On a mid-November evening in Brooklyn, the table is cleared, the coffee is poured, and an amber backgammon set is opened between two players who have known each other for years. Thanksgiving is close now — the season when families come home, dinners run long, and the best conversations happen after the plates are gone. Backgammon belongs to those evenings. It is quick to learn, hard to put down, and asks for nothing but time, a little luck, and a little courage. In amber, the old game gains something more: warmth in the hand, and light that shifts every time a checker slides across the board.
A Game Carried Across Centuries
Backgammon is one of the oldest board games still played, with roots reaching back thousands of years, and amber has been part of its story for centuries. In the 1600s, workshops in Königsberg on the Baltic coast were already making amber game boards — ornate chess and backgammon boards that now sit in museum collections, their panels still glowing after four hundred years. The material explains the fascination. Baltic amber formed around 44 million years ago, when resin from ancient pine forests hardened and waited through long ages to be found. It arrives in tones no paint can copy: pale butterscotch, clear honey, deep cognac. Across a backgammon board, that natural contrast does the work — light checkers against dark, one army warm and bright, the other rich and shadowed, with no two pieces ever exactly alike.
Cut, Turned and Polished in Brooklyn
Each of our sets is Made in USA from Baltic Amber, worked in our Brooklyn workshop from rough stone to finished board. The making is patient. Stones are sorted by tone first, because a game needs two families of colour that belong together. Checkers are cut and turned until each one sits flat and slides cleanly; the points of the board are laid and finished so the eye reads the field at a glance. Then polishing, stage after stage, until the surface clears and the colour inside wakes up. Our finishing relies on U.S. Patent Pending technology developed here, but the final judgement is still a human one — a checker rolled between the fingers, a board set under lamplight to check the glow. It is at this stage that our amber backgammon board on bamboo takes its final form: a compact board, made to be opened often and kept within reach.
A Luxury Backgammon Set for Family Game Night
Some gifts are opened once. A backgammon set is opened for years. It comes out after Thanksgiving dinner, when the table talk turns to rematches; it travels to Christmas, to winter weekends, to the quiet rivalry between a father and a daughter who has finally learned to beat him. That is what makes it such a considered gift for him — for a husband, a father, a grandfather, or the host whose house gathers everyone. It does not ask for a screen or a signal, only two chairs and an unhurried hour. KIZIMA is a second-generation family workshop, and as the only Baltic amber manufacturer in America, we make these sets in small batches, so a board given this season can stay in a family far longer than the season itself.
If your table is ready for a longer evening, we invite you to look closer: our Baltic amber backgammon and checkers set brings two games together in one box, and the amber backgammon checkers in butterscotch and cognac are made for a board you already love. Visit us at KIZIMA, 271 Brighton Beach Ave, Brooklyn, NY — the board is open, and the first roll is yours.
