Online backgammon
The other day in my Middle Eastern studies class, the professor began the class with an overhead image. The picture on the screen was of a Backgammon game being played out by two computer players at a moderate pace. After about three or fours minutes of the game going silently she began the professor began to speak. She began this lesson and gave us the findings of several archeological digs that showed the origins of Backgammon to be from Persia, modern Iran, and Egypt. Most of the people on the class had never even played backgammon and so were a bit shocked to find that the game they though died out with their grandparents' youth, is actually a game that has been developing for over twenty-five hundred years. Though the lesson switched gears and went back in to the stricter history, the first segment was lodged in my brain. I went home from class and did a little research on my own. I started out by looking in to the history and found exactly what she had been talking about. Though the original game of backgammon may not have included dice in Egypt or Iran,but the version found in Sumar had the tetrahedral dice we have today. Now all modern versions have developed with dice as one of their core similarities. It is really cool to think that it began as a game played on stone and moved to leather around fifteen hundred years ago. Then within the last hundred years, the game went from primarily wood boards, to the online backgammon services we see today. I have actually started trying to play the game in some of these online forums because as i said before, most people I know have never even seen a backgammon board let alone ever played a game. The hardest part of this for me has been learning the rules. Since there are four different versions of backgammon that I have found online backgammon and all of the rules differ in some way, it has been difficult trying to find a good strategy for each one.