Long backgammon
The variant played at home across Eastern Europe: all checkers start on one point, nothing gets hit, and the whole game is about who blocks whom.
Rules in short
- All 15 checkers start from one point — the head
- Only one checker may leave the head per turn (except the first move)
- No hitting: a point held by the opponent is simply unavailable
- You may not build six in a row unless at least one enemy checker is ahead of it
- The goal is the same — bear all your checkers off first
Harder than it looks
Without hitting there is no way to win a tempo back, so every move costs more and a bad distribution follows you to the end of the game.
The BG Space analyzer handles long backgammon too — with its own engine and its own evaluation, because no world-class program plays this variant at all.