Tavla in the Coffeehouse: A Short History of Backgammon

Walk through almost any neighborhood in Istanbul in the early evening and you will hear it before you see it: the sharp clatter of checkers slapped onto wood and the rattle of two dice in a cupped hand. Tavla, the Turkish name for backgammon, is played in coffeehouses, on shop doorsteps, on ferry benches and in family living rooms. It is so ordinary that most people never ask where it came from.

The answer is a long journey across empires, from Persian courts to Roman taverns to the Ottoman coffeehouse, and it says a lot about how people in this part of the world have balanced skill and chance.

Persian and Roman roots

Race games with dice and a board are very old. Boards from the Royal Game of Ur in Mesopotamia date to around 2600 BCE, and a board with backgammon like features was found at Shahr-i Sokhta in eastern Iran. These early games were not backgammon as we know it, but they shared its basic idea: move pieces around a track according to dice throws.

The closer ancestors are two games. In the Persian world, nard was played by at least the Sasanian period. The Shahnameh, Ferdowsi's epic, tells a story in which the Persian sage Bozorgmehr invents nard as a reply to the Indian king who had sent chess as a challenge. In Rome, a game called tabula, meaning board or table, used two or three dice and fifteen pieces per player. The Byzantine emperor Zeno is remembered for a disastrous throw in tabula described in a Greek epigram, which is one of the earliest recorded positions in any backgammon type game.

The Turkish word tavla itself descends from the Latin tabula, through Greek. The game's name alone shows how many hands it passed through before reaching the Ottoman coffeehouse.

The coffeehouse arrives

Coffeehouses opened in Istanbul in the middle of the sixteenth century. Ottoman chroniclers record the first ones appearing in the 1550s, and they spread quickly. They became places for conversation, poetry, storytelling, music and games, especially tavla and chess.

They also worried the authorities. Coffeehouses were places where people gathered, talked and criticized. Several sultans restricted or closed them, and Murad IV in the 1630s went furthest, banning coffee and tobacco and closing coffeehouses entirely for a time. The bans never lasted. By the eighteenth century, the coffeehouse and the tavla board were fixed parts of Ottoman city life.

Skill, luck and the Ottoman view of chance

Tavla sits in an interesting place between pure chance and pure skill. Every move depends on a dice throw, so a beginner can beat an expert in any single game. But over a long series, the better player wins far more often, because good players choose moves that make the most of every possible throw.

This mix mattered in Ottoman society. Islamic law and custom were hostile to gambling, maysir, which was understood as winning money through pure chance. Tavla played for no stake, or for the price of the coffee, sat comfortably in daily life. Playing for real money was frowned upon and at times prohibited. The line was drawn not at the dice but at the wager.

That same tension between games and gambling still runs through modern Türkiye, where tavla is everywhere and games played for money are tightly regulated. Today some people follow numbers and results through online sites such as ankertoto, while the coffeehouse board remains mostly a game of pride and a round of tea.

A popular idea that needs correcting

It is often said that tavla is simply a game of luck, and that the best player is just the one with the best dice. Older players in any Istanbul kahvehane will quickly correct you, and they are right.

Over a single game, luck can dominate. Over twenty games, it matters much less. Skilled players think in terms of probabilities: how many throws out of thirty six will hit an exposed piece, which positions leave the fewest weak points. Much of this knowledge was passed on by watching and playing rather than written down, but it is real skill, the same kind that distinguishes a strong chess player. The Ottoman coffeehouse was, in its own way, a school for it.

Why the game endures

Tavla has survived empires, bans, wars and the arrival of television and smartphones. Part of the reason is simplicity: a board, thirty pieces and two dice. Part of it is social: the game is played face to face, with constant commentary, teasing and advice from onlookers. It is less a pastime than a conversation with dice.

For readers interested in the Ottoman world that shaped the coffeehouse, Kanuni Sultan Süleyman'ın hayatı covers the reign during which the first coffeehouses opened in Istanbul, and how Ottoman households budgeted without a bank account looks at daily life from another angle. More material is in our Osmanlı Tarihi section.