Bg3D - totally cool looking 3D backgammon. If it only were a backgammon.

The doubling cube is the latest addition to backgammon. Its history stays mysterious but it was created about 100 years ago, in the 1920s, and massively increased the complexity and the drama of backgammon matches. I believe I'm fairly good at backgammon except for my cube handling which is still way too conservative. This costs me many matches. Same goes for some apps who play a fair game of backgammon, but still I destroy them 15-3 or so because they have no clue how to use the doubling cube.

Now there seem to be people, even app developers, who seem to believe that the cube is an afterthought, something only there if you play for money, not really needed in backgammon. They don't use it in their games and unnecessarily play a more boring, more peaceful backgammon variant, or they don't include it in their app and unnecessarily ask their app users to play a more boring, more peaceful backgammon variant.

 Bg3D is such an app. It comes with a mindboggingly beautiful animated 3D UI that is without peers on my iPhone. It is simple and plays an okay backgammon. And it even includes a doubling cube in the UI:

 

 

That nice cube on the right side is, unfortunately, just polygons sitting there without any functionality. 

 

Apart from that cube issue, the app is quite nice. Very simple to use, four difficulty levels, and a beautiful, beautiful UI with wonderful animations. For example, when all your stones are in your home board, the game will pan to center on that part of the board in a smooth animation.

 

 

Bg3D also features online playing, but probably due to a lack of users I could never establish a game between me and another player.

 

The other major problem for some of us is the lack of playing strength. On its hardest level it makes horrible mistakes; I win something like 4 out of 5 games against it, and I'm only an intermediate player. I fed half of a game of me against Bg3D into Extreme Gammon (PC) and it rated Bg3D "distracted", finding 6 grave mistakes that cost it over 1 game's worth of equity.

 

Summary:  "I felt like destroying something beautiful" (Tyler Durden, Fight Club).

 

That pretty much sums up what this app is to me. Bg3D is free, it's beautiful, but it doesn't play backgammon, and the cube-free backgammon variant it plays, it plays poorly. If you're a backgammon beginner you will enjoy this beautiful app a lot. If you're better, go somewhere else (unless you look for a beautiful app to destroy).

 

 Update 08/2022: played another game with it (a match to 1 pt, the only kind of game this app can still play). Graphically, this is SO BEAUTIFUL. And again it made the most horrible blunders you can imagine. Here's what XG2 has to say about it (I'm white, XG3D is blue).

And this is a kind rating; in the second half of the game the AI was facing very simple positions where you can't go very wrong. In the first half its rating was "distracted" with a PR of over 40. I feel this is its real rating, but can't make myself play and transcribe more matches... Needless to say I won.

 

The Backgammon to rule them all - XG Mobile

Well, "to rule them all" applies to the AI point of view. The thing is, Extreme Gammon Mobile (XG Mobile) doesn‘t feature any multiplayer mode. It‘s you against the strongest mobile Backgammon on this planet, an engine of superhuman strength, even stronger than Backgammon NG and True Backgammon HD, although somebody like me probably won‘t notice the strength difference - they all destroy me. 

As there are only so few, let‘s start with XG Mobile‘s weaknesses: it has no multiplayer, the board doesn’t look as crisp as in some competing products and has some rendering glitches, and it has, well, let‘s call it „the infuriating toolbar“, a toolbar that is both very ugly to look at and hard to open if you choose the auto-hide option. 

Here it is (took me something like 20 attempts to get it to show up on my iPad Pro).

Unfortunately this is the toolbar you have to open to get access to XG Mobile‘s options. But it‘s distractingly colourful, features stupid social networks buttons (including G+ which is out of business for over a year). It‘s ugly to look at, and the place where I have the best chances to get it to open is right next to the doubling cube. I‘ve ended up with some really stupid involuntary doubles.

BTW note the rendering issue on the „five“ cube. It does that when waking up. Killing the app and restarting it helps.

So much for the complaining. On the positive side, you get a world champion backgammon teacher.

To understand how strong XG mobile plays you need to know about the BMAB/PR rating system. In this system you get a rating between 0 (makes no mistakes at all, ever) and something like 100 for total newbie. I’m intermediate, around 14. The best players on this planet are in the 2-4 range “super grandmasters”. 

Just today I let XG on the PC analyze a 9p match I did against XG mobile, and while it rated me intermediate with a performance of 14.5, it gave XG mobile a performance rating of 0.19, which means “ten times less errors than a super grandmaster”. Gnu Backgammon consistently rates it as "superhuman".

 

Here's the statistics of XG for PC on this match.

 

Also interesting: the total equity that XG mobile lost in 9 games was 0.075. This means that in the nine games we played, all mistakes it made added up are less then 1/10 of a point. Shockingly good backgammon.

 

Apart from the best engine that‘s out there, XG Mobile also has the most helpful and sophisticated tutor and analysis features to be found on a mobile device.

In tutor mode, you get immediate, wonderful feedback after a move or cube decision.

 

First it will show you a dialog that it believes you‘ve made a mistake. If you want to see details you get a larger dialog that shows you the best moves and how much off yours was in terms of equity and winning chances. You can then click on the „eye“ button and the app will show the selected move on the board for a few seconds. Extremely helpful.

 

And after each game you get the (often disastrous) summary of your and its own performance.

XG Mobile offers to export matches, e.g. for analysis on the PC, the full backgammon rule and feature set (matches to any length or money games, Jacoby rule, adjustable playing strength, game modes from tutor etc).

 

When it comes to options, XG mobile is well-equipped: full control over all kinds of aspects of the game and backgammon rules are there. And a couple of different designs offer a nice board for every taste.

 

 

A nice leather layout

 

The premium version offers stronger tutors, different board designs and a few other cool features at $10. Considering that there was a time, not long ago, when such a full-featured backgammon would cost you $100-$300 this is a bargain :-). Supposedly the premium version includes multiplayer. No clue where this is supposed to be.

All in all: if you want to improve your backgammon, XG Mobile is the best backgammon you can get.