Ruling — Backgammon

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Backgammonbg-2397-en-1e

1. Each player rolls one die on his right-hand side of the board, and the player with the higher number wins the honour of playing first.[1]

2. If both players roll the same number, they roll again until the dice show different numbers.[1]

3. The player who wins the opening must use the numbers from his die and his opponent's die to make his move.[1]

4. A player can move one of his men a certain number of points (pips) along the board and then move one man (or the same man again) by the second number, provided the opponent does not "own" the destination point.[1]

5. A player "owns" a point if they have two or more men on it.[1]

6. A player must use both numbers of a roll if it is legally possible to do so, or all four numbers of a double.[2]

7. If only one number can be played, the player must play that number; if both can be played but not both together, the larger number must be played.[2]

8. When rolling doubles, if fewer than four numbers can be played, as many numbers as possible must be played.[2]

9. During a turn, a player must move checkers clearly to a specific location using one and the same hand throughout the turn.[3]

10. A player should announce the roll before repositioning dice and must keep borne off checkers away from the playing surface.[3]

11. A player's move is finished only when they have picked up their dice.[4]

12. In an untimed game using two dice, a player ends their turn by hitting a non-expiring clock or tapping the bar if no clock is available.[3]

13. When using four dice, players end their turn by lifting one or both dice, unless notice of repositioning is given.[3]

14. When using a clock, players must hit the clock to end every turn, even if no play is possible.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) · p.8 · the First Move

[2] RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) · p.14 · Play as Much as You Can · Play as Much as Possible

[3] RULEBOOK Backgammon — WBGF Tournament Rules · p.2 · CHECKER AND DICE HANDLING · END OF TURN; PREMATURE ACTIONS · ILLEGAL MOVES

[4] RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) · p.15 · Choosing a Move

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 80 ms · ask 4913 ms · total 4997 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4997 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 15, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "T he greatest challenge in backgammon is in consistently finding the 'right' play . One of the reasons it took computers so long to become good at the game is that on every turn there are so many possible moves and until sophisticated techniques came into existence computers were useless at the game", "headingPath": "Choosing a Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.047073, "snippet": "S o how do we start the game? Each player rolls one die and whoever gets the higher number wins the honour of playing first. If both players roll the same number, then they roll again until the two dice show different numbers. When rolling the dice each player rolls on his right-hand side of the boa", "headingPath": "the First Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "T he rules of backgammon state that a player must use both numbers of a roll if it is legally possible to do so or all four numbers of a double. When only one number can be played, the player must play that number. Below is an example, A . Black is trying to bring his last two men into his home boar", "headingPath": "Play as Much as You Can · Play as Much as Possible", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.045335, "snippet": "There's another old adage in backgammon: 'When in doubt, hit.' As we have seen, that applies in the example, where we saw that the best move was 13/9, 13/10*. One more piece of advice: when you roll a double, particularly a small one like double 1 or double 2, then take a little more time than usual", "headingPath": "Choosing a Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044733, "snippet": "6 L earning the rules of backgammon may be difficult at first, but it is actually simple to understand and play . So, to begin, what do you need to play backgammon? Just four things. Backgammon is played on a board consisting of 24 narrow triangles called 'points'. The triangles alternate in colour ", "headingPath": "Backgammon History · the equipment · Backgammon Board · Men (Checkers) · Dice · Doubling Cube", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.042803, "snippet": "H itting and entering are two fundamental backgammon concepts that every beginner in backgammon should understand to move forward in their game. A single man is known as a 'blot'. If you land on the point where the blot is, you are said to have 'hit' it and it leaves the board and is placed on the b", "headingPath": "Hitting and entering", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.04188, "snippet": "A", "headingPath": "Play as Much as Possible", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.040401, "snippet": "W e are nearly ready to start moving the men around the board but first we need a method of notation to describe the movement of the men. For many years there was no agreed notation but that problem was solved about 30 years ago, and there is now a universally agreed notation. Dice rolls are shown a", "headingPath": "notation", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "the First Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Play as Much as You Can · Play as Much as Possible", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CHECKER AND DICE HANDLING · END OF TURN; PREMATURE ACTIONS · ILLEGAL MOVES", "sharpsignalDocId": 149}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Choosing a Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 148 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 148 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.91732 of 1403 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 14, 2026 18:00

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Choosing a Move	p.15	0.048131 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	the First Move	p.8	0.047073 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Play as Much as You Can · Play as Much as Possible	p.14	0.046244 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Choosing a Move	p.15	0.045335 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Backgammon History · the equipment · Backgammon Board · Men (Checkers) · Dice · Doubling Cube	p.4	0.044733 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Hitting and entering	p.12	0.042803 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Play as Much as Possible	p.15	0.04188 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	1
#8	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	notation	p.6	0.040401 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 44 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

one thing that looks wrong and is not: a row a floor seated can carry a fused rank LARGER than the pool size above it. The floors draw from the whole fused list, not only from the passages the re-ranker scored — so a rank past the pool is a floor reaching down for something the re-ranker would never have seen, which is exactly what the floors are for.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Backgammon — WBGF Tournament Rules (corpus doc 149)	CHECKER AND DICE HANDLING · END OF TURN; PREMATURE ACTIONS · ILLEGAL MOVES	p.2	#10	0.028577 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	guaranteed a slot by the base-rulebook floor
#2	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	the First Move	p.8	#2	0.047073 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Play as Much as You Can · Play as Much as Possible	p.14	#3	0.046244 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Backgammon History · the equipment · Backgammon Board · Men (Checkers) · Dice · Doubling Cube	p.4	#5	0.044733 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Choosing a Move	p.15	#4	0.045335 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	the Basics of Doubling	p.24	#29	0.022801 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Play as Much as Possible	p.15	#7	0.04188 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	A Couple More Guidelines	p.19	#16	0.026631 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	the First Move	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Play as Much as You Can · Play as Much as Possible	p.14	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Backgammon — WBGF Tournament Rules (corpus doc 149)	CHECKER AND DICE HANDLING · END OF TURN; PREMATURE ACTIONS · ILLEGAL MOVES	p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148)	Choosing a Move	p.15	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 80 ms · first delta 2797 ms · total 4997 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 80 ms · ask 4913 ms · gateway work 4997 ms · total 4997 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3148
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 432
tok/sec: 201.0 tok/sec — 432 output tokens in 2.149 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 29s ago)
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 70), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.