Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Backgammon

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why backgammon is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Backgammon known for being a game. Famous for being a game with checkers and triangle points. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why backgammon is secretly incredibly fascinating. There, folks, here's syphilopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alec Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden.

Katie. Hello. What is your relationship to or opinion of backgammon? Backgammon. I actually know this one. I play. I back a little gammon now and I then. I like to back my gamins.

I learned it for the show. That's awesome you play. Yeah. Yeah. I used to play all the time with my dad. And my dad is actually a listener to the podcast. So hello father. Hi.

I remember all those times that you beat me. I almost called him father because I don't know his first name. Hello, father. It's fine. I'm sure he would be honored. I remember all those times that you beat me at backgammon, but no longer I'm about to learn the secrets. So just dad, don't listen to this episode. You won't like it.

It's boring. Yeah, don't learn Alex's 100 backgammon tricks. There's 100 of them. Wow. That's very fun. I know at one point when I was a child, we had one of those like combo game sets because we'll talk later about in some countries backgammon is a very fundamental board game. And then I think in the U.S. it's more of a if you buy an inexpensive one that's chess and checkers and a few other things, they might throw in backgammon.

Right. It's a side of the board or something. we had one of those and I tried it and I didn't like it that much and I stopped. Yeah. And if you're a kid, it has like black pieces and white pieces that you can kind of layer and make them look like Oreos and then pretend you're eating the Oreo and, you know, that was for a while as far as I got. And then my dad was like, oh, you're interested in backgammon. And I'm like pretending to eat my little Oreo going like, back what? And then, you know, taught me how to play.

So. Aw. And also, this got a lot of comments from syphilopods on the Discord. Thank you to Sandcaster for suggesting it. Arcblade said, I'm finally going to know how to play backgammon maybe. Yay. Which is cute. And we're not quite going to do like a whole tutorial because they exist.

And it's also relatively simple. So we'll talk about some of how it works, but otherwise get into why it's culturally and historically interesting. It's a game of both luck and strategy and of persistence and siege warfare. Kind of, yeah. Yeah, it is, once you play backgammon, you know the art of war, one could say. Like a little bit. It's also, I feel like it's very connected to chess throughout a lot of history. and chess is perceived that way by people too.

People are like, I could be a general because my horsey did the L shape. Yeah. I love chess pieces. Like they've got really cool stuff going on with all the shapes. I actually prefer backgammon to chess because I like the chance factor. Gives the idiots like me like a little bit of a chance sometimes. when I'm going up against someone who actually knows how to play chess, it's just like there's no luck involved.

It's just me like I can't say like, well, look, yes, you've won 10 out of 10 of our last games that we played. But that's because you wait the die. I just have to sit there like a fool with by little horsies that are in horse jail because they got captured. And, you know, my point is I like that. With backgammon, you roll the die, and you get a little bit of a luck element there. But you also, you know, it's strategy.

So it's not like cards. Well, I guess cards is, there is some strategy to cards, but there are certain types of card games or it's just all luck. And that's also not so fun for me. I like the combination. I agree all around. If folks want to hear other sifts about games, we have a past siff about the game of checkers and a past siff about dice. Those are most of the pieces in backgammon. And there's also a siff about playing cards and a siff about rock paper scissors. And toward the end of things, we'll get into how perfect or not perfect

backgammon is as a game, kind of like we did in the rock paper scissors show. They're very differently perfect in their ways. It's cool. Yeah. Yeah. This is a real treat of a topic. And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that's in a segment called Sir Kitty and Alex Have you seen them yet? Oh, but the so stats out Numbers and the stats

Boom Beautiful. And that name was submitted by Tom. Thank you, Tom. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them the silly and my game as possible. Submit your through Discord or to sitpottagemo.com. Wonderful.

And yeah, it was fun. Yeah. And the first numbers are what's on the backgammon board. 15 checkers for each player and then two dice. which you take turns rolling. Those are the main pieces. Yeah, that's that's about it.

And they can be any two colors, but usually they're black and white. They can be brown and white. They could be, you know, blue and cream, egg shell and gray. No, you're just pitching sets, hey. Yeah, and a lot of Americans have played with black and red because, like, the pieces are often called checkers. You can get like a combo checkers backgammon set very easily. And I got a set from my library.

My local library has something called the Library of Things. Wow. We can check out stuff. It's not just books. That's awesome. So it was a combo checkers backgammon set, which is great. That's really good. Yeah.

And one common name for games like Bank Gammon is a racing game as like a kind of board game. Jay Store Daily says there's others in the world like Mancala, Parchisi. There's an ancient Egyptian game called Senna. And also U.S. board games like Trouble and Sari are a little bit of that too. You're just trying to race your pieces around the board first. Yeah, I played Mancala at some point. That was fun. It's like a bunch of little holes and rocks.

Yeah, and Mancala's a little different because the pieces aren't just yours. Everybody's sharing the same and trying to get the most in their box, you know. But there's a lot of games of that structure. I'm going to be real here. I don't remember the rules to Mancala. just remember that the rocks were pretty and I like touching them. Yeah, I learned it at church camp. Hey.

And we got the rocks from like the beaches of Lake Michigan. It felt very of the region, you know, it was great. That's fun. I learned it in skill. They were like, and here's some Bible stuff. I was like, Mancala. I'm addicted. Get out of here, you know, waving a boy.

Yeah, and backgammon, both players are racing to move their pieces in kind of U-shape and it's a two-player game you're each like running into each other they're opposing U-shape and you get in each other's way right it's like you have your kind of like home base where you're trying to get the pieces too and then your starting area and you move I guess counterclockwise from your starting area because you essentially have like four quadrants uh on the backgammon board it's like usually in a little briefcase type deal where it shuts it can be a mat as well but like then you have four quadrants and you're moving your pieces from the quadrants in a clockwise way into a little like home tray

depository and then the first one to get all their little guys in their winds yeah and the other parts of that board there's 24 triangular spaces that are called points and then the case you mentioned, it's often a case, partly because that's just very practical. Like, if you can close the case around all the pieces, that's a very easy way to store everything. And also people like the case because it creates a physical little rail through the middle of the board, like a raised rail. Which is important. It turns out, like, I always thought that was just random space, because I didn't really learn the game until doing this. But that rail is where you put a piece if it gets hits. Yeah. And one of the key strategic things is if a player has at least two of their pieces

on a space, that's called an anchor and they're like protected. But if your piece is on its own on a space, the other player can move their piece onto it and hit your piece, stick them on the rail, and they have to start over at the beginning. Yeah. And it's also hard to even get off the rail. You need an exact role into an open space. Exactly. And that's like a huge part of the strategy is if you're blocking spaces, the other person can get stuck for a really long time in that little jail area. And it's really hard to get your piece back on the board because you can only put it on either a free space or a space where your opponent only has one little guy on there. And it's a really good way to learn the importance of bathroom buddies because if you don't

have a bathroom buddy, someone can just grab you and send you to backgammon jail. It should be bathgammon, right? Perfect. Bathroom gumum. Yeah. I should say where the name comes from. It turns out until the mid-1600s, people who spoke English just called this game tables. And that's partly because it was a massively popular board game.

It was the game you play on a table that's not chess. So they just called it tables. But in the middle English dialect, they made a compound word of backgammon. out of slightly archaic words for back and game. Because a central element of the game is that pieces get knocked onto the rail and move all the way back to the beginning. So it's the moving back game. That's why it's called backgammon, which is a kind of funny sounding word now. Back game.

And then where does the on? It's just like a funky word for game in an early dialect. That had that like extra kind of syllable and sound on it. Right. Okay. Like a jambo. I don't think a jambo is anything. Gambon.

Now that's French for like some kind of meat. I don't know what I'm talking about. Anyways, yeah. There's a kind of British pork called gammon. So that's confusing too. I didn't know where the name came from. Thank you, Alex. It was really bothering me that I had no idea.

And it's, yeah, it's confusing because it's almost English today. It's just slightly archaic. to compound words that became the name for it, but only in the mid-1600s and in English-speaking places. I see. Okay. Yeah, and there's more to the rules. I'm going to link to backgammon galaxy.com for a good write-up and at least one other option

too. But in general, it's like Katie said, it's a mix of a lot of strategy and a lot of luck because your pieces only move the amount that is rolled on a dice. And so you never have total control over anything. And especially with getting hit onto the rail, you're depending on dice to get you out of there. Right, exactly. And also, the way that you move, it's not sort of, it's not like in chess where you only move one piece at a time and each piece kind of has its own rules. You can move any piece or you can move multiple pieces, but it's basically math and geometry. So it's like you can move them, like say you get a two and a three on your dye.

You can move either one piece for five spots or you can move one piece, two spots and another piece, three spots. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you each get to do essentially two moves at a time as long as you're not blocked. Right. But also you could move one piece with both moves. And yeah, there's a lot of strategy you can control. But the general gist I've read is that with top players, they'll tend to win more often. And they can always lose a game.

Like if they just don't get decent roles, they can lose. Hear that, dad, one of these days. I'll be one of these days. Yeah, take that, Golden Father. Take that. That's what I call you. The last thing with the case here is the case that back, Gammond often comes in. Like Katie said, it can just be a mat or the one I got from my library is just a

flatboard. But that case has sparked a sort of urban legend about medieval times. Ooh. The urban legend is that it comes in a little case because European kings and popes outlawed backgammon and made it against the law to play and viciously punished people. That's not true. So there's like little back alleys where some guy in a big medieval coat is going and you want to back some gabin and then opens his coat. And he's like naked underneath except for he has a backgammon board. Oh, I just wanted British pork.

Oh, man. And they're like, do you mean the euphemism or? Yeah. I'm too. I'm lost. I'm lost too. Let's just leave this alley. Yeah.

Let's just go home and bathe because of plague. Yeah. Yeah. And so this urban. legend, it's based on one amazing real thing, but it's otherwise fake. The case is not to evade gambling laws. Like the urban legend claimed that it comes in a little case so you can snap it shut in a hurry or sort of disguise it as a book or, you know, some other like sneaky move. Sorry, disguise it as a book? And books were big back then, you know, yeah. But it still doesn't

look like a book. Man, that's such a good idea. Yeah. I got to do that more often. Yeah, so it's not in a case in order to sneak around, but it turns out it is true that some kings and church figures banned backgammon. But the reason they banned it was that it was a huge gambling game for a lot of history. I see. So you would kind of bet that you'd win or would you gamble throughout? You could do any kind of wager you want, but basically just betting money that you'd win the math. Yeah. Right. And people like that as gambling because of the dice.

There's chance. Could you play with like slices of pepperoni? And then as you get them into your home base, you eat them. And would that be considered gambling? I guess who fronts the meat, you know? This keeps coming back to meat. It's amazing. Yeah.

It's a good point. I mean, I guess anything really can be gambling as we're learning. in the era of Cal she, et cetera? Truly, and I hope that society will note that gambling is a blight and kind of stop some of that stuff. How much you want to bet? Right. But for a lot of European history, especially from the 1200s to the 1600s or so, apparently there was an epidemic of betting on backgammon.

It was way too much of a gambling game. And it was pretty much the same board game with some minor rules tinkering. People just thought they needed to bet money on it to make it interesting enough. Right. Well, I would have been very broke if I had done that. So I think it's very much more interesting to do it just for the love of the game. That's kind of how people came around. And there's one other thing we'll get to in our first takeaway that made it exciting too.

But while it was a huge gambling game, apparently in the mid-12-100, the King of France, his name was Louis the 9th. Also, he was such a pious Christian. He got canonized. He is the St. Louis. Oh. Like the city in Missouri is named after, you know? I see.

I see. So it's really St. Louis. Yeah. Yeah, right. If you call it that, it's more French, incorrect. Yeah. So, but King St. Louis in the mid-1200s banned backgammon, along with other forms of gambling in his kingdom, because he felt it was all.

un-Christian to gamble. Then in the 1500s and 16-Hundreds, there were many Catholic cardinals or church decrees either criticizing or banning backgammon. But the urban legend is fake that the case was needed to sneak the game around. The broader thing is just that there was either criticism or local banning of backgammon because it was a huge money-risking and money-wagging thing for a lot of its European history. Oh, the case is so that you can pack your sandwiches, so you can have backgammon in your sandwiches. But yeah, no, I loved the, like, that was one of the cool things about it as a kid is that it comes in this really neat case and you can carry it around and feel like you're doing business or you're going to meet with deep throat and exchange information.

Yeah, right. And I missed that as a kid with, it was just like a multi-game box where the premise was, you should buy this. because it's like six games at once. So it wasn't in a cool case. And I was like, these annoying pieces are in my checkers and chess set. Yeah. I think you would have liked it if it was in a cool case. I really think I would have gotten excited.

Yeah. The case is great. Yeah, but so backgammon, especially in Europe, it was a leading game of gambling on table games. And, you know, a lot of casino games today survived that and continued to be for gambling. And one key source this week is writing by Marcus DeSotoi, who's a professor for public understanding of science at Oxford and also specializes in games history as like a sideline. And he says that many board games of the distant past started as gambling and then moved away from it. So unlike something like poker where wagering is kind of the key hook and if you're not betting, there's almost no point. Right.

The opposite is something like chess. Apparently in ancient India, there was like a predecessor of chess where you rolled dice to move the pieces. Whoa. And then some leaders in the Hindu faith criticized the gambling because people rolled dice to move the pieces and bet money on the whole game. So after Hindu leaders criticized that people made a new version where the pieces only move one specific way and you don't gamble. And that helped lead to chess. Yeah, I mean, because I guess with chess, since there's no element of chess, chance is just like it's purely skill and I'm and I'm bad at it.

Yeah, yeah. It would be like betting on an individual sport like golf or something. Right. Like you can but I don't know. Which I'm also bad at. Right. I can do miniature golf though. So, you know, that I could potentially bet on that sports betting for miniature golf.

Yeah. We'll get at last a fan dual sponsorship. Remember when I said gambling is a blight? Never mind. Let's do it, baby. Right. Never mind. I feel like I never want to shill for gambling companies unless it's like a miniature golf gambling.

It's like mini draft kings. Right, right. Ah, there we go. You need a smaller phone too? Yeah, just everything's small. But yeah, so backgammon. It kind of is in between something like chess and something like poker where it did have a long gambling history, especially in Europe, and then moved away from it. Like, if it hadn't changed, it might be like a dingy casino kind of game today.

Kind of the main reason it didn't is fans of backgammon figured out an entirely new dimension of the game that added one item to the sets and kind of revolutionized it in the 1930s, which is our takeaway number one. Backgammon is most popular with players who use the doubling cube. Mm. Doubling cube. And big backgammon fans might have been like, when are they going to talk about the doubling cube? It's huge now. Doubling cube. Cube.

Cube. It's arguably the most important part of the game. And especially if you were like me as a kid just picking up a backgammon set, it's hard to even notice the doubling cube. It looks like a confusing extra misprinted dice. Mm-hmm. But it's kind of the whole game now. So that's amazing. Like they really revolutionized it less than 100 years ago.

Because that's like, is that where you're kind of keeping track across games that you're playing? Or is that? Yeah. Okay, yeah. We didn't do that when I was a kid. I guess my dad didn't want me to, you know, get into the bad habit. And then sooner or later I wind up in a casino, doubling everything. Yeah, CD backgammon clubs.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Caesar's gammon. Uh, Lux gammon.

Yeah. Yeah. The Balaja gammon. Uh, apparently people who love this game will say, hey, my friend, let's play to a huge number of points, sometimes 101 points. And yet it'll take maybe multiple sittings and days to do it. And the doubling cube is. the thing that makes that strategic and makes that feel high stakes without any money necessarily

being involved. And key sources here are some blogs by diehard backgammon players who also found research sources about the game. Vic Maroski writing for backgammon galore, Albert Stegg righting for the New England Backgammon club, and Stephen J. Dubner writing for the website of his podcast Freakonomics. He is a professional economist, but also loves Backgammon. This started in the late 1920s on the East Coast of the U.S. And it's a product of a major reason some people said,

Backgammon's boring. I don't like to play backgammon. The thing is, if you're obviously going to lose a game of Backgammon because you're way behind, any race, it can be clear if somebody's going to win early on, if it's not a close race. If you're obviously going to lose, it's not fun to finish the game. And the other problem is, in standard, backgammon rules of especially that time, you couldn't just surrender like in chess.

In chess, you can just knock your king over and get out of a boring one-sided game. But in backgammon and modern play, winning a match is worth one point, but you can also get two points for getting all your checkers off the board before the opponent removes any. A two-point win is called a gammon. And then there's a greater three-point win called a backgammon, where you do that and your opponent still has a piece on the rail or at the beginning. So because there can also be blowouts, a lot of players were forced to finish blowouts and just didn't find that fun. And if you win some points on style of how you spike your pieces into the little tray, that's called a baby got backgammon.

My dad laughed at that joke, I'm sure. Me and Golden Father are just slapping each other's knees mentally. As I said that, I became uncomfortable with it. That's the strangest thing anyone has ever said about my father. But do you go on, Alex? Yeah. I regretted it pretty quick. Yeah, so into the 1920s, there was a big culture of betting money on backgammon.

And the betting money takes the edge off of the boringness of the game itself. there's a lot of casino games where the gameplay is not that great. It's the money that makes it fun. But backgammon fans started to solve this gameplay issue for themselves. And they developed the doubling cube to make an extended series of backgammon games more fun. If you have a backgammon set with a doubling cube, it's a dice, but they're just using dice because that's a common thing to print stuff on, where there's squares of two written on the sides.

So it'll be two, four, eight, 16, 32, and then 64. And that's just a marker. You don't roll it like a dice. But you, at any time in your turn in a backgammon game, you can say, hey, I want to double the value of the game. And your opponent either accepts that or forfeits. So if you think you're ahead, and there's a bunch of backgammon blogs about calculating whether you're ahead or not with pip counts. PIP counts are the number of spaces, all your combined pieces need to move to end the game. But anyway, you can force your opponent to either double the value or forfeit.

So they can say, fine, I lose one point or they can allow doubling. And once you've doubled, then your opponent has the opportunity if they feel they're coming back in the game to like double back at you and say, now I double the value. And you have to accept that it's worth four points or forfeit to end up and up and up and up. And so just one game, you're not just seeing if you win the game. You're seeing if you take this like moneyless wagering leap to make it more interesting. That's so cool. Yeah. It's a really neat thing.

I feel like pro gambling and anti-gambling people both benefited from it because the pro-gambling people could now also bet money on that added strategy. And then the anti-gambling people, there was a whole new hook for backgammon. that made it not a wagering money thing. I was going to kind of question why my dad didn't have me learn that way. And I was going to blame him. But then I remember I was a kid. And so I had the attention span of a flea. So that would not have worked.

I think he probably explained this to me at some point. And I was probably like picking my nose and, you know, watching a cartoon or something. Right. I really feel like the game stays accessible to kids if you leave the doubling cube out. Yeah, it's a lot like sorry or trouble where or even it's insulting to compare it to like Candy Land. But if you truly just want to move pieces around first, you can play it that way and it's fine. It's not that complicated. Candyland rocks though, actually.

Like that game has lore, eyes and lows. It's a great kids game. It's kind of only lore. It's really a flat game to me. But yeah, there is like lands of gumdrops or whatever. Because you lack vision. Like I always like had ideas of a whole Candyland war like Westeros. But with, you know, the throne made out of peppermint canes instead of swords.

Yeah, man. I thought real hard about that game. But yeah, I mean, I would say backgammon's a fair, even a single game is a fair deal more complicated than Candyland. Because you're, there is, there is strategy. Because there's like another, like we said there's like leaving a single piece open kind of maybe a risk. But sometimes you're doing a calculated risk just like you do in chess. You can even try to trick your opponent into doing something that you want them to do. Yeah, it's just there's a lot of interesting sort of things, right?

Where like maybe you want to start depositing stuff into your tray or maybe you want to keep more pieces on the board so that you can block off more points so that your opponent has less space to maneuver. There's a lot of cool stuff. Totally. Yeah, it's a chess like in that way where you can. be more of an offensive aggressive strategy and more of a defensive player and you can plan specific ways of winning or losing. And yet people who played this a bunch, some of them said, it's kind of just a race. I wish it was more interesting. And the doubling cube really brought that interest in instead of the I bet money on this interest. It's really cool thing that

unnamed various backgammon people came up with in the 20s and 30s. I think the ability to speed up the game at the end so that it's not just your opponent making a smug victory lap like they do in Monopoly. It does make a lot of sense. Right. Yeah. Because if somebody says, I want to double extremely late when they're just going to win, then the other person forfeits and you can move on. Like, it really saves everybody a lot of boring, wasted time, which is what you want with game design. It's great. Right. Unless you enjoy gloating, which, you know, I do. But the thing that really when another person gloats because they're winning. And, you know.

Sure. You know what I mean? That's unacceptable. I love it. The thing is, I love it when I'm reaping, but I hate it when I'm sowing and or maybe, wait, no, is it the opposite. I think it's the other way, red. Oh. No, you see, that doesn't make any sense, Alex, because reaping is, you get corn.

So who's, who's the fool this time? around. Like the clickbait title for the episode is Katie defeats God or something. You know, like you've freely debunked the Bible. Here we are. Oh, is that from the Bible? I thought that was a tweet someone did. You know, I've always assumed, and I love the tweet.

No, it's some kind of proverb, right? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. But I love the tweet. Ha ha, ha. Yeah, me sewing me reaping has its. own know your meme page. Yeah. Me sewing. Ah, this rules. Me reaping. What the heck this s**. And so these backgammon players, like, we don't know who came up with the Dublin Cube. We just know a couple of Backgammon strategy books published in the late 20s and early

30s all mentioned this Cube idea kind of at the same time. And they're from the East Coast of the U.S. And then Backgammon kind of starts to grow. from social clubs and gambling situations to being more of a like elegant strategy game, especially for stylish, rich people on the east coast of the U.S. Elegant, eh? Apparently the leading guy in this movement, his name is Alexis Obelensky. He was an exiled Russian prince. Yeah, there's a lot of those guys, huh?

Yeah, he was like so aristocratic. He was from a ruling family from before the Romanov's. You know what I mean? Like he had like old, old, weird gentry stuff going on. Right. But he would host Manhattan parties in his glitzy home where people would be offered backgammon by the Russian prince. And they'd be like, this must be fancy and great. Cool.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And people got into backgammon as, hey, this is elevated. I'm not gambling. And also it's not as nerdy as chess. It sort of found a niche thanks to the Dublin Cube, giving it this new. space. Hell yeah.

Bully those chess players. Make them feel bad about being better than chess than me. And then the people who wanted to be like chess champions, them in collaboration with Prince Obelensky, they created a backgammon world championship, which happens every year to this day. Oh, really? Wow, I didn't know.

Yeah, me neither. And it's usually held in Monte Carlo at a casino, which is very stylish. And there's also, I was curious, like, is there a so-called Michael Jordan of Backgammon? Only three people have ever won multiple world Backgammon championships. The title changes hands pretty much every year, partly because it's luck-driven. Yeah, it's a roll of the die. Yeah, only three people have ever won it multiple times, and they've been doing it since the 60s as a world format.

So it's pretty wild, actually. Backgammon also popped up once as a super stylish casino game. It's in a Bond movie, the 1983 Roger Moore movie titled Octopussy. There's a villain who uses loaded dice to cheat at Backgammon and then Bond beats him anyway. It's kind of fun. And I'm also going to link an extremely bizarre page on the James Bond website store where they are selling one backgammon set for over $3,600 U.S. and it's marketed as like James Bond backgammon. But hilariously they link pictures of the set and screenshots of Roger Moore playing it in Octopussy.

And the sets look nothing alike. And the Octopussy screenshot is not even high resolution. It's really, I think they're like just hoping luxury dudes will bother to buy this. Right. Is that a Faberget egg in the original movie shot? Yeah, they bet a false Faberger egg as the state. I see. So they're betting money.

They're not using a doubling cube, really. I mean, I would bet an egg. Also, I have a birthday coming up. So if anyone feels like getting me this $3,000 backgammon set that appears to, you know, be pretty normal, like it's not made out of diamonds or anything. Like the dye seem to be plastic. Maybe they're glass. I don't know. Yeah, like people really decided, okay, backgammon is luxurious.

The thing is that I don't like about this one is that the, you know, the middle divider, the little, the little, yeah, the rail. Yeah, the little rail. It's rounded, so you can't set your pieces down on it. So what the heck? I did not notice that, and you're right. They would slide off. They would slide right up. This isn't made by anyone who, like, actually loves backgammon.

This is made by someone who, like, is just making a collector's item for a hardcore James Bond fans. But who is that enough to buy a backgammon set for $3,000? The pieces would fall off there. This is the actual worst backgammon interface I've ever seen. Yeah. Wow. No, it's bad. I need to do a deep dive on this now because this is crazy.

The scam they're trying to do, the product description says this is appropriate because Backgammon has deep lore and James Bond. And then the stories only involve Roger Moore in the movie Octopus. Like they say, for instance, it's in the movie Octopussy and Roger Moore like to play a backgammon with cubby broccoli. So there you go. That's it. There's really no backgammon connection to James Bond.

Vulcanized fiber board? Vegetable, tanned leather corners. That's not quality materials. What are you talking about? Vulcanized fiber board. You mean particle board? Is that what you mean? Right.

I think that's what they mean, yeah. Globetrotter's signature vulcanized fiber board. Set inside a signature gray globetrotter case. The case also looks like it would contain, it's like the exact size to contain a little replica of James Bond's gun. And then when you try to show it to somebody, they'll be like, why is this backgammon? You know, like it's really disappointing to a Bond fan. No, because, yeah, it looks nothing like it isn't like a movie proper recreation. The thing in the movie looks a lot nicer.

Right. They're completely different colors. Like, yeah. It has a flat rail in the middle where you can set your pieces down in comfort and style. This one doesn't have that. I like how they do have a separate itemized description for the corners. Corners. The iconic leather corners take five days to craft and complete and are molded using time-honored machinery for optimum strength and form.

This is what I think about when I am thinking about corners is I want them to take five days to craft. Each case is truly one of a kind individualized with its own unique serial number. Well, now you know something's fancy when it has a serial number. Such as a barcode or something. They keep talking about vulcanized fiber board. Yeah, thank you. I felt like I was too fixated on this when I was looking at it, but it's truly bonkers. No, you're definitely not.

They don't even include the Faberjeet egg. Right, right. No, this is wild. Details. It doesn't not tell you what material. I'm sorry, I'm fixated on this, but it doesn't even tell you what the pieces are made out of. And you can just get a nice backgammon set for not a lot of money.

It's really a people's game, and there's this kind of thrilling thing where it became an elevated celebrity action in the 1960s and 70s. Like luxury and style got associated with backgammon in U.S. culture. Are they just trying to prey on people who were young in the 1960s and think that somehow this case means anything? I would guess that only a couple of these have ever been made and they're just hoping somebody splurges crazy money on it. Yeah, that's it. It's like for watch guys, you know?

This might be the wildest, like, online. purchase fine you've made on this show. Did you know that the Globetrotter proprietary fiber board is made from 14 layers of recycled paper bonded with zinc? I think zinc's come up on like maybe four out of the last five sifts. There's an unceasing tide pushing us towards zinc, you know? We're going to get there. Can we do like a bonus show just on the James Bond store?

because now I'm looking at related items. And there's a bag charm for 146 euros that is literally just a little, it's odd jobs hat. And it's like just a little leather thing that looks like not good. It's. Yeah. Let's next next fund drive. I'm going to make it a thing we can unlock because I've seen every James

Bond movie several times and we can have fun with it. I don't think I can wait that long. Can we do like a mid-season like flash fundraiser and then we do the 007 store podcast? It's just we got to do this is this is wild. This has got to be a money laundering scheme. Oh, that would make sense. Actually, yeah, it would make a lot of sense. There's a leather cover.

The poker said it's cheaper, by the way, if you were wondering. It's only practically a steel at 462 euros. So I don't know what you find so funny about an egg-shaped sort of oblong object on a stand with a flared bottom. I don't know why that would be funny to you. And I want you to be serious for a second here and try to guess how. how much this costs. Is it over $5,000? It is, you're correct.

I'll give a little, so just so the viewers can play along. We're looking at a gold egg on top of a black flared base. You know, nothing weird there. The egg itself has like a vault structure. It looks like it has rivets in it and a little fake vault. And then you open up the vault and there's little bars of gold inside. And, you know, I'll read some of the description too just to help you out. It's Faberjee times 007 goldfinger egg objee spelled OBGJ, numbered edition.

Sure. French. And so this is introducing the Faberjay plus 007 goldfinger egg objay, a numbered edition of precious collector's piece, handcrafted from 18K, yellow gold, yellow and white diamonds, and black nephrite jadeite in a limited edition of 50. It's immaculately crafted. Is this more than $100,000? Why, yes, it is, Alex. Because I didn't see the diamonds on the super ugly base, but you're right, there's diamonds. Those is diamonds.

Them there's diamonds. I mean, nothing says James Bond like this. Yeah. You're getting close to the price. One more guess, and then I'll tell it to you. Okay. $125,000. No, All right.

it's 190,173 and 95 cents euros, which in America dollars. Okay, so that's, I'm going to do this. I'm going to convert this. This is important. I'm sorry, I've completely derailed the podcast. But it's really important that you guys know, because that's a lot more in dollars. $219,532. And five cents in America.

America dollars. Yeah. That story is just a trap for like senile tycoons. This is, yeah, you're wondering where all of your money that should go into fixing potholes and cancer research is going. It's this. Anyways, Alex, I'm sorry. You've lost me for the rest of the podcast, Alex.

I'm just going to be doing a little bit of shopping, a little online shopping. Yeah, while Katie loses all her money to James Bond's ghost, we're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be back with two more takeaways going all the way backwards and then four words in time. Folks, we're back. And we have two further backgammon takeaways for you about the most ancient and modern forms of backgammon possible. The ancient one is takeaway number two. In the 1980s, archaeologists rediscovered backgammon's roots as humanity's first hit board game. Whoa.

Backgammon is the most popular descendant of something called the Royal Game of Er, which was Mesopotamia's favorite game and spread across three continents. All right. So the Royal Game of... No, it's called the Royal Game of Er. The Royal Game of Er, like from the city of Err in Sumeria. I see. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, and this is essentially the first board game that was ever massively popular

across a huge part of the world in probably human history, like just networking huge civilizations and groups of people. It's probably the first one. Wow. And it's pretty similar to backgammon. So if you want to feel connected to the ancient past, you can learn backgammon. Yeah. I already feel so much more connected to my ancestors who I assume were playing this and not laboring away at potatoes. Right. My people could have. afford the James Bond catalog. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

For 100 generations, my family has made the leather on the corners of the credit of backgammon set artisanally. You think we built this podcast on our own? No, we're backgammon tycans. Key source for this, two amazing pieces of reporting, a feature

for the New York Times by writer Deb Amlin, and a feature by Associated Press reporter Deepa Barath. And I'm also citing a book called Do Dice Play God by Ian Stewart, who is a math professor at the University of Warwick. Do dice play God? Yeah, it's backwards. It's fun. Yeah. That's fun.

And yeah, and the shortest version of this idea is that backgammon dates back to ancient Sumeria. They built large city states in Mesopotamia, mostly what's now modern Iraq, more than 5,000 years ago. and they created a massively popular board game that it doesn't have the exact rules of backgammon, but the board is 20 square spaces instead of 24 pointed spaces and you move checkers around it. Also, apparently the first version used triangular dice. So I love that the real game of Err had square spaces and triangle dice, and then backgammon has triangle spaces and square dice. That's fun, you know, it's kind of a flip.

It's square space, you say. No, no, no, no, no. I wish they would. They're really good. But the royal game of Err, it was the dominant board game across Mesopotamia for at least 1,000 years. We've found boards and pieces multiple times at multiple digs. It's such a cultural landmark. We think the game was part of the reason dice were invented.

Whoa, no kidding. There's a long ago, Siff. episode about dice. We talk about ancient dice found in what's now Iran. They're the oldest dice we have. They were used to play this. And it was from after the initial triangle dice. They're six-sided. But we think that the origin of dice is probably fortune-telling bones, like bones that you cast with various things written on various parts, and then you see what turns up. So before this game, it was, there weren't really dice games to be played that we know of. Hmm. Because I guess you'd have to invent the cube first.

Yeah, like making cubes. And bones were a big material for this, either animal or human. You got to make a cube that's fairly good because otherwise you're just always going to roll the same numbers over and over again. Right. Like in James Bond, where they have the Wade dye so that they can have their fabricier egg that definitely doesn't look like something. else. Yeah, and also modern scholars call this the royal game because it was so prominent, but it was not only limited to royalty. Apparently people of all social classes were obsessed with it.

It's been found at like regular homes that we dig up or royal tombs or in between. And then people kept playing it tinkered with the rules and a bunch of variants spread across the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. So Europe, Asia and Africa, parts of it all received this game some way. Okay. So it's spread pretty early. And we're talking still about the royal game of Err. Yeah.

And Backgammon, in the codified way, backgammon exists now, only developed several centuries ago. But it's one of many, many variants of what was a variance of Er's game. Like this was an ancient and popular enough game that it influenced ancient Egypt, one of their favorite board games called Senet, which is sort of like this. Okay. Also, one of our syphalopods, their username is Thassos on the Discord. When the topic got picked, they shared that in Cyprus, their family plays a game called Silito, which is called Placoto in Greece. And I'll link about it, but they say that it's a lot like backgammon and there's no doubling cube, which makes.

sense because the doubling cube is from, you know, like depression era United States. So I'm looking at, you sent a photo of what looks like maybe one of like a version of this game. It's very pretty. It's much more intricate than a typical backgammon board. And there's eyeballs staring at me, which I do like because then it discourages cheating because you're always being watched. Yeah, and the other other thing I love about this game in terms of its rules is that apparently, you know, what we said with backgammon, people needed a hook of either wagering money or the extra strategic element of a doubling cube. The extra hook of the Royal Game of Err was fortune-telling. The New York Times says that the marked squares on the board, it's not just decoration.

They had signs of the Sumerian zodiac indicated on them. And the way your piece has moved predicted your future as a person. Whoa. That's intense, though. Yeah. So people like love games and also the extra hook was what's going to happen in my life. Yikes. I mean, that's kind of like, that's intense, man.

And also they kind of lived fast, died young in Sumeria, you know. I think we're a little more cautious. So I get the negative side of that where you don't want to think about your future. They were like, I'll die building a ziggurat, whatever, let's roll, you know. I mean, honestly, yeah, if you're living fast and die in young, if a game says, like, you're going to die building a ziggurat, that's like, then at least you don't have to worry about choking on moldy bread. Right, right. Everybody I know dies building a ziggurat. It's the thing to do.

It's on trend. Right. That's, yeah, that's the way to go out. And, yeah, and so, like, Mesopotamia, it gets called a cradle of civilization. It was also, in many ways, a cradle of board gaming, especially with this sort of racing game where your pieces are opposing and blocking and traffic for each other. And this also explains why Europeans didn't get a hold of backgammon until the past thousand years. Apparently, it didn't really reach Europe until soldiers returned from the Crusades. and also some influence from Arabic rule in what's now Spain and Portugal.

That led people to get the descendants of the descendants of the royal game of Err and start playing it. Was there any sort of rules drift over this amount of time, or did it stay pretty consistent? Apparently, yes, like a lot of variation and change. But the basics of a racing game and you hit each other and oppose each other is pretty consistent. I see. And then also the way that this has roots in Southwest Asia means that backgammon has been a huge game in that region for thousands of years. I'm going to link to a New York Times piece about Iran this year as the U.S. is bombing and attacking it. They write about cafe culture there where people still want to get out and see other people.

So they go and they often play backgammon as they just kind of wait through a war. Like it's so portable. It's in the case. Yeah. part of its appeal. People know it and you can just sit and get at it. I like that. It's sort of like how in some parks you just have like chess boards out there and old dudes go and play chess. Yeah, yeah. But a lot more portable. It's a lot like that, yeah. Yeah, and then another amazing sign of this progression is one very small Jewish community in a city in modern India.

It's the city of Kochi on the west coast of India. Apparently thousands of years ago, a group of Jewish people fled the Middle East and settled there, established a Jewish neighborhood. And then ever since then, they were known for playing a unique board game that's like backgammon that the rest of the region didn't have. And it's because the Middle East is the cradle of what became backgammon. Like you can trace migrations through the game. That's so cool. Man, I bet there's like, not to be a nerd, but there's probably like an economics paper there. There probably is, yeah, yeah.

And then like my favorite thing about this is all of that history and progression of backgammon was only a theory until the 1980s when one scholar rediscovered a complete tablet of rules for the royal game of Err. Whoa. Is that what I'm looking for? What is this, Cuneiform? Yeah, yeah. This was a tablet. Apparently people working for the British Museum acquired it in 1880. It was from a dig at ancient Babylon.

And for about 100 years, British museum experts failed to translate it, especially because it didn't read like literature or laws or other common styles of writing. And then around 1980, a curator and a serialologist named Irving Finkel detected little similarities between the cuneiform on the tablet and other scraps of rules for games on other Babylonian finds. And he proceeded to translate our only old complete rules for the royal game of Er. And the rules are complete enough that some people in modern Iraq have revived the game and made like new boards and pieces and they play that exact. game. Whoa. But also he was able to confirm it's pretty much like backgammon. Setting aside the distant past and fortunes and so on, let's leap into the future with

one last takeaway number three. Backgammon was the first game that humans lost to a computer. And it was one of the first handheld video games. Oh, whoa. So this is like as we approach the really singularity, this is very appropriate. Yeah, this was the first game where the famous version is chess computers, and then there's a passive about checkers where we talk about people building a checkers computer. But Backgammon was the first game where a world champion lost to a computer that was in 1979.

It seems a little unfair because couldn't the computer just, you know, weigh the dye in favor of itself? So no joke, the guy who designed the program, he told the press that he was proud of building something that beat a human champion, but this person felt that the computer got much better rolls. It wasn't rigged, but he publicly said, part of our success is just luck. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does feel a little bit unfair, like, for this to be the litmus test, because it's like the computer could just roll really good. Yeah, I'm sure they made the rolling fair and also it can go either way.

So, you know, yeah. Yeah. I have no mouth, and I must call shenanigans. Yeah, this key sources here, it's writing by computer scientist Hans J. Berliner, who is the person who built the program. And also an obituary of him from Carnegie Mellon and then digital resources from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Because there's two tech stories here. They both happen specifically in 1979. In 1979, the reigning world backgammon champion was an Italian play.

named Luigi Villa, which is great. It's a great name. Perfect name. Luigi Villa. That's coming out soon on the Nintendo D.S. We were just playing Luigi's Mansion 3 on Switch. Yeah, it kind of felt that way. Yeah. That's actually what it's called in Italy. Luigi's Mansion is called Luigi Villa. It would make sense, yeah. Luigi Villa, like I mentioned, there's a world backgammon championship. He was the reigning champion, and then he lost to Hans J. Berliner's computer program. This was described as the first time a world champion in a recognized intellectual activity

has been defeated by a man-made entity. Wow. That's ominous. And yeah, it was more than a decade before the Checkers computer beat a Checkers champion, and then it took a longer time for chess computers to beat humans. Right. Kind of makes sense that you got to master the ancient game first. The more Stone Age the computer is. It kind of aligns, yeah.

And the entire reason this happened is that Hans J. Berliner's real dream was to build a chess computer. And then he settled for a more doable game. I see. So it's just chess is more complicated. In terms of the rules, why is that harder? Yeah, apparently chess is extraordinarily complicated in terms of the potential moves. They're like famous and apparently true status. There are more moves in a chess game than there are atoms in the universe.

As we understand the universe. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is why, you know, chess is a little boring. What do you mean? You only have enough moves for there to be atoms in the universe. What if it's infinity plus one moves? Checkmate. Yeah, and on the Checkers show, we talk about computer scientists building a Checkers

computer because chess is too hard. They did that in the early 90s. They completed that. And Backgammon is also simpler than chess. Hans Berliner calculated that there were about 60 possible moves at any one time plus 21 possible results from the dice rolls. so he programmed for both of those things and built a system that plays backgammon against you. With the original program, was it him kind of inputting specific strategies for the computer to follow

or just like a basic set of rules and then the computer figuring out the strategy? The first thing, yeah. Okay. Apparently the most challenging element was that he struggled to help the computer have strategies to follow for the dice rolls. and he was only able to solve it when mathematicians working separately invented a whole new field of math. It's called Fuzzy Set Theory. Fuzzy set theory. That sounds cute. It makes me think of fuzzy dice when you put it together with dice, yeah.

Yeah, so then once he incorporated that, the computer was good at backgammon and could beat a world champion. And that's a massive achievement in computer science, artificial intelligence, everything. It's really cool. Yeah. And now we've got computers that are going to take our jobs. And he's such a interesting guy who built this, too, because his true passion is chess to the point that he became the world champion in correspondence chess. Is that like email chess? Yes.

And when he was doing it, it was letters or postcards. And apparently, you know, people who played it would give themselves. much time as they wanted to make each move. So one of his multiple championships in correspondence chess, it took them about three years to play the game. Whoa. One game. But he did that.

He also, he was a German immigrant, literally from Berlin. His last name's Berliner. He has a wild connection to another SIF. The past episode about vinyl records, and we talk about a German engineer named Emil Berliner inventing discs for recorded music. Hans was his great nephew. And their family left Germany when he was eight years old because the Nazis were taking power.

So he also got out of there. That's really good. That's good. Yeah. That's not a good time. So talented family. Absolutely. And yeah, because he was able to escape, he massively advanced computer science, our theories and understanding about games.

And also one of his computer science students helped build a computer named Deep Blue that beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. So I like that his students kind of continued his goal, too. And no, I was thinking that one of them was on Jeopardy, but that was Watson. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's another. I think they were both IBM or something, yeah. Got it. And they're jerks.

No computers should play Jeopardy. Only me. Me, human. Only Alex. How do I know you're human, though? Yeah, and I said there's two stories here. The other story is that backgammon is one of the first handheld video games ever made. This, in a fun way, ties into the 1960s and 70s trend in the U.S. especially of glamorous and celebrity type people promoting backgammon as like a cocktail party activity.

And the main celebrity of that was Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. Huh. Very cool guy. Yeah. Star of movies like Dr. Javago. If you look him up, you'll be like, oh, what a handsome mustache guy. It was really cool. I'm going to do that.

You know, there weren't a lot of Egyptian actors in Hollywood. And also, Egypt has a huge backgammon culture because it's proximate to the Fertile Crescent and so on. Oh, he was in Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, he's a cool young guy in that too, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he's in a ton of movies. And Omar Sharif, as he ages, he becomes the face of backgammon in a lot of U.S. pop culture.

And he endorses two products. One of them is a luxury executive case backgammon set. Okay. Much better deal than the James Bond. Is it? How much is that one, Grunya? I couldn't find a price, but it was in like normal stores. Yeah.

Okay. And the packaging showed Omar Sharif and like a lovely lady with cocktails playing backgammon, you know. That was the vibe. Oh, I'm looking at this. There's eBay, UK. set that you can get for 50 British pounds. Yeah, for like an out-of-print

classic board game. That's normal. That's fine. Yeah, yeah. That's not so bad. That's really not bad at all. It looks like they can rest the pieces comfortably in the middle. I think the James Bond store is the only place you could find a bad rail. It's always either a case with a good rail

or a flatboard. Yeah. So Omar Sharif, he does not just lend his name likeness to a nice physical backgammon set. He partners with an Ohio electronics company called Triom Incorporated. They seem to have done not much else since then. But in 1979, Triom Incorporated debuts handheld electronic backgammon, including you can do a hot seat where you pass it to another human, but you can also face a redimentary AI

opponent that has been programmed with backgammon strategies, and you can play against this computer. Oh, okay. Omar Sharif was so famous, the product was named Omar 1. Wow. And then they made four further additions up to Omar 5. And the ad was just Omar Sharif looking cool and holding this out to you, you know? I feel like it makes it seem like they're upgrading Omar as well.

Like there's a new version of Omar who gets released, which is nice because I feel like the world could use more Omar in it. I completely agree. I want Omar Shreve to have only good things, you know? Like rocket legs, whatever they give him. Yeah. And like he was so central to the product, Triom Incorporated, trademarked the name Omar. They successfully got a U.S. trademark in 1981 for Omar in all capital letters to refer to, quote, equipment for playing a handheld computerized backgammon game. Okay.

I guess that's sufficiently specific because I was going to ask, how do you trade, like Omar is just a very car. common name. Right. Like the television show, the wire gets sued. You know, come on. That wouldn't make sense. But yeah, this was like a modest hidden gaming and it helped make handheld gaming a thing at all.

Like, apparently Mattel in 1976 put out what's considered the first portable handheld electronic game. It was a little auto racing game. So just three years later, Omar Sharif is not just popularizing backgammon, but handheld gaming at all. Wow. It's wild. And he was at this point, like, was he sort of in his, like, he was a little bit of an older man, right?

Yeah, he's, he's like gray. Yeah. Right. He's aged. Like fine wine. Honestly, yes. He just got like better and better looking, I think. But, uh.

He's got an entry in the Muppet Wiki. Why? He probably hosted one or something. He was in Gulliver's travels for the, I didn't know Jim Hinson did a, production of Gulliver's travels, but apparently they did, and Omar Sharif was in it, and he's got very cool hair. Yeah, like he was in his mid-40s. I wondered actually how old he was.

He was past his mid-40s when this game came out. And so, you know, you can be gray and still youthful in that time. And he was like, yeah, I'm salt and pepper, and I'm the handsome backgammon man that you know from movies. Right. That was a cool niche he had, you know. from the from the from the Muppet version of Gulliver's travels uh you keep trying to pull us away from the topic of the show which is the Muppet version of Gulliver's travels I wish you'd stay on topic a little better it the last last really silly thing is Omar Sharif was basically the first of two

video game backgammon icons the other one was Mario in 1998 they made a Mario game of various board games where among other things you can play backgammon against Mario. Two moustachioed kings. That's true. Yeah, Mario does kind of look like a, like if your plumber had a cartoon logo and they wanted it to look like Omar Sharif, you know? Right. And Mediterranean adjacent. Sure.

Former Roman Empire. Yeah. Look, if you can't like sort of futs with your mustache while playing backgammon, I don't, you're, you know, what are you even doing? Yeah, I'm going to, I'll link to the nostalgia subreddit has screenshots of, it was either called Mario's Fundamentals or Mario's Game Gallery. And the Mario version of backgammon, he's across the table from you and the pieces are turtle shells and eggs. It's great. It's really good. Adorable.

It's cute. Although the pieces are both green, which makes it a little confusing because they're green eggs and then green shells, which is a little odd. I agree. It's hard to look at. A little bit hard. But then it's Mario looking at you from across the table with a very passive aggressive smile saying, I don't think you can go there. Yes. I love that even in the screenshot, Americans are like, how do I play backgammon?

I don't know this game, man. Right. Right. I think that this was back in a time when computer AI would use a friendly face like Mario to teach you backgammon. Yeah, not a Terminator skull. Yeah, it's cool. Right. That's the thing that I keep wondering why, like, ChatchyPT has the Terminator's skull.

in most of its marketing materials. That's wild to me. Folks has the main episode for this week, and I think we found a future bonus idea in there, too, with the Bond Store. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one,

backgammon is most popular with players who use the doubling cube. It really raises the strategic stakes and makes it more interesting without betting money. Takeaway number two, in the 1980s, archaeologists rediscovered Backgammon's roots as the main derivative of the Royal Game of Er, humanity's first hit board game. And that's not to discount other ancient board games, it was just the first board game with a truly giant spread across regions and cultures. Takeaway number three, Backgammon was the first game humans lost to a computer and one of the first handheld video games. Astonishingly, both of those things happened in the year 1979 specifically.

The defeat of champion Luigi Villa by Hans J. Berliner's program and the electronic handheld backgammon device sponsored by Omar Sharif. And then a lot of numbers before that. Again, if you'd like a tutorial on exactly how to play backgammon, that's easy to find. I will link a few. but we got into the basics of how the board is set up, and then a lot of extraordinary history of the name of the game, the kings and religious leaders banning it,

and the gambling-oriented origins of lots of different board games all over the world. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. Members are why we may explore the James Bond store someday. Right now, members get a bonus show this week and every week. Every week we make you a whole extra show exploring one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is two related stories. It's an argument for why backgammon is the greatest and most perfect board game ever devised and a system for randomizing chess to try to make chess even more perfect than backgammon. Visit sifpod.fund.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 25 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows.

It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things. Check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include a few books. Do Dice Play God is by Ian Stewart. Mathematics Professor at the University of Warwick. Also citing an excerpt of Marcus Duce Satoi's writing, he is Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and his book is Around the World in 80 Games. A mathematician unlocks the secrets of the greatest games.

I'm also thankful to Backgammon fans for really exploring how this game works and can work. Backgamon Galaxy.com is a great resource for just the basics of how to play. other great sites include backgammon galore and the New England Backgammon Club. And then we really benefited from digital resources from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Carnegie Mellon University, the gaming website pad and pixel.com, and reporting from places like the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Associated Press. That page also features resources such as native-lashland.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking.

the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord,

where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 209. That's about the topic of homework. And one fun fact there, the country of Finland and studies of students in Finland is the biggest flashpoint in the modern debate and analysis of how. how homework should be given to students.

So I recommend that episode. Also recommend Katie Golden's podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budo's Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners.

I am thrilled to say we will be back next week. with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists' own shows. Supported.

Directly. By you.