Backgammon vs the computer — play free against AI

Backgammon against the computer right in your browser, in English: no signup, no ads, nothing to install. Your AI opponent is the Nardex neural-network engine — play a single game or a match to 3, 5 or 7 points.

Your AI opponent — a neural-network engine, not a script

Hit «Play» and the backgammon game against the computer starts right away. The bot is the Nardex neural-network engine: it evaluates the whole position and picks the move with the best expected value instead of following a rule list, and it comfortably beats most amateurs while holding its own at strong club-player level.

• Win, gammon and backgammon probabilities the network estimates all three for the position, and the best move follows from them
• Rust + ONNX Runtime + CUDA each evaluation runs on the GPU in milliseconds
• In the TD-Gammon line (Tesauro, 1995), rewritten from scratch for a modern stack

A quick game or a match against the AI

Play a single game of a few minutes, or a match to 3, 5 or 7 points — in a match the doubling cube (1→2→4→…→64) and the Crawford rule come into play. The dice are rolled on the server by a cryptographically strong generator, the same way for you and for the AI, and every roll stays in the game replay.

Review every game against the computer

A finished game opens in the replay: a PR (performance rating) scale, best-move arrows and an equity evaluation of every decision, with each move graded ok / doubtful / error / blunder after the conventions of gnubg and XG. How to read those numbers is in the backgammon game-analysis guide.

Long backgammon (narde) against the computer too

The same lobby has long narde — long backgammon, the game with a single starting head and no hits — against the AI as well. The engine behind it and the rules it plays by are below; the game itself is explained in the long narde rules.

A real AI, not a script

Most online narde sites use simple if-else logic: «if the roll is 6-6, go there». Nardex is a full neural network trained on TD-Gammon principles (Tesauro, 1995) and adapted to long narde with its specific game phases (blocking / race / x-escaped / o-escaped). Behind every move of the network there is:

• 10+ million positions in the training set (random positions, self-play, expert positions, and positions extracted from real games)
• 300,000+ expert positions — a labelled expert corpus within that set
• ONNX inference on CUDA — millisecond evaluations on a modern GPU
• Multi-phase networks — separate models for blocking and race endgames

All Russian Ministry of Sports rules respected

Nardex plays by the official long-narde rules approved by the Russian Ministry of Sports order №347 of 30.04.2025 (Article 23). One checker off the head per turn (except for the first-move 6-6 / 4-4 / 3-3, where two are allowed). Scoring: mars = 2, koks = 3 (see the separate article on mars and koks). The doubling cube with the Crawford rule is available in match play. No improvisation, no «grandma's house» variants.

Want to go deeper?

If you are serious about levelling up your game — see our guide to long narde strategy: opening templates, building a prime, the race endgame and the doubling cube. Still getting familiar with the rules? Start with the long narde rules. You can play with no download, right in the browser, and on a phone the game opens full screen; want the app — Download the Android app (APK); the iOS version is in development.

Frequently asked questions about backgammon against the computer