backgame

English

Etymology

back +‎ game

Noun

backgame (plural backgames)

1. (backgammon) A game in which a player blocks the opponent's progress by forming two or more points in the opponent's home board.
   • 1977, Nicolaos S. Tzannes, Basil Tzannes, Backgammon Games and Strategies, page 65:

     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.

   • 2007, Chris Bray, Second Wind, page 96:

     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, Michael Crane, Teach Yourself Backgammon, page 27:

     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.

2. An indirect strategy in which one attempts to achieve one's goals by maneuvering behind the scenes.
   • 1836, Junius:

     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.

   • 1991, Roberta Kevelson, Action and Agency, page 106:

     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.

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

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