After eighteen years offline, GamesGrid is coming back. The server that ran from December 1996 to March 2008 — one of the first dedicated online backgammon platforms ever built, the home of the legendary bots GG Weasel, GG Raccoon, GG Forever, GGotter, GGbeaver, GGchipmunk and MrHyperBot — is being rebuilt from the ground up for a new generation of players.
No coins. No paywalls in front of fair play. No rigged dice. A new platform, designed around competitive integrity and the deep mathematics of the game.
For the short, direct version of where the platform stands and where it's going, see backgammon online, done right → — the launch manifesto.
If you played here between 1996 and 2008, welcome back. If you didn't, this page is the short version of why so many people are still talking about a server that has been dark for nearly two decades.
What GamesGrid was
GamesGrid Backgammon went live in December 1996, in the very first wave of internet-hosted board-game services. It launched a few months after Andreas Schneider's First Internet Backgammon Server (FIBS) had proven that thousands of human players, scattered across continents, could converge in real time to play rated matches with proper Crawford and Jacoby cube mechanics.
GamesGrid extended that idea into a polished, client-driven product with elegant board art, persistent ratings, structured tournaments, league play, and — critically — a stable of resident bots that became cultural figures in their own right.
The bots were the heart of the place. GG Weasel, GG Raccoon, GG Forever, GGbeaver, GGotter, GGchipmunk, and the tireless short-game specialist MrHyperBot were not generic computer opponents. Each had a distinct style, a known weakness, and a small mythology of famous matches. Beating GG Raccoon in a long money session was a rite of passage. Surviving MrHyperBot on a hypergammon ladder was a story you told for years.
The wider trajectory is well-documented. Backgammon was GamesGrid's first and best room. In April 2005 the company launched a poker product to ride the post-Moneymaker boom; the software could not compete with PartyPoker or PokerStars, and the strategic focus on poker meant backgammon — the room that had built the brand — was steadily neglected. In March 2008 the company was acquired by GamesAccount. The new owners ran the platform through 2008–2010 before the lights went out entirely.
The domain came up for sale in 2020, was acquired in 2021, and we spent the years that followed restoring the original site from archive and designing what comes next.
The full thirty-year arc — both the game's and the server's — lives on the history page.
What GamesGrid is becoming
The 2026 platform is not a re-skin of the 2008 client. It is a new product built around one organising principle: competitive integrity, end to end.
Career Mode
A real single-player career launches with the platform. You join the club and compete against over 500 members from 120 countries — personalised AI characters, each with a name, a face, a playing style, and a story of their own. They chat in their own character, remember your encounters, and run careers of their own: season after season they win, lose, promote, relegate and transfer between leagues, whether you're playing or not.
Your own career begins at the GamesGrid Invitational, the club's free welcome tournament. Where you finish decides which of the nine leagues you start in; from there it's seasons, promotion battles, cup runs, the GamesGrid Grand Prix, and the Bahamas World Championship — all at your own pace, with no real-world clock ticking against you.
The original bot cast — GG Weasel, GG Raccoon, GG Forever and the rest — belongs to the server's 1996–2008 legend, and their story is told in full on the history page. The reopened club fields a new generation.
Multiplayer
GamesGrid was always a human-versus-human server first, and the relaunch continues that. Online play follows the single-player launch: ranked matches by GG Rating, friendly matches, tournament play and leagues — plus the club's signature format, hybrid tournaments, where real players and the club's personalised AI members fill one field, so every bracket is always full and always runs. Standard cube conventions (Crawford and Jacoby, beavers and raccoons where the format allows them), automatic recording of every match, and export of every played match in the standard .mat format (positions as XGID) to GNU Backgammon, eXtreme Gammon (XG), or other tools that read the standard format, for independent review.
The Casino
The full money game — cash games, chouette, and swing tournaments — played on simulated chips. Nothing to buy, nothing to cash out, no rake, no loot boxes: the chips can never be purchased and never converted back into anything, so the game carries the fun of the cash table and none of the damage — and you can always keep playing. The Casino keeps its own leaderboard, and one score matters there: win more chips than you lose.
Zero coin mechanics
We make this explicit because the broader online-backgammon industry has spent a decade obscuring it. GamesGrid does not run on virtual currency, lootbox progression, energy timers, or pay-to-win cosmetics that affect gameplay. The game decides who advances, not the wallet.
Mersenne Twister RNG
Every die roll on the platform is generated by the Mersenne Twister algorithm (MT19937), the same pseudo-random number generator used in GNU Backgammon, eXtreme Gammon's rollout engine, and a long list of scientific Monte Carlo simulators. Its period is 219937−1 — an astronomical figure that, in practical terms, means the sequence does not repeat across any human lifetime of play. It passes the standard statistical batteries (Diehard, TestU01 SmallCrush) and is the closest a deterministic algorithm gets to genuinely uniform randomness.
We say this in print because the alternative is the path some older servers took. SafeHarbor Games, for example, operated rooms that deliberately reduced the frequency of doubles to appease players who complained about "getting smashed by the dice." That is a fix to a perception problem that introduces a real-money cheating problem: in those rooms, any player who knew the doubles distribution was skewed had an exploitable edge over players who didn't.
Our position is the opposite. Rolls are uniform, the seed is logged, the algorithm is named, and the audit trail is publicly inspectable.
The technical specifics — algorithm, seed source, audit policy — are documented on the Bots & AI page.
Why backgammon, in 2026
Backgammon is the oldest board game in continuous play. Boards consistent with the modern fifteen-checker setup appear in the Royal Game of Ur (Sumer, c. 2600 BCE) and the ludus duodecim scriptorum of imperial Rome. The medieval game tables descends from the same line; Hoyle standardised the English rules in 1743; the doubling cube was introduced in New York in the 1920s and turned a folk game into a piece of decision theory.
The game's mathematical depth is what attracts software engineers, quants, and Olympic-level competitors in roughly equal measure. The state space is small enough to be tractable and large enough to be deep: there are approximately 1.8×1020 legal positions, a 21-element distribution over dice rolls, and the cube turns every position into a two-player no-limit equity decision.
TD-Gammon, Gerald Tesauro's 1992 neural network at IBM Research, was the first program to demonstrate superhuman play through reinforcement learning — five years before DeepBlue beat Kasparov at chess, and twenty-four years before AlphaGo. Modern engines like GNU Backgammon, eXtreme Gammon, BGBlitz, and the open-source Wildbg continue that lineage and now serve as the calibration standard for every serious human player's PR.
Long-running tradition; short nardi corresponds to backgammon, long nardi uses a different starting setup and no hitting. In Iran the game is takhteh (takhteh nard).
Historical French tables games; trictrac is the older point-scoring game, jacquet its simpler successor.
English-speaking world
Backgammon
The 18th-century Hoyle ruleset codified the modern game.
Translations and locale-specific rules pages will follow the English encyclopedia. The glossary carries the cross-lingual term map; the backgammon rules page carries the regional variant definitions.
What you'll find on this site
This is the encyclopedia layer of GamesGrid. It exists alongside the playing client, not behind it, and it is written to stand on its own as the most factually dense backgammon reference on the internet.
Bots & AI — The technical lineage from TD-Gammon (1992) through Jellyfish, Snowie, GNU Backgammon, eXtreme Gammon, BGBlitz and Wildbg, plus Performance Rating methodology and the new roster of over 500 AI members.
New to the game — start with the backgammon beginner's guide: the rules in plain language, in fifteen minutes.
For equipment — boards, dice, cubes — the backgammon shop opens alongside the platform relaunch with a curated selection of partner brands.
For reference — start with the full backgammon rules page and follow the cross-links — the encyclopedia is dense, interlinked, and meant to be read non-linearly.
A note on what we are not
We are not a casino skin. We are not a coin-grinding meta-game with backgammon stapled on. We are not running an opaque RNG service.
The community rules — what counts as cheating, what counts as bad behaviour, and how disputes get resolved — are documented openly on the standards page. The membership and business-model details will be published closer to launch.
The pitch is simple. GamesGrid was a great backgammon server because the people running it cared about the game. The 2026 platform is being built on the same principle, with twenty more years of accumulated theory, twenty more years of accumulated AI research, and a server architecture that finally lets the original ambition breathe.
Welcome back. Or, if this is your first time — welcome.
If you're new to the server and want to understand what's coming, start with the history page or the encyclopedia glossary — the site is dense, interlinked, and meant to be explored.
Footnotes
A new backgammon world is opening.
Imagine online backgammon as a living world, where you compete against over 500 unique personalities from 120 countries. Every member has their own character, life story, voice, playing strength and style. They compete in the same leagues and tournaments as you, build careers alongside yours and remember the matches, conversations and history you create together.
Learn who they are. Adapt to how they play. Earn their respect, make friends, create rivalries and become part of their story—because they will become part of yours.
No paid coin economy. No loot boxes. No pay-to-continue mechanics. Just online backgammon, the way it was meant to be.
