Playing online on Backgammon Galaxy

Let‘s start with a few confessions: I hate „pay to win“ games. I‘m not talking Backgammon here, but normal games you download on the App Store or Google Play. These games don‘t feel like they are designed for you to have fun. They are designed, primarily to milk you for virtual coins so that you buy virtual coins with real coins. I also hate annoying sales people, but seriously, who doesn‘t.

That said, I‘ve come across three kinds of online backgammon sites: 

1. Those that seem to have been added to an app as an afterthought (Backgammon NJ). They just don‘t feel fun to play.
2. Those that stem from the ancient days of online backgammon - FIBS clients, Backgammon Studio Heroes. They are free, feature-rich, fun to play but the user experience shouts „I was designed in the last millennium!“. And particularly with respect to FIBS: downloading a PC/Mac client? In 2020? Seriously?
3. Those that (and that brings us back to my confessions) want to make money when you play backgammon. Sites like Backgammon - Lord of the Board that SCREAM at you! Win! Click! Pay!

But now here‘s 4. Backgammon Galaxy, a web site for serious Backgammon fans that is beautifully designed, innovative as hell, plays as great on a PC than on a phone. It has a few issues, but wow I‘ve seen the future of online backgammon.

This is how it looks. @Ychan if you read this and want your name removed, just comment here.

Playing a game on Backgammon Galaxy (iPad Pro)

Backgammon Galaxy features a very distinct, very simple, IMHO very beautiful look and feel, with a futuristic theme and a blue-ish design. Rolling, moving, doubling is all done as you would expect; I never ran into an issue trying to move a checker to a place or doubling. Currently, only match-play is supported with matches running from 1 to 25 points. You can also select three different time controls - fast is 8 sec per move + 20 sec per point, normal is 10 sec per move + 1 min per point, casual is 15 sec per move + 3 min per point. I love casual, gives you plenty of time to think. But if you want time pressure, you can get it :)

Matchmaking is simple: one player creates a game by filling out a simple form, entering desired match length and clock. The game offer is shown in a list. Another player accepts the offer and the game starts.

The overview screen. Here you can join a match offered by somebody else or create a game offer yourself.

There‘s also tournaments, but I haven‘t tried them yet. If I understand there's a registration period and a start time and then you do knockout rounds.

 

 

A finished tournament

Unfortunately there are no private games. If you want to play against a friend, this isn‘t easy here as your game offer will be there for everyone to accept and usually it takes seconds only until you get your match.

Once you‘ve started a match you play a normal match of backgammon. I love the beautiful UI, I like how they implemented checker movement - tap on a checker to move the first die, then same for the second, tap on the dice to swap, if you prefer, drag and drop checkers. I‘ve got two minor complaints, though. First, I don‘t see an animation or similar that shows me where my opponent has moved; the simple UI also doesn‘t show me the last move. Sometimes I have to guess what exactly my opponent did. Second: I don‘t get the sounds. Sometimes the game makes tiny clicking noises for unknown reasons; the one sound it should make („opponent has finished moving, your turn“) it doesn‘t. So I sometimes didn‘t notice that it‘s my turn again. But that‘s minor really. Playing a game of Backgammon is extremely enjoyable on Backgammon Galaxy.

Once you‘re finished, you‘re taken to the total magic wonderful game-changing killer-feature of Backgammon Galaxy, the feature while I pretty much stopped playing anywhere else. The Match Result incl. rating adjustment.

Game result of my most recent game.

Have a look at this screen. You see not one but two crowns. One for the player who won the match. One for the player who played the stronger moves. Now the thing is, you need both crowns to have your rating improved and vice versa. Win by luck although you‘ve played weakly - no point for you. Lose a match where you played like a God (like my opponent in the screenshot) because your opponent was lucky - you won‘t lose a single point. 

There are discussions going on whether this approach is the right one; after all, sometimes the right move is the wrong move. For instance, if you‘re playing somebody who is much weaker you might want to play an aggressive move instead of the optimal move. Personally, not encountering the frustration of losing against a clearly weaker but luckier opponent and losing rating because of this is a major step forward in enjoying online Backgammon.

How do they achieve this? Behind the scenes, the supposedly strongest Backgammon engine, Extreme Gammon, keeps track of all moves, and determines how far you and your opponents have strayed from the best move. And after the match it will tell you.

Which brings us to another fine feature of Backgammon Galaxy: having your games reviewed by a strong AI.

At any time, you can bring up a list of all matches you've played. In this list you can either export the match to have it analyzed by XG or gnubg on your computer, or you can use the beautiful and pretty decent built-in analysis that you can see above. 

The UI shows the list of moves of each game in the match, along with differently colored dots that show where you or your opponent made a mistake. Tap on a move to see a detailed analysis of that move:

You need to learn a bit about equity (no big deal), but then this analysis shows you nicely what the best move would have been and how far off your move was.

Of course, this being a free online backgammon, you won't get the full power of XG to analyze your matches. For lowly <1750 ranked people like me, it uses XG with a 2-ply analysis. That is way enough and tremendously helpful. Still: if you download the match to analyze with a PC you get a much stronger analysis (XG spends 250 times more time analyzing each move).

A big construction site: in several places you come across pieces and bits that are under construction.

 

You can't play private games, you can't play money games, you can follow somebody, but that doesn't seem to mean anything (like "challenge a friend", getting updates about their progress etc), you can't create tournaments on your own, you can't use whatever the blunder DB is going to be etc. There's even a premium membership that, well, isn't there.

But that's not bad. I hope all those features will appear one by one. Until then what's there is well enough to play some wonderful games of backammon.