Backgammon
Backgammon is one of the oldest known board games. Its history can be traced back nearly 5,000 years to archeological discoveries in the Middle East, originally in Iran. It is a two player game where each player has fifteen pieces ("checkers") which move between twenty-four triangles ("points") according to the roll of two dice. The objective of the game is to be first to "bear off", i.e. move all fifteen checkers off the board. Backgammon is a member of the tables family, one of the oldest classes of board games.
Penultima
Penultima is a game of inductive logic, played on a chess board. It was invented by Michael Greene and Adam Chalcraft in Cambridge in 1994. The game is derived from the chess variant Ultima (otherwise known as "Baroque chess"), and played with a standard chess board and pieces, each piece having different movement and capture rules from standard chess. In a manner similar to the game Mao, which was a popular game in Cambridge at that time, the rules for each piece vary from game to game, and are initially kept secret from the players. Penultima is similar in style to Eleusis, Zendo and Mao. The name of the game is a pun on "penultimate", and "Ultima", the name of the chess variant.