# History of the games

> Where chess, checkers, backgammon and dominoes came from — origins, dates, records and the odd corrections history has made along the way.

Four games, between them about four and a half thousand years old. None of them was invented in the way software is invented — they were played into their current shape, argued over, and in one case proved finished. Where the record is genuinely uncertain, this says so.

## Chess

*Northern India, by the 6th century*

Nobody invented chess. It arrived by degrees, across a thousand years and three continents, and the version played today is younger than the printing press.

- **c. 600** — Chaturanga is played in northern India — the four arms of an army, infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, on sixty-four squares. There is no inventor to name. The story of a sage who asks to be paid in grain, doubled on each square, is a legend attached to the game long afterwards.
- **c. 650** — Carried into Persia as chatrang, then across the Islamic world as shatranj. Two of its words are still in English: shah for the king under attack, and shah mat — the king is helpless — for checkmate.
- **c. 1000** — Established in Europe by way of Muslim Spain and the Mediterranean. The queen is still the ferz, an adviser that shuffles one square diagonally, and games take a very long time.
- **1475** — In Valencia the queen and the bishop are given their modern range. It is the largest rule change chess has ever had — it made the opening sharp and the game fast — and the earliest surviving record of it is a poem, Scachs d'amor. Players elsewhere called the new version mad queen chess.
- **1749** — Philidor publishes L'analyze des échecs and argues that the pawns are the soul of chess. It is the first real positional theory, and it is written by a man better known in his lifetime as a composer of comic opera.
- **1851** — London holds the first international tournament.
- **1886** — Wilhelm Steinitz beats Johannes Zukertort for the first official world championship.
- **1924** — FIDE is founded in Paris.
- **1997** — Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov 3½–2½: the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a machine at standard time controls.

### Interesting facts

- **Longest game: 269 moves** — Ivan Nikolić against Goran Arsović, Belgrade 1989. It ran past twenty hours and was drawn.
- **Fastest checkmate: 2 moves** — Fool's Mate — 1.f3 e5 2.g4 Qh4#. It only happens if White cooperates.
- **Longest title match: 48 games** — Karpov against Kasparov, 1984–85. Called off after five months with no result and both players spent.
- **Possible games: ~10^120** — The Shannon number, an estimate of the game tree. There are perhaps 10^80 atoms in the observable universe.

[Play Chess](https://www.chessorro.com/en/play/chess)

## Checkers

*The ancient Mediterranean; the modern game, France c. 1100*

Checkers is older than chess and, unlike chess, it is finished. In 2007 a computer proved the game out to its last position.

- **Antiquity** — Boards for alquerque — a game of capturing by jumping — are cut into stone across the Mediterranean and the Near East, including roof slabs at the temple of Kurna in Egypt. Those are often dated to around 1400 BCE, though the dating is disputed. The game is certainly very old.
- **c. 1100** — In southern France, alquerque's pieces move onto a chessboard. The promoted piece takes its name from the chess queen — fierge — which is why the French still call the game jeu de dames and the Germans Dame.
- **c. 1535** — France makes capturing compulsory. That version, jeu forcé, becomes the modern game; the older one, where you could decline a capture, survives for a while as le plaisant.
- **1952** — Arthur Samuel starts a checkers program at IBM that improves by playing against itself. He later coins a phrase for what it is doing: machine learning.
- **1994** — Chinook, from the University of Alberta, becomes the first program to win a world championship in any game against humans. Its rival Marion Tinsley withdrew from the match ill; he died the following year.
- **2007** — Chinook's team announces that checkers is solved. Played perfectly by both sides, the game is a draw. The proof took eighteen years.

### Interesting facts

- **Solved: A draw** — Perfect play from both sides ends level. Checkers is the largest game ever solved outright.
- **Positions accounted for: 5 × 10^20** — What the proof had to cover. Chess is thought to have something nearer 10^44.
- **Tinsley's career losses: 7 games** — Marion Tinsley lost only seven games in forty-five years of competitive play. Two of the seven were to Chinook.
- **Two games, one name: 64 or 100 squares** — English draughts uses sixty-four squares and men that move only forwards. International draughts uses a hundred, and kings that fly the length of a diagonal.

[Play Checkers](https://www.chessorro.com/en/play/checkers)

## Backgammon

*Mesopotamia and Rome; the modern name, England c. 1650*

The board has barely changed in two thousand years. The thing that made backgammon a modern game is a hundred years old and fits in your palm.

- **c. 2600 BCE** — The Royal Game of Ur is played in Mesopotamia — a race decided by dice, on boards recovered from the graves at Ur. Its rules survive because a Babylonian scribe wrote them on a tablet more than two thousand years later.
- **1st century** — Romans play tabula on a board of twenty-four points that a modern player would recognise at a glance. The emperor Claudius is said to have written a book on it and had a board fitted to his carriage.
- **c. 1650** — The name backgammon appears in English.
- **1920s** — Someone in a New York club invents the doubling cube: before your roll you may offer to double the stakes, and your opponent must take it or concede. Nobody knows who. It is the most important change in the game's history — it turned a race into a running argument about who is actually winning.
- **1979** — Hans Berliner's program BKG 9.8 beats world champion Luigi Villa in Monte Carlo — the first time a computer beat a reigning world champion at any board game. Berliner said afterwards that the dice had been kind to it.
- **1992** — TD-Gammon, written by Gerald Tesauro at IBM, teaches itself by playing itself a million times over. It reaches world-class strength, and then does something rarer: it changes how the best humans play, because it kept preferring opening moves the books had rejected.

### Interesting facts

- **The doubling cube: 1920s** — Invented in New York. The inventor's name was never recorded.
- **Distinct rolls: 21, not 36** — Two dice land thirty-six ways but only twenty-one of them are different turns, since 5-3 and 3-5 are the same. Doubles come up half as often as the other rolls.
- **The opening throw: Never a double** — Each player rolls a single die to decide who begins, and a tie is thrown again — so the first move of a game is always two different numbers.
- **Checkers per side: 15** — Each running a track of twenty-four points in opposite directions, which is why a blot left behind you is safe and one in front of you is not.

[Play Backgammon](https://www.chessorro.com/en/play/backgammon)

## Dominoes

*China, by the 13th century; Europe, early 1700s*

Dominoes came out of China, and somewhere on the way to Europe they gained the blanks that make the modern game.

- **c. 1270s** — The earliest clear written record of dominoes is in Zhou Mi's Former Events in Wulin, which describes tiles for sale in the markets of the Song capital.
- **Chinese sets** — Chinese dominoes are the twenty-one throws of two dice made solid. There are no blanks, and eleven of the tiles are duplicated, which gives a set of thirty-two.
- **Early 1700s** — Dominoes appear in Italy, in Venice and Naples. By now they have blanks — a whole extra rank that China's sets never had — and a double-six set has grown to twenty-eight tiles.
- **The name** — Probably from the domino, a black hooded cloak lined with white worn at Venetian carnival. The same contrast as the tiles.
- **1998–2009** — Domino Day turns toppling into a televised spectacle in the Netherlands, and the record climbs year after year.

### Interesting facts

- **A double-six set: 28 tiles** — Every pairing of nought through six, counted once. The blank-blank is a tile like any other.
- **Bigger sets: 55 and 91** — Double-nine has fifty-five tiles and double-twelve has ninety-one. A double-n set always has (n+1)(n+2)/2.
- **Toppling record: 4,491,863** — Tiles felled at Domino Day in the Netherlands, 2009.
- **What Europe added: The blanks** — Chinese tiles cover only what two dice can show. Adding a blank rank is what makes a European set larger and the games different.

[Play Dominoes](https://www.chessorro.com/en/play/dominoes)

*Dates before about 1500 are approximate, and the earliest ones are contested — board games leave boards behind far more often than they leave rules. Where a claim is commonly repeated but thinly evidenced, such as the age of the Kurna boards, it is marked as disputed rather than dropped.*

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