Aarp Backgammon
- Our backgammon collection features traditional and modern variations. House rules aside, you must bear off all of your checkers to win. A few lucky rolls of the dice will give you a big advantage over your opponent. Use your best hitting and entering strategies, and double the stakes for extra fun!
- Backgammon is a classic strategy game with almost 5000 years of history and our free version is the best place to play it online. You can play free backgammon against a computer or friends and save time on real backgammon setup in our game.
Backgammon Play Free Backgammon Online and Play The Oldest Recorded Game In History. A classic game of skill and strategy mixed in with a little bit of luck, our backgammon game and online backgammon board date back to the earliest civilization - Mesopotamia (also know as the Royal game of UR).
Spades Rules
These are the rules I use for Spades. I got them from John McLeod's pagat.com, which has rules for pretty much all card games. (C) John McLeod, 2011 - reprinted with permission.
The teams
The four players are in fixed partnerships, with partners sitting opposite each other. Deal and play are clockwise.
Rank of Cards
A standard pack of 52 cards is used. The cards, in each suit, rank from highest to lowest: A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.
The Deal
The first dealer is chosen at random, and the turn to deal rotates clockwise. The cards are shuffled and then dealt singly, in clockwise order beginning with the player on dealer's left, until all 52 cards have been dealt and everyone has 13.
The Bidding
In Spades, all four players bid a number of tricks. Each team adds together the bids of the two partners, and the total is the number of tricks that team must try to win in order to get a positive score. The bidding begins with the player to dealer's left and continues clockwise around the table. Everyone must bid a number, and in theory any number from 0 to 13 is allowed. Unlike other games with bidding, there is no requirement for each bid to be higher than the last one, and players are not allowed to pass. There is no second round of bidding - bids once made cannot be altered.
Example: South deals; West bids 3; North bids 1; East bids 4; South bids 4. The objective of North and South is to win at least 5 tricks (4+1), East and West try to win at least 7 (4+3).
A bid of 0 tricks is known as Nil. This is a declaration that that the player who bid Nil will not win any tricks during the play. There is an extra bonus for this if it succeeds and a penalty if it fails. The partnership also has the objective of winning the number of tricks bid by the Nil's partner. It is not possible to bid no tricks without bidding a Nil. If you don't want to go for the Nil bonus or penalty you must bid at least 1.
The Play of the Hand
The player to dealer's left leads any card except a spade to the first trick. Each player, in turn, clockwise, must follow suit if able; if unable to follow suit, the player may play any card.
A trick containing a spade is won by the highest spade played; if no spade is played, the trick is won by the highest card of the suit led. The winner of each trick leads to the next. Spades may not be led until either some player has played a spade (on the lead of another suit, of course), or the leader has nothing but spades left in hand.
Playing the first spade is known as 'breaking' spades.
Aarp Backgammon Quick Play
A Boston is when one team gets all 13 tricks in a round.
Scoring
A side that takes at least as many tricks as its bid calls for receives a score equal to 10 times its bid. Additional tricks (overtricks) are worth an extra one point each.
Sandbagging rule: Overtricks are colloquially known as bags. A side which (over several deals) accumulates ten or more bags has 100 points deducted from its score. Any bags beyond ten are carried over to the next cycle of ten overtricks - that is if they reached twenty overtricks they would lose another 100 points and so on.
Example: Suppose a team whose score is 337 bids 5 tricks and they have 7 bags carried over from the previous rounds. If they win 7 tricks they score 52, taking their score to 389 (and their bags to 9). If they win 8 tricks they score 53, but lose 100 because they now have 10 bags, and their score becomes 290 (337 + 53 - 100). If they win 9 tricks they score 54 and lose 100, bringing their score to 291.
If a side does not make its bid, they lose 10 points for each trick they bid.
If a bid of nil is successful, the nil bidder's side receives 100 points. This is in addition to the score won (or lost) by the partner of the nil bidder for tricks made. If a bid of nil fails - that is, the bidder takes at least one trick - the bidder's side loses 100 points, but still receives any amount scored for the partner's bid.
When a nil fails, the tricks won by the nil bidder do not count towards making the partner's bid, but do count as bags for the team.
The side which reaches 500 points first wins the game. If both sides reach 500 points in a single deal, the side with the higher score wins.
Backgammon Rules
Backgammon is one of the oldest known boardgames. The object of the game is to move your pieces along the board's triangles and off the board before your opponent does.
There are a few different ways that this game is played. In this version your pieces move counterclockwise from the upper right, while your opponent's move clockwise from the bottom right. You can change the direction of play in Options if you prefer going from bottom right to top right. Additionally, the game is sometimes played in rounds with a scoring system deciding the eventual winner. In this version, each round is its own game, with no point scoring involved.
- The game starts with both players each rolling a single die to determine who goes first. The one with the higher roll starts, and uses the dice he and the opponent rolled to make his first move.
- Each turn, a player rolls two dice. The numbers shown decide how far the player may move their pieces.
- If the same number is rolled on both dice, the player plays as if there were four dice, all showing the same number.
- When moving, you must always move the top piece off a triangle. As you move a piece, you may move onto a triangle that contains:
- No pieces.
- Your own pieces.
- A single opposing piece.
- If you move a piece onto an opposing piece, that piece gets removed and placed onto the middle of the board. That piece's owner must then return it back onto the board, starting from the beginning. They may not perform any other moves until all their pieces are back on the board.
- Once all your pieces have made it around the board, you may start removing pieces (also known as 'bearing off'). A piece can bear off if:
- You roll a number which corresponds exactly to how far the piece would have to travel to exit the board.
- An unusued die has a higher value than is required to bear any piece off. In which case, you may bear off the piece that's furthest from the end.
- NOTE: You must use all your dice if possible! That means you cannot make a move with one dice and then say Pass, if there's any way to use other moves that play both dices. If you ever think the game is not allowing you to make a move that you think should be allowed, ask yourself what your next move would be. If there's no next move possible, then the game is forcing you to use both dice.
Your opponent bears off when their pieces are all in the upper right section of the board.
The player who manages to bear off all their pieces first is the winner.
- Gammoning: When a player wins before their opponent has borne any pieces off.
- Backgammoning: When a player wins before their opponent has borne any pieces off, and still has at least one piece left either in their first quadrant or on the bar.
About Backgammon
Backgammon is the 28th game we make here at CardGames.io. It's been requested a lot over the years, but the main reason it was never created was the custom graphics needed for it. Well, finally we did it! Backgammon is the first game developed by CardGames.io's two new full time employees, Kjartan and Alexandra! Winning a single game can take a long time, so we decided to just make the simplest version, without the doubling dice and tracking wins over many games. However, if we get a lot of requests for that we might add it later.
Backgammon Free Playing On Internet
The game is written in JavaScript, using the Phaser HTML5 Game framework. The game board and pieces are custom graphics made here at CardGames.io, the dice and player faces as always come from our favorite clipart site, Open Clipart.
As always, bugs, requests, comments can be sent to admin@cardgames.io or you can contact us through our Facebook page or our very inactive Twitter account.
This is version 2890 of Backgammon.
Aarp Backgammon Games
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