Backgammon rules, stakes & fair play

Standard backgammon: each player has 15 checkers moving in opposite directions. Roll two dice and move by their values; a double plays four moves. A lone opposing checker ("blot") is hit and sent to the bar; it must re-enter in the opponent's home board before anything else moves.

Once all your checkers are in your home board you bear them off. First to bear off all 15 wins. If the loser bore off none, it is a mars (2×); if they also have a checker on the bar or in your home, it is a backgammon (3×).

Each turn has a 45-second clock. Running out of time forfeits the game as a SINGLE loss — never a gammon or a backgammon, so gammon stakes do not multiply it. If neither player rolls the opening die in time the game is void and both stakes are returned.

In staked games both players lock the same stake in escrow before the game. The winner takes the pot minus a 5% house fee (the rake). Free games have no stake and no fee.

If a player leaves a staked game, the remaining player wins.

A table option: the loss multiplies by the win type — normal 1×, mars 2×, backgammon 3×. To guarantee payment, 3× the stake is escrowed from BOTH players up front; the unused part returns after the game.

A table option: on your turn, before rolling, you may offer to double the stake. The opponent has 20 seconds: accept (the game continues at ×2 and the extra escrow is locked from both balances) or decline (they lose at the current stake immediately). Offers alternate — the player who accepted owns the next double.

Letting the 20 seconds run out counts as declining, and costs the game at the stake in force. The cube stops at ×64. Beaver and raccoon are not played here: a double can only be accepted or declined.

Balance is held in TON (grams) and shown in USD at the live exchange rate. Top up on-chain (TON or USDT-on-TON) or via payment bots. Withdrawals are paid from the game treasury straight to your TON wallet, usually within a minute.

Share your invite link. Every STAKED game your invitees play — win or lose — pays you 30% of their 5% fee, credited to your balance instantly and announced by the bot. No cap, no expiry (until further notice).

All real-game dice are generated on the server with a cryptographically secure RNG (the OS entropy source, unbiased by rejection sampling). No player — and no client app — can predict or influence a roll.

You do not have to take that on trust. Before the first roll the server publishes a fingerprint of the secret seed every die will come from, and each side's app mixes in a random value of its own. When the game ends the seed is revealed with the result, so you can confirm the fingerprint matches and recompute every die yourself. A server that had chosen even one roll would fail that check. Open bgammon.xyz/fair/<game number> — the link is in your end-of-game report.

Dice you roll in the bot chat come from Telegram, not from us, so they are outside that proof and are listed as such. For a fully checkable game, use in-app dice.

Staked games are played with real money and can be lost. Decide your limit before you sit down, treat a stake as the price of the game rather than an investment, and never play with money you need. Games against the AI and free rooms are always available at no cost. You must be 18 or older to play for stakes.