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.
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