The history of backgammon and tabla in the Balkans

Race games with dice are among the oldest games known. The Royal Game of Ur from Mesopotamia, about 4,500 years old, is one of them, though not backgammon itself. A board with dice and pieces found at Shahr-e Sukhteh (the Burnt City) in Iran, roughly 5,000 years old, is often called an early ancestor of backgammon; how it was played is still debated.

The Romans played tabula, a game on a board of 24 points with three dice. A Byzantine poem describes a game played by Emperor Zeno in the 5th century with rules very close to modern backgammon. In Persia the game is called nard, and a well-known legend credits its invention to the sage Bozorgmehr.

In medieval Europe these games were simply called tables. The English name backgammon appears in the 17th century. The doubling cube, the last big change, was added in New York gaming clubs in the 1920s and made the game popular all over again.

In Bulgaria and its neighbours the game spread in Ottoman times; the Bulgarian word табла comes from the Turkish tavla, which goes back to the Latin tabula. Here tables is not one game but several, played in turn: Greeks play portes, plakoto and fevga, and Bulgarians play табла, тапа and гюлбара.

Gulbara belongs to the games where both players run the same way and nothing is hit, like the Greek fevga. Тапа is the pinning game the Greeks call plakoto; the mother-checker rule used on ZAR comes from plakoto, while traditional Bulgarian тапа plays without it.

Tabla is still played in cafés, parks and homes across the Balkans, and now online. On ZAR you can play all three games: each on its own, in turn as in the Tabla set, or online against players from anywhere.

Dates and origins in ancient history are debated; we give the commonly cited ones.