways, and choosing well is the whole game. That's why backgammon has a rating system, tournaments and opening theory, and ludo doesn't.

Backgammon vs othello

Othello (a modern form of reversi) is played on an 8×8 grid with 64 two-colored discs: you flip your opponent's discs by trapping them between yours. No dice, no hidden information — like chess and go, it's a luck-free game of positional judgment. Backgammon's closest thing to othello's "trap and flip" is the prime: six blocked points in a row that an opposing checker cannot get past.

Backgammon vs mahjong

Mahjong is a four-player tile game from 19th-century China: you draw and discard tiles to build sets, a bit like rummy. There's chance in the tiles you draw and hidden information in your opponents' hands. Backgammon is the opposite in both: two players, everything on the table, and the only chance is the dice.

Try backgammon in a minute

If you know ludo, you already know half of backgammon: learn the rest on the one-page rules and play the computer on Beginner. For a version where nothing is ever hit and strategy is all about blocking, try long nardy.

Play for freeNo sign-up, no download — right in your browser

Updated: October 24, 2026