Building Primes to Lessen Enemy Activity

In the beginning of a game the opponent will start from our home board and head toward the enemy home board. The same with us—we also start from the enemy home board and move our checkers to our own home board. The trick to winning here is to think of a way to lessen enemy activity by building backgammon primes.

Primes are checkers formations consisting of two or more allied checkers on a single point on the board. When there's just a lone checker on a point we call this a blot. This is susceptible to getting hit by the enemy. So what we do is to get at least two checkers occupying a point to protect our checkers from getting hit.

But we can do better than having a prime on our home board. We can build walls of primes on our home board. This is called priming in backgammon. If we build consecutive primes these are strong deterrents to prevent enemy checkers behind them from crossing over them. It will be fun to just watch the opponent having difficulty trying to get dice rolls that would get enemy checkers past our primes.

There are occasions when enemy checkers get trapped for a while behind our primes. If the opponent has no other possible move the opponent may lose turns and that will be to our advantage. We can get all our checkers to our home board and bear them off without much interference from the opponent.

Another fun activity is building backgammon primes all over our home board when we have hit a lot of enemy checkers on our way to our home board. After hitting enemy checkers they are placed on the bar waiting turns to be re-entered back to on board. Dice roll results determine what points on our home board they enter on. If the points they are to enter on are primes they lose the turn and wait for the next one.

When they re-enter they will have to start from our home board again. However, if we have spread our primes all over our home board—which is called a blitz—the opponent will find it hard to re-enter enemy checkers and may have to lose a lot of turns before chancing on a favorable one when an open point is available for entering hit enemy checkers.

Building backgammon primes will provide excitement when both players race each other in building the most number of primes.