Backgammon online — play free backgammon, no sign-up

Backgammon right in your browser, in English: no signup, no ads, nothing to install. Your opponent is a live player or the Nardex neural-network engine, and the format is a single game or a match to 3, 5 or 7 points.

This page is about backgammon — four starting stacks, checkers moving towards each other, hits and the bar, gammon and backgammon scoring. Looking for long narde instead? See the long narde rules and long backgammon online for free.

Opponent and format — from a quick game to a match

In backgammon on nardex.ai you pick the opponent: meet a live player from the real-time lobby, or play backgammon against the computer — the neural-network engine, which comfortably beats most amateurs and holds its own at strong club-player level.

The format is yours too: a single game of a few minutes, or a match to 3, 5 or 7 points — the classic tournament distances, where the doubling cube and the Crawford rule come into play. Dice are rolled server-side by a cryptographically strong generator, identically for you and for the AI, and every roll stays in the game replay.

No signup, no ads

You hit «Play» and the backgammon game starts. No email confirmation, no banners, no popups. Playing is free both in the browser and in the Android app: no microtransactions, no chips, no premium tiers — our paid products are B2B only (the analytics API and an engine licence).

Anonymous progress is stored in the browser. You only need an account for the rating, for matches against people, and to keep your game history in sync across devices.

A real neural-network engine, not a script

Most backgammon sites move by plain if-else logic — «if the roll is 6-6, go there». In Nardex the move is chosen by a neural network: it evaluates the whole position and compares candidate moves by expected value rather than by a rule list.

• Rust + ONNX Runtime + CUDA position evaluation runs on the GPU in milliseconds
• Probabilistic output the network outputs win, gammon and backgammon probabilities — the best move follows from those
• Architecture in the TD-Gammon line (Tesauro, 1995), rewritten from scratch for a modern stack
• The same engine in the Analysis API access is requested on the developers page (currently private beta)

Backgammon rules — as under the World Backgammon Federation (WBGF), no house variants

The engine plays by the official rules of the game. Each side has 15 checkers and four starting stacks — the starting setup is the same for both sides — and the checkers travel towards each other into their own home boards. A lone checker (a blot) can be hit and sent to the bar — it must re-enter before any other move is made.

Both dice must be played whenever a legal play exists; doubles are played four times. Bearing off starts once all 15 checkers are home. A plain win scores 1 point, a gammon 2, a backgammon 3 — all multiplied by the doubling cube (1→2→4→…→64), which is available in matches of three points and up together with the Crawford rule. Beaver and raccoon are not supported. The full walkthrough with diagrams is in the backgammon rules guide.

Want to go deeper?

The rules from the opening setup to the bear-off are covered in the backgammon guide. How to read a game review — PR, EMG and cube errors — is in the game-analysis article. How backgammon differs from long narde, point by point, is in the comparison of the two games. On a phone the game opens full screen right in the browser, and if you want the app — download it for Android; the iOS version is in development.

Frequently asked questions about backgammon