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.
History of games
First patented in 1904, "The Landlord's Game", designed by Elizabeth Magie, was originally intended to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of Economic rent and the Georgist concept of a single tax on land value. A series of board games were developed from 1906 through the 1930s that involved the buying and selling of land and the development of that land. By 1933, a board game had been created much like the version of modern Monopoly by the Parker Brothers. 
Though the first commercial version of the game of Battleship was "Salvo", published in 1931 in the United States by the Starex company, the game itself dates to before World War I when it was played on paper by Russian officers. The French board game "L'Attaque" was first commercially released in 1910, having been designed two years prior as a military-themed imperfect knowledge game based upon the earlier Chinese children's board game Dou Shou Qi. "L'Attaque" was subsequently adapted by the Chinese into Luzhanqi (or "Lu Zhan Jun Qi"), and by Milton Bradley into Stratego, the latter having been trademarked in 1960 while the former remains in the public domain. Jury Box, published in 1935, was the first murder mystery game which served as the basis for games like Cluedo.