Backgammon Tools

Three small, free tools for the board game that refuses to stay small: a provably fair dice roller, a pip count calculator and an interactive setup visualizer. Everything runs right here in your browser — no install, no sign-up, no ads, nothing to download.

Each tool exists because a real question keeps coming up at real boards. Someone's dice have rolled under the sofa and the game shouldn't stop. Someone is staring at a middle-game position and wants to know, in numbers, who is actually winning. Someone new is setting up a board for the first time and the diagram in the box lid has faded to abstraction. These pages answer those three questions directly, and each one explains the ideas behind the answer as it goes.

The Tools

Built Honest

The dice roller uses your browser's cryptographic random number generator — the same class of randomness used for encryption keys — so every face is exactly as likely as every other. And because we care about this more than most, the page is explicit about what it is: a convenience tool for over-the-board play. In our online games, dice are generated server-side and independently certified, which no dice-rolling web page can claim for itself.

The pip counter does the arithmetic that separates racers from gamblers: enter any position and it reads out both pip counts, the difference and what that difference means for your game plan. The setup visualizer shows the correct starting position on a real board and explains, point by point, why 700 years of backgammon put the checkers exactly there.

Learn the Ideas Behind the Numbers

Tools give answers; understanding gives wins. The Learn Backgammon hub covers the rules, setup, scoring and the doubling cube from zero, while the strategy guides turn dice odds and pip counts into decisions — opening theory, the hitting table, and when a race is really a race. When you're ready to put any of it into practice, you can play backgammon free in your browser against real opponents, with fair dice doing the honest work.