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.