The game of backgammon was invented by Joseph Gammon in 1778 in Ripley, Yorkshire. Gammon was a carpenter who worked for the local textile mills making equipment for spinning. He had several apprentices who often took time off work to play cricket matches against neighbouring villages. Sometimes these cricket matches would go on for days or even weeks at a time.
One of the items which Joseph made for the mills was a folding box divided into 12 compartments for holding the cotton reels for the weaving machines. The idea suddenly came to him that if he could invent a game which could be played indoors, his apprentices would be less likely to go out playing cricket all day. He would allow them to play the game during their tea break, and hope that they would be satifsied with that.
At first, everything went to plan. The apprentices enjoyed the game and came to work more often. But soon they made copies of the board for themselves to take home and before long, they were staying at home playing backgammon all day long. They taught their families and the game spread to other parts of Yorkshire. Soon people all over the county were starving to death because they had become addicted to backgammon and were no longer earning any money.
At this point the government decided that something had to be done. All backgammon boards were collected and burned. But the effects had been so dramatic that they also decided to make use of the game for the good of the British Empire. So in the years afterwards, agents were sent abroad to spread the game and demoralise other nations so that British power could grow. The most famous of these agents was Lord Byron, who introduced Backgammon to Greece as part of Britain's plans to destroy the Turkish Empire. In the case of Greece, this strategy was succesful: initially it was the Turkish rulers who played the game more than the Greeks, and they became too addicted to it to defend themselves. On March 25th 1821, the banner of free Greece was raised.
Unfortunately, like any new weapon, backgammon, once invented, could not be disinvented, and Britain's enemies also soon started using the weapon in their quest for conquest. Napoleon's agents introduced the game to Egypt, and the effect was much the same. The local troops simply didn't bother to fight because they were too busy playing backgammon, and the whole country was taken over by the French.
In Greece, although the Turks had left, the game soon spread widely throughout the population and resulted in a demoralisation which continues to this day. The main reason that the Olympic stadiums in Athens have been completed late is that the workers spend all day playing the game.
In Iran, the British used the same strategy to take control of the southern oil wells. The game soon spread across the country with similar disastrous results for the people.
Interstingly, some countries (such as England and Italy) seem to be immune from this disease (despite the original Yorkshire outbreak).
The story with Joseph Gammon together with most of the facts about Lord Byron, the British using the game and the level of addiction that built and destroyed empires. However, allow me some remarks: maybe the game was invented in Yorkshire. But not the "raw material" (by raw material I mean e.g. the dice and the circular pieces in order to play). Coming to my PhD: Eustathius of Thessalonica (12c.) in his Commentary on Homer's Odyssey talks about the game of dice (in Greek /petteia/) which the Greeks used to play in the symposia even from Homer's time (cf. the amphora preserved to us with Achilles playing dice with Ajax). The dice - as my beloved friend ******** would say and my beloved mentor Herodotus would confirm - came from Persia or to be more precise from a somewhere between Persia and Lydia; HOWEVER. dice were not in the form of the modern backgammon dice and did not have numbers at the beginning. The Greeks introduced the cubistic form (in Greek /kubos/) and the circle as the sacred shape to be used in pieces used in table games; furthermore, they invented several games having to do with dice the most famous of which is TAVLI (from the Greek verb /tavlizo/) which has many many points with backgammon. Petteia and tavli were considered to be an occupation with demoralizing implications and with addictive influence (it is very nice to remark that there is an episode in Athenaeus where the Rhodians play and exchange their WOMEN in the game of petteia...)(maybe I should think about it as the only way for salvation from ******). Anyway, Eustathius goes on mentioning Suetonius (and his work "On the Games of Children") and of course Athenaeus (and his work Deipnosophistae) and he talks analytically on EVERYTHING that has to do with "dice" and playing with them (cf. Eustathius' Commentary on the Odyssey book 1, ch. 1397 -of course there is no edition -otherwise what is my role as a scientist but if you are interested I promise to send you the piece humbly translated in English by me...)
The origins of Backgammon are quite clearly Norse and predate Joseph Gammon by more than a thousand years. Archeologist have found the remnants of "tafl" as they were called, throughout the Viking world. The earliest "mention" of the game is on a rock carving from the Malaren district of Sweden which depicts gamers at play having returned from a successful Elk hunt. This tradition survives in Nord Botten where the husband returning to his wife after a night of hard drinking has to dress in "elgskinn" (elk skin) leggings & imitate the mating display of the male elk before being allowed back into the house. Very often the evening is then completed with a competitive game of backgammon, the stake being the elk's tail, considerd a delicacy. Very often the boards were highly decorated and very valuable - their use spread to the celtic world where the game was known as Tawl-bwrdd in Wales, & Fidchell in Ireland.
The association with Yorkshire came from the viking settlers. Indeed, the gaming pieces could be used as weapons - some boards appear to have had pegged pieces - we know this from a passage in Grettis Saga, in a dramatic scene where þorbjörn Öngull þórðarson is sitting at a gaming board. His stepmother comes by and insults him, and after a short argument, she runs a playing piece through his cheek. þorbjörn hits her so hard that she later dies.
Joseph Gammon, porky to his friends, actually died from a blow to the head in an argument over a game, somthing which is gloossed over in later sources but which can be found in the original document, "Tht gameon tht folk do battle withe in Yorukshir" Harlean 1948.