Plakoto

Plakoto is a two-player tables game popular in Greece, where it is played as one of three games making up tavli, the Greek backgammon tradition, alongside portes and fevga. As in backgammon, each player moves fifteen checkers around the board's points according to dice rolls, aiming to bring all pieces around to their own home board and bear them off before their opponent; Plakoto's defining difference is that it replaces backgammon's hitting and bar rule with a pinning mechanic, so that landing a single checker on a point already held by exactly one opposing checker places that checker on top and pins it in place, unable to move again until the pinning piece leaves. This pinning rule rewards a far more positional, blocking-oriented style of play than standard backgammon, since a pinned checker is completely immobilized rather than merely sent to the bar to re-enter. Plakoto is traditionally played as the opening game of a full tavli match, with players proceeding afterward to portes and then fevga, and related pinning-based tables games are also found elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, including mahbusa in the Middle East and tapa in Bulgaria.