My linear backgammon design

So what is this? Well, on a traditional backgammon board, the players change direction of their movements after half of the board points (1-12), when reaching the edge you go back on the other side of the board in the opposite direction so to say (13-24). The main reason the game board is designed like this must be to save space.

My linear gammon design simply puts all of the board points 1-24 in one continous line so that the player always go in the same direction regardless of where you are on the board. I have also added some elements to make the game feel more like a medival war game, playing on a map where you should enter your own "castle" (home board).

The reason for this is to create a more logical board for children and beginners. The game plays exactly the same and uses the same rules as on a normal backgammon board. I have also added black and white numbers on the board, to help beginners to set up the start positions. For example, there is a black 5 where 5 checkers should be placed and so on. Strange that no manufacturer have done this before, because the start positions is one of the things beginners forget.

You are free to download my design to make your own game for personal non-profit-use if you like (at the bottom of the page).

The game folds up nicely and don't take up more room than a normal backgammon game when stored.

The game is made of laminate floor pieces, tied together with windows blind line. The board design pictures was printed with a color laser printer on half glossy photo paper and glued on.

Benefits:

As the movement direction is always the same, the game is more logical for beginners and children.

The direction of the movements is even the same regardless of which color you are playing. With a traditional board, beginners don't want to play the color they are not used to as it will mirror the whole board. That is not the case with the linear board.

Built in start positions help. Even my five year old daughter can easily set it up correctly.

Disadvantages:

The board is longer.

Experienced backgammon players are not used to playing this board.

It could be harder to get a good overview of the board.

It could be harder to evaluate who is in the lead. With a normal board, both players are mirrored which probably makes it easier to directly compare the positions.

Hard to move the whole game to another location/room during an ongoing game. Some kind of locking mechanism would be needed for this.

(Risk of messing up the board, see below.)

V1.0 and V1.1

My initial thought was to put the checkers at the center of the points and not aligned to the sides as with normal backgammon. If you play like this however, the board will quickly get messed up and hard to read. It is therefor recommended to align the checkers to one of the sides. Because of this, I went on and made a V1.1. I have not made a physical V1.1 game so all of the pictures above is of the V1.0 design.

In V1.1 I replaced the "rectangular" points with more traditional triangles. I think this is a good way of indicating that the checkers should be aligned that way. I also removed a bit at the entrance of each castle just to save a bit of space. For my physical copy of the game, I printed all pictures with a hight of 15 cm. If doing the same with the new V1.1 design, the whole game would be about 4 cm shorter totally. The text is also in smaller print in the new design.

Download

You are free to download my design to print out and make your own game for personal non-profit-use:

V1.0

Download

V1.1

Download

These downloads contain four pictures each which should be printed out at exactly the same height. In my case I used 15 cm.

Note that you don't need to make a linear backgammon board to use my design. You can just as well them put them in a normal backgammon orientation as you can see here to the right.

My own board can easily be transformed to a normal backgammon board by untying one of the middle knots and turning half of the board 180 degrees.

(C) 2017 by Anders Persson

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