backgame

plural backgames

1. backgammonA game in which a player blocks the opponent's progress by forming two or more points in the opponent's home board.

   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

   2 more examples

   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

2. An indirect strategy in which one attempts to achieve one's goals by maneuvering behind the scenes.

   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

   2 more examples

   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