Domino Backgammon, by Mark Thompson

The central idea of this backgammon variant is quite simple:  replace the dice in backgammon by a hand of three dominos, from which the player selects his “roll.”

The simplest game is to remove from a set of double-six dominos all the dominos that contain a zero, and augment the set with all the dominos from another set of double-six dominos except the doublets.  Shuffle the bones on the table, and prepare to play a game of backgammon.  Each player draws three dominos.  To make a move, a player reveals one of his three dominos and uses its numbers as his dice roll.  Then he discards it to the boneyard and draws another at random to bring his hand up to three again.  Optionally a player could turn in all his bones and draw a complete new hand, but without moving.

I haven’t tried playing this game, except against myself.  Michael Keller (who edits an excellent occasional publication, World Game Review) tells me the extra choice makes it perhaps too easy to hit blots.  If the game used dominos from double-9 sets, using all the bones going up to seven or even eight, this would make it somewhat less likely that a player would have the number he needed to hit a blot and also make it somewhat easier to release a blot from the bar.  But Michael suggested a different possibility:  leave in the dominos with blanks!  He writes, “This would skew the probabilities, but give the game an additional element of hand management (when can I afford to burn that double-blank?) and slightly reduce the blot-hitting probabilities.”

Perhaps a domino with a blank could be given some special significance, and used to reduce the disadvantage of having a piece sent to the bar.  How about this rule:  you can use a domino with one side blank to move a piece even while leaving a piece on the bar -- the blank side stands for the piece on the bar, which moves zero pips?  The double-blank might be even more special:  by playing the double-blank when you have a piece on the bar, that piece can trade positions with any enemy blot -- thereby moving the enemy piece to the bar.

Lately I’ve heard of a backgammon variant that was marketed a few years back that was played on a board with 28 pips, using 7-sided dice (shaped like a pentagonal pyramid, just long enough that each number was equally likely).  Apparently in the larger game blots are a little less likely to be hit -- so perhaps the right way to play Domino Backgammon would be on a 28-pip board using dominos with 0 to 7 pips; or possibly even on a larger board.  At some board size, perhaps it would become advisable to have four dominos in one’s hand.

If you play this game you’ll have to decide in advance which combination of these rules to use.  If you have comments or suggestions, please let me know!

Questions, corrections, comments:  Send me e-mail at  markthom@flash.net