Moving Backgammon Pieces after Setup

After we have setup the board and the checker pieces properly we need to decide which player would initiate the move. Each player rolls a die and sees who gets the highest roll. The player with the highest roll starts moving backgammon pieces.

The first player moves a piece according to the number of die result used to determine who would move first. Two dice are to be used afterwards to determine the number of points a checker piece will be moved. At times, a player may opt to move two pieces using each die result when two dice are rolled. Or, the player may opt to move one piece using both dice results.

For instance, we roll dice and the result is 4-3. We may opt to move two checker pieces; one is moved 4 points and the other 3 points. Or, we may move one piece 7 points. We do these adjustments especially to avoid non open points. We need to land pieces only on open or unoccupied points.

The two players take turns rolling the dice and moving backgammon pieces. Notice that the dice rolls dictate how many points we move checker pieces on the board. Points can also be referred to as pips. After the dice are rolled we move a checker piece forward. We cannot move it backward once we have moved a piece on the board. A piece can only stop on a point unoccupied or is occupied by only one enemy piece.

When two or more enemy pieces occupy a point and that point happens to be where the dice roll dictates that our piece stops we cannot take that turn and instead wait for our next turn. But we can do other options. We may split the dice rolls between two pieces or use the dice roll for a single piece, as explained above. This prevents us from forfeiting a turn.

We must move our checkers in the opposite direction of the enemy checkers. If the opponent is moving enemy checkers clockwise we must be moving our checkers counter clockwise. Players always start from the enemy home board going to their home board.

In case both dice pieces roll the same number (a doubles) the player must play twice the number of times reflected on the dice. Hence, moving backgammon pieces are always done through dice rolls. They are always moved forward and stop on open points or those with a lone checker.