Definition of "backgame"

The strategy of the backgame is very similar to the defensive strategy discussed earlier; i.e., you begin to make your points inside your inner table and wait for him to leave a blot.

1977, Nicolaos S. Tzannes, Basil Tzannes, Backgammon Games and Strategies, page 65

We are also taught that we should not commit to a backgame until we have to and that we should try to win by going forward if at all possible.

2007, Chris Bray, Second Wind, page 96

When playing a backgame, you need to have at least two anchors in your opponent's home board, ideally on their 2- and 3-points.

2007, Michael Crane, Teach Yourself Backgammon, page 27

This doctrine, once fully established, will add a great facility to business, and prevent unnecessary delays: for example —in former times a minister would have been exceedingly hampered with such a promise as we have here cited: he would have shifted, and delayed, and played the backgame to have got rid of it, or to reconcile the breach to his conscience and reputation: but here you see there was no unnecessary delay; the business went on; and he who acknowledged that he had given his word in a private capacity, brings the book to prove that as a first lord of the treasury "he was not bound to adhere to it," — and this is sound casuistry.

1836, Junius

If we understand the law as a backgame of images to which life adheres through repression, which the body represses by repeating, then the bodegón articulates at a level just above or just below the kitchen pieces , the pans and pots and jars of the kitchen scene, a type which contracts into everyday life like water in water.

1991, Roberta Kevelson, Action and Agency, page 106

This is a question of the long term, the backgame. Let's see who wins in the end.

2004, Michigan Law Review - Volume 103, Issue 1, page 464