Beautiful and free, but no teacher: Backgammon+

Summary: If you don't want to pay just to play a game of backgammon against a good engine, if you want a beautiful UI and a simple multiplayer mode, then Backgammon+ is for you. If you want a world-class engine or a teacher, it's not. If you want to play actual backgammon matches online, it's not, either.

A great UI designer can make a huge difference. Backgammon+ (henceforth BG+) shows how much this is the case for Backgammon apps. Man this is a great-looking app. The UI is clean, the buttons are few and logically placed and you never come into a "now how do I do this?" situation. In addition, Backgammon+ renders beautiful backgammon boards on iPhones and iPads of every size as crisp as you can. No comparison to BGNJ or XG mobile (which I will review later). For a beautiful and enjoyable Backgammon experience, you can hardly beat BG+. And on top, BG+ is the only Backgammon app I know that features a portrait mode backgammon board, and one that looks and plays great as well. Nice job!

Backgammon+ on iPad Pro 12.9

There are a few annoyances, like not being able to restart a whole match or an auto-finish of games in the bearoff phase or being unable to save games for later analysis, but those are minor. Playing BG+ is a very enjoyable experience.

Portrait mode on an iPhone. Nice.

Ads in Backgammon+ are there - it's a free app, after all. You can get rid of them for an in-app purchase of a lowly $2, and if you don't, they are nowhere as obtrusive as in other (Backgammon) apps. I've yet to come across my first annoying "watch this 30 secs ad and look for a hidden close button" video. Only banner ads on the start screen so far.

The engine that you can test your backgammon skills against is no slouch either. It's not on par with the world-champion strength of BGNJ or XG mobile, but on hard difficulty nearly every Backgammon fan should get a tough opponent to beat. Here's XG2's opinion on BG+ after 3 games:

XG2 (PC) rating me and BG+

"Expert" means: great player, but sometimes blunders moves and cube decisions. A performance rating of 5.8 is nowhere in the same league as BGNJ (about 2) or XG mobile. But do you care? (by the way, BG+ doesn't offer a feature to export games as text file. I spent my time manually entering all rolls and moves into XG2 manually, which obviously affected my playing strength...)

Personally, I like the agressive playing style of BG+ a lot. It's great fun to play it. But I never do. Why? Do you ask? Because it is like "Jellyfish Player" decades ago, which was the most frustrating computer program I ever used...

When Jellyfish came out (30 years ago?), you could either download Jellyfish Player for free, or pay something like $200 for Jellyfish Tutor. Jellyfish was one of the first programs featuring an artificial neural net, which turned out to be the kind of software you need to do a world-class Backgammon. Jellyfish's core is a network that is designed to learn and match patterns. You let it play against itself for a long time, and let it adjust its network, and once it's done it will destroy you. And that's what the free player did. I played game after game, and game after game it destroyed me like I was never destroyed in Backgammon. And it wouldn't tell me why. It wouldn't tell me where I blundered, and what I should have played instead. It would cost me a huge pile of money to get that knowledge, to get a tutor that tells me where I go wrong and what I should do instead. In the end I payed the $200, and I never looked back.

Backgammon+ is like Jellyfish player. Place your wits against it, fight it, but you will never learn why it beats you. If you can bear that (without writing "Backgammon+ cheats" reviews in the app store :-) ), go ahead. But for $10 you can get the good tutor of BGNJ, for $11 you get the even better tutor of XG mobile, and can start improving your skills.

Multiplayer is done wonderfully in BG+ with one big "but". Matchmaking is simple and beautiful. Hit the "Online game" button, it tells you "waiting for player", and off you go. Nice and easy.

Playing the game online is done as beautifully as single-player gaming. It is soooooo close to perfect. But they don't have a doubling cube. They have obviously decided to replace the actual doubling in Backgammon with some implementation that allows players who regularly use the app to get the option to double at any time during a game (only once, no re-double). This is not something to take lightly. The doubling cube, with doubling, redoubling is an essential ingredient of a Backgammon.

If you're a serious fan of Backgammon you know that the doubling cube is more than an add-on that you can leave out. It's an essential ingredient of Backgammon that makes the game much more fun, and that is incredibly hard to master well. I have no clue why the developers decided to leave this bit out, but for me this means "use BGNJ for online gaming even if BG+ is overall implemented much cleaner".

Backgammon NJ (HD) on iPhone and iPad

Update Nov 20, 2021: corrected iPad graphics section - BGNJ HD looks great on my iPad.

Update July 11, 2020: added details on online playing.

Summary: Backgammon NJ features a good, mostly intuitive UI, an AI oppenent playing from beginner to world-champion level, and decent online gaming. It's not cheap at $7,99 + $2,99, but it's worth every cent.

Since the advent of pro-level backgammon programs mere mortals have been accusing them of cheating. To find out whether a backgammon app uses a state of the art engine, just check for the presence of many "this app cheats!" reviews. And, unlike in chess, it feels like they cheat. The point, however, is: a world-class backgammon player plays the move that maximizes the number of good rolls for them in the next move, and that minimizes the number of good rolls for the opponent. It is a sign of great strength if an app always seems to roll dice that are good for it like this reviewer of Backgammon NJ (henceforth BGNJ) writes (highlight by me):

So: look out for this kind of review - in Backgammon these usually mean "world-class neural network engine at work", not "app cheats".

In case you're concerned now: I analyzed a 13-point match I played against BGNJ in Extreme Gammon on the PC. We got a similar number of lucky/unlucky rolls, and BGNJ just made nearly no mistakes. Here's the summary:

That "equity" means: if you add all the errors that BGNJ made in 13 games, they add up to losing 0.836 of a game. If you add mine, I've made 7.449 games worth of mistakes. Correspondingly, Extreme Gammon rates BGNJ as "world champ", me as "intermediate".

 

Update: I've played a couple more matches (one in which I'm advanced with a performance rating of 8.17! Yay!). BGNJ consistently ranks between 1.5 and 2.5 performance rating - right where, according to BMAB, the best human "super grandmasters" are, even a bit better.

At the highest level, it plays a precise, logical game. No major surprises there.

Okay, so it's a world champ. How does it look and feel?

BGNJ (reviewing the $2 more expensive HD version) features a clean, unobtrusive board, excellent UX while playing. It's a bit on the boring side (e.g. no translucent checkers, no huge list of designes with subtle textures like in BGBlitz on PC and Mac), but it does the job really well. Everything looks crisp and precise.

Good: doubling works well, you can undo your current halfway-done move in case you click the wrong checker, you finish the move by clicking on the dice (again to prevent errors and to experiment with different moves), and a built-in tutor tells you about mistakes (in case you've enabled the tutor) just when you made them, and helps you find out what would have been better.

I don't like the weird separation o a menu in the left upper corner and another menu in the right upper corner; I would have liked a few more board designs, and a sharper iPad UI.

BGNJ comes with all Backgammon bells and whistles - money games, matches to 3, 5, 7, 9, ... points with Crawford rule, full doubling cube handling (also incl. tutor), optional Jacoby rule, auto-completing games, saving games and matches or sending them via e-mail for analysis on your PC etc.

There's also a second "felt" visual design, but I prefer the original one.

Improving your Backgammon

There's a lot of features to help you get better at Backgammon: if you want, an equity bar in the top left area shows you how you're doing. When you've moved your checkers, before you finish the move, this is immediately updated so you can see the equity impact of your move. Together with the tutor that allows for some experimentation with different moves.

By the way: equity is how the game stands. If equity is 0, the game is perfectly even. If it's 0.4, like above, this means: if we play 100 games from this position, and get $1 for every game I win, and lose $1 for every game I lose, I'll win $0.4 * 100 = $40. This also factors in doubling, so the equity can be something like 4, for example, if the game has been doubled and I'll probably win by a gammon.

That said, if you buy that in-app purchase of the analysis package, you also get a nice option to analyze whole matches on BGNJ's highest level. You can go through all moves of a match and get hints, or you can see them in a list like below and click on the mistakes you made to review them. Very convenient.

That said, XG mobile (review later) has more sophisticated analysis features, so BGNJ is great, but not the king of BG learning.

Online

BGNJ offers full real-time and turn-based online gaming; money games, matches, all is there, and works quite well. Match-making is a bit clumsy: In the settings you tell the game what match length you prefer, and then you click on "turn-based" or "real-time" and then, well, you sit there and wait for a few minutes, and you have no clue what's going on until all of a sudden a dialog with a match offer appears. 

After a match has been established you play against the other player with the normal BGNJ interface, and all works beautifully - throwing dice, moving, doubling, all is fine. And after the match you can use BGNJ's analysis to have a look at where you might do better. Great job!

Price tag

Back then I payed $200 for Jellyfish Tutor. I'm not concerned about the $8 for the app and $2 for the in-app purchase to get the analysis package. Still, it costs some money. If you really want to stay free, there are alternatives that I will cover later. I'm still recommending BG NJ wholeheartedly.

  

Hi! Welcome to my Backgammon info

In this blog...

I'll post about Backgammon. Particularly I'll cover Backgammon apps for iOS, and write about Backgammon and Computer Backgammon once in a while as well.

Backgammon is one of the most underestimated board games. Many play it for fun without much thinking. After all, you roll the dice in every move. There cant' be much about it except for randomness and luck, right?

However, if you try out some of the best apps (that I'll review in this blog), you'll see that they will destroy you over and over. And over. And you'll learn that despite rolling dice, Backgammon is full of strategies and tactics, full of hard decisions, and, foremost, full of patterns to know and full of accurately estimating probabilities.

To start with the conclusion: for iOS there are some excellent apps, apps that give you a world-class opponent and teacher and apps that allow you to play against other Backgammon fans around the world. And the best have both. But: there are also some really poor apps, apps that want your money, apps that want to flood your brain with ads. I'll talk about those as well.

My first review in the next post here will cover the first "world class" Backgammon iOS app I ever used, and an app that I still play regularly. The wonderful Backgammon NJ.

Why...

would you want to read this blog? I'm not an expert at Backgammon. The apps tell me I'm "advanced", which is okay, I guess. On a good day, and with luck, I can beat a top backgammon app in a match to 13 points. But I know about how the top backgammon apps work, I know about neural nets and backgammon apps, about the history starting with Jellyfish Backgammon (yes, I'm an old fart, I used Jellyfish when it was new, decades ago), and I've read enough Backgammon books to talk about this and that. I hope you'll enjoy the ride :-)

Oh yes and I'm proud owner of "extreme gammon 2" for the PC, probably the best backgammon player on this planet, and I'm using it to find out how strong apps play whenever this is humanly possible. (and gnu bg as well to check whether XG cheats when e.g. evaluating the strength of XG mobile :-) ).