Verquere

Verquere is a historical two-player tables game played on a board of the same type used for backgammon, though its direction of play and its rules differ substantially from that game. It was probably invented in the Netherlands, and the earliest written reference to it dates from the end of the 14th century; during the 17th and 18th centuries it became widely popular across the Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic countries before falling out of favor in the 19th century. Each of the two players controls fifteen men, one side black and the other white, with all pieces starting on the far right point of the board known as that player's home; the objective is to move the men anticlockwise around the board and be the first to bear every piece off. The game went by different names in different regions, including verkeer in Dutch, Verkehren in German, revertier in French, forkeren in Swedish and forkaeringur in Icelandic, and its Swedish descendant evolved into the modern game of Swedish Tables, which still has an active competitive scene with annual championships today.