New England Backgammon ClubLogo Design Contest

New England Backgammon Club (NEBC) is a longstanding backgammon club based in the Boston, MA area. Our target audience is adults who are interested in playing competitive backgammon. NEBC has been holding monthly and weekly tournaments in the Boston area since the heyday of the game back in the 70's and 80's. We want to attract people who used to play but left the game for other pursuits or to have kids, and also younger adults new to the game (children can come, but are not currently a target audience).

Historically, green was a 'club color' for equipment -- more of a forest green, not pale or lime. But a bold deep blue would also make sense, with a nautical association appropriate to Boston also reflected in our "Anchors" newsletter. Not looking for a highly 'realistic' multi-color logo -- neutral colors with perhaps one bold accent (blue or green) perhaps best -- but I'm open to being wowed by a more colorful design.

Backgammon equipment has several iconic features that should lend itself well to logo design.

1) The tall triangular points of the playing surface. On boards they always alternate in color, but for a logo they could be one color.

2) Backgammon is played with circular checkers -- a few of them can be superimposed on the triangles to suggest a game position, but must always be positioned starting at the base end of a triangle (See image).

3) While dice are used, a more distinctive backgammon piece is the Doubling Cube, whose sides read 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and which is used for raising the stakes of the current game (like raising in poker). While there is no standard arrangement of these numbers, a random placement would probably "look wrong," so a designer should copy one of the arrangements in the attached images.

4) ANCHORS. The NEBC newsletter is called anchors, which draws a clever connection between Boston's harbor setting and the backgammon of holding an "anchor" point of two or more checkers in your opponent's home board (in the picture with 6 stacks of green & yellow checkers, the 2 Yellow checkers hold an "anchor".) So it could be nice (but is not absolutely required) to feature an anchor in the design somehow -- either as a major component or with a string of anchors as a divider or embellishment in the larger design. It should not be a highly detailed / realistic anchor with barnacles on it - something more simply "iconic".