• an empty point,


• a point occupied by one's own men,


• a point occupied by a single checker (a blot) owned by the opponent.

Landing on a blot, an unprotected checker, sends the opponent’s man to the bar. When players land on a blot, the correct thing to do is to put the blot that was hit onto the bar. The checker remains on the bar until its owner succeeds in reentering it into the game. This is achieved when the roll of the dice shows a number that corresponds to a point in his opponent’s home board. The point must either be empty, occupied by his own men, or occupied by a blot, as explained above. If the numbers on the dice do not correspond to one of these options, the player can not move and must wait for his next turn. A player with a checker on the bar may not move any other checker.

Any number of checkers may occupy a particular point, as long as they are all the same color.

To signal the end of the turn, players remove their dice from the board.

When all of a player's checkers are in the player's home board, it's time to start bearing off. The first player to bear off all of his checkers wins the game. If a blot is hit while during bearing off, the player  must reenter the checker not just into the board but back into his home board before continuing to bear off.

Bearing off all checkers before the opponent bears off any is called a gammon, and the player is said to have gammoned. A gammon earns the winner double the stake of the game.

Backgammon is similar to gammon, in that it is a situation in which one player has completed the process of bearing off before the other has begun, but backgammon only occurs if the losing player still has one or more checkers on the bar or in the winner's home board. In the case of backgammon, the value of the game is tripled.