My brother and I once took a train trip from L.A. to Omaha and back for a friend’s wedding and played backgammon for most of the trip. For weeks afterwards, I saw backgammon everywhere (most notably when reading dialogue-heavy books with lots of 1-line paragraphs).
Solitaire and Hearts too. Well I actually know and love Hearts, but most people seem to know it as "that game in Windows where you play random cards"
You’d be surprised – take a Backgammon board to a table in at a cafe in a popular area and chances are someone will sit down to play with you. Can be a good way of meeting people in a new area. (or new people in an old area!)
It was a good way to while away the time at jury duty back in the days when you had to physically be there until you were called. I encountered a tournament player who beat me maybe 4 times out of 5. I also played in a chess tournament where my opponent was considerably stronger and faster and quickly put me in a position where I had to think long and hard to try to avoid disaster (fruitlessly in the end). She would make her move, wait a few seconds to see if I would reply, and then get up and disappear into a back room where, I found out later, she was playing backgammon. I looked her up and learned that she was a rapidly rising women's chess star but was better known as a semi-pro backgammon player.
I learned to play backgammon because it was one of the three games on my Nokia phone circa 2001 :P