I Thought I Was Going Speed Dating. Instead, I Fell in Love With Backgammon
How Remington Davenport Is Breathing New Life Into One of the World’s Oldest Games
NSR Community Spotlight: Remington Davenport & NYC Backgammon Club
I’m captivated by people who are shifting the cultural needle. In this age of overstimulation, it might be easy to get someone’s attention, but to keep it is a whole other game - a game that Remington Davenport, founder of NYC Backgammon Club, happens to be winning.
Thank you to Remington for sharing your story with the Natural Sunlight Report, for building a community devoted to giving people the experience they want, and for emphasizing the importance of sportsmanship throughout it all. Thank you to my dear friend Meg, who did the Reddit legwork that brought us to our first club event, and thank you to our unofficial coach, Razz, for getting us through our first few games.
I thought I was going speed-dating. Instead, I fell in love with Backgammon.
A week before Thanksgiving, I found myself in the private room of Kings Co. Imperial in Williamsburg, learning how to play backgammon. I thought I was going speed dating - a failure on my part to read a single word of the Luma link from Meg - so, imagine my surprise when, instead, I found myself perched on a barstool learning about statistics.
The scene: a Diet Coke to my right (ice, lemon wedge), Meg to my left, and in between us: a vintage backgammon board with the Alice Mushrooms logo placed gingerly in the center of the cork*. A tall, friendly backgammon enthusiast named Razz stood watch nearby, helping us to get our bearings and cheering us on like a cool, encouraging math tutor.
How did we get here, and why did I think we were speed dating?
After a canonical night of shaking our fists and wondering “how are we still single!”, Meg looked up “best places to meet someone in NYC” on Reddit, and the NYC Backgammon Club surfaced as one of the hottest recommendations. She bought two tickets and off we were.
I arrived first, hung my signature yellow puffer on the crowded rack, and took in the scene. The back room of Kings Co. Imperial is undeniably chic - an appropriate and transporting backdrop for a night dedicated to both competitive and casual play of a 5,000-year-old game.
I slid up to a safe, quiet area of the bar and ordered my Diet Coke. The room was slowly filling up with casual backgammon players and their boards, as the more serious players found their place on the bracket and set up for the tournament in the tabled portion of the room. As someone with social anxiety that hums on a steady simmer in new situations, I was eager to figure out how this all related to speed dating and what I should do with my hands. The bartenders assured me that Remington would be over shortly to explain everything. Excellent.
Meg joined me at the bar, and the club’s founder surfaced not long after: backgammon board held like a deal-or-no-deal suitcase in one hand, tournament clipboard cradled in the other. She placed the board in front of us and said the club’s Backgammon teacher had cancelled for the night, but she’d show us the ropes between tournament admin duties.
The first word out of my mouth as she opened the board was “CHIC”. The half-edible I’d thrown back in the Uber over was hitting, and I was excited about the aesthetic promise of this new hobby. “Backgammon is chic as fuck -“ Remington affirmed, pushing up her thick, black rimmed glasses with her forefinger. With mesmerizing efficiency, she got the board into its starting position and began her lesson.
“The basic principles of backgammon are simple: get all your checkers off the board,” she started, and explained how one of us would be red, the other would be black, and we’d essentially race in counter-clockwise and the other in clockwise laps around the board until one of us was free and clear.
We got the basics, and while Remington ran back to the tournament, Meg and I (mostly Meg - I’m shy) asked neighboring tables for help. This was about as close to speed dating as we got - but soon enough, I’d forgotten all about our initial goal because I was so entranced by the game.
Within a round or so, we had a generous, stand-in coach, Razz, who politely pointed out when one of us was moving in the wrong direction, or to challenge our plays - was it really the most strategic move possible? He spoke to us about how backgammon is the perfect combination of strategy and luck, and how he grew up playing with his grandpa. And there we were: 9 pm on a Monday: high-fiving, rolling the dice, and ordering Diet Cokes with the abandon of Meryl Streep in the bar scene of It’s Complicated.
In between tournament rounds, Remington would come to check on us, clarify rules, and indulge our excitement while we asked her questions about how she ended up here: running a backgammon tournament at a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn. It turned out she’d been running NYC Backgammon for almost three years at that point, but had lived a few lives (in a few cities) before landing here.
There was too much to get into that night, so I asked her if she’d be up for the Natural Sunlight Report feature, and two weeks later, she gave me her full lore during an hour and a half Google Meet. I took nine pages of notes.
How Remington Davenport Is Introducing a New Generation of Players to Backgammon
The short version of the story: right after graduating from the University of Arizona, she took a chance on a job as a freight broker in Chicago. She spent five years grinding - clocking in at seven and out ten hours later. She said the doors to her office would lock at 7 am, and in this intense environment, she experienced wild success and built a thick skin while working with hot-headed, boys-will-be-boys types. Two and a half years in, she was transferred to San Diego, where she kept hustling until one day she had it and walked out on the spot.
From there, she Googled female CEOs in LA, determined to course-correct from the male-dominated environment she’d had enough of, and quickly landed at Figs. This was 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic made essential workwear more essential than ever. After an incredibly lucrative year in the field, selling to some of the biggest hospitals in the US, she was laid off - brutally - and was back to square one.
She was approached by another medical outfitter that transferred her to New York - a city where you can find anything,” she figured - and started her work outside of work: building a community.
This is where the story of the NYC Backgammon Club truly begins.
She set out to find her people by looking for backgammon events. She grew up playing in San Francisco - her parents taught her the game early, and every weekend in middle school, Remington and her six best friends would play nonstop. She describes her parents as non-traditional hustler types who grew up grinding in alternative ways themselves and, lucky for her, didn’t see her rebellious spirit or disinterest in school as a bad thing. They told her from a young age, “you’re a salesperson,” and encouraged her to lean into that - advice that would serve her well in adulthood.
Remington thought surely, there were fellow players to connect with in New York. It was January 2023, and she was surprised to find only two organized backgammon events on meetup.com - both of which she was grateful for, but lacked a certain jenes se quois (women, young people, vibes).
“This can’t be it,” she thought, and decided to start a small club of her own. She started an Instagram account just for fun - she does not identify as a content creator, she’ll have you know - but attention grew. By April of 2023, the club had expanded, and that June, 50 people came to one of her events. She identified that as an emotional, a-ha moment - although she continued on in her full-time job for another full year while she thought about how to scale this.
There was a lot to learn in that first year. When Remington started the NYC Backgammon Club, she didn’t know about the world of tournaments and professional players - until January of 2024, when she was hired to support the NY Metro Tournament - working brackets, helping opponents find their matches, and generally creating order. This tournament was a far cry from the trendy backdrops of her meetups - these were hosted in carpeted conference centers and other sterile non-places. These events opened her eyes to a world beyond casual play, and the experiences encouraged her to keep growing her club.
By April of 2024, layoffs at her company were imminent. She asked to be let go - by this point, she was fully consumed by her growing club - and felt relieved to plant both feet firmly in that world. Remington says she was in no way financially ready, but she had a fire, and by July 2024, she was hired to work in Monte Carlo for her first-ever Backgammon World Championship. She couldn’t believe she was there - and found herself once again clocking in for 10-12 hour days.
She left inspired, and with a profound sense that this old-world game and its surrounding structure were desperately lacking innovation. Remington asked herself, “How do I give people this same experience?” and set out to form a world championship team of her own. Back in New York, she interviewed 85 people, took on 31, and together they studied the sport for a year. She convinced grandmasters to give them free lessons, self-funded the trip to Monte Carlo, got the team matching jerseys (I can’t help but picture Cady Heron and Northshore Mathletes at the end of Mean Girls), and showed up in July of 2025 to compete with one member at the champion level, seven playing as advanced, and twenty-three playing intermediate.
Remington exists in two unique worlds - that of old-world backgammon, with its established preconceptions of who backgammon is for, and the world she was building from scratch: a world where backgammon is for anyone.
This past December, she was appointed to the US Backgammon Federation - America’s governing body of backgammon. Eight people were nominated and four appointed; I think this bodes well for the game’s future and for Remington’s hand in shaping it.
It will be no small feat, and she isn’t disillusioned about the work ahead. Disrupting a space that’s so traditional, serious, and, for lack of a better term, ancient, requires maybe an even thicker skin than the one she gained during her time as a freight broker. She says, “You can have thick skin, but when you’re getting criticized on something you’ve built from the ground up, it’s hard.” Hard as it may be, she’s locked in.
Remington’s current challenge, as I see it, is continuing to bridge the gap between trend and tradition - using her newfound street cred to continue proving to the world of professional players that the new life she’s breathing into backgammon is a good thing, regardless of players’ intentions when they show up to her events. Over the years, Remington has simultaneously been celebrated as the new face of backgammon and critiqued by some professional players as someone running a club for millennial players just looking to “drink and hook up”.
Take it from me - one of the millennials who did show up to “drink and hook up.” That’s literally what I thought I was in for the night I showed up to Kings Co. Imperial, and instead - I, Erica Bogdan - who famously hates learning new games (ask Kim, who tried soooo hard to teach me Gin Rummy last year in Bali) - left with a complete obsession of a game I’d always just associated with hotel decor in Palm Beach.
Remington hopes people get whatever they seek when they show up to her club’s events. If people end up dating because they met over a game of backgammon, she’d love to officiate the wedding. If they hope to level up their strategic play, she hopes they enter more tournaments. But above all, she hopes to continue growing her club and to experience the satisfying business success that comes from pouring your heart into what you’re building.
At the NYC Backgammon Club holiday party mid-December, 244 players of all backgrounds, intentions, and skill levels gathered at Fandi Mata to celebrate the end of the year and unwind with a night of play. Meg and I saw our “coach,” Razz, and made friends with Mark, who’s building a pickleball brand from the ground up. The people who show up to these events are incredibly creative, kind, and inviting - and it’s safe to say Remington’s original goal of building community in New York has been accomplished.
During Remington’s speech that night, she teared up - and cheers’d the crowd - now, officially, the largest backgammon club in the world. It’s an honor to have stumbled into this club, and I can’t wait to see what Remington does next.
Don’t Let Me Buy This:
The dangerous thing about Backgammon is how CUTE it is … like, is this board not the most Bogs-coded thing you’ve ever seen?? Shoutout Olivia for the link.