A piece of art, but barely a backgammon: Backgammon Machine

The computer game “Doom” kicked off the whole 3D first person shooter genre. In this classic, you start by selecting a difficulty level. On “I’m too young to die” the game is easy, on “Hurt me plenty” it’s fairly hard to beat, but real men (and women) played it on “Ultra Violence” for a real challenge. This analogy came to my mind when thinking about why a Backgammon like “Backgammon Machine” that doesn’t include the doubling cube is fun to play, but somehow stale compared to the real thing. Checker play offers plenty of fun, but by including the cube you turn the game’s challenges from “hurt me plenty” to “ultra violence”. 

That said, Backgammon Machine is a special app. It’s really, actually, totally completely free. No ads. No in-app purchases, no virtual coins, no “watch this video for <feature>”. Free. And beautiful. Man this app is well designed in its pure and beautiful grey look. Steve Jobs would love it. I love it.

Playing a game of backgammon on the iPad

But its beauty doesn’t stop at only visual appearance. Its user experience is also top notch - the way you move your checkers, how you undo is just perfect. For example: you roll 6/3, move a checker by 6 pips. Now if you tap on this checker, the app will highlight two target places - 6 back (to undo the 6) and 3 back (to turn the 6 into the 3). Very clever, have not seen this anywhere else.

The minimalistic options screen

Concerning features, this is pretty much it. You start a game in “match to 1 pt” mode. You make your moves (enjoyable). It makes its moves. You start another game in “match to 1 pt” mode. And so on. No tutor/analysis, no setup, no matches, no doubling, no exporting, no manual dice, you get the picture :-).

Oh yes, and the UI is so clean that it doesn’t show a pip count. The joys of counting pips by hand (strengthening my “criss-cross pip counting skills”).

But maybe that’s enough. Play against a strong, free AI can be fun, at least for a casual backgammon in between meetings or such, even without matches, without doubling. So all boils down to the question: is the AI any good? The answer is yes and no. It certainly plays a stronger game than the AIs that have been hand-crafted in a rush. It certainly plays a weaker game than then high-end AIs of XG, BGBlitz, BG NJ. 

I‘ve played 18 games so far, and lead 12:6 against the AI. I feel I was fairly lucky sometimes, but I‘ve also seen it going for significant blunders. For example, in a situation where I‘m bearing off against 1 or 2 trapped checkers it moves those trapped checkers home far too early (considering it doesn‘t treat a gammon as 2 points it should wait it out as long as possible). Or take this one:

Backgammon Machine playing a 6/4 opening rather … uhm … unconventionally

This 6/4 opening, according to XG2, is nearly a blunder (losing 0.072 equity). This is way too loose, it will be hard for me to roll something that doesn’t hit, and hit on a point I want to make. Not something an app that claims to play at nearly master strength would do.

Nevertheless this app plays a good game of Backgammon, certainly better than many of the “beginner” level Backgammons out there, and as it’s fast, fun, free and beautiful, it’s great for a fast, casual game of backgammon.

So, just install it and have fun. Just don’t expect too much. I hope the author invests more into self-playing to improve its strength, and into a few more features. Matches would be great.

 

Update (September 2022): As part of my "big table with all backgammon app rating" project I've played a couple of games against the machine, and had them analyze with XG2 on the PC. Seems I was lucky during my review; the app plays a strong expert game, almost world class level. (PR 5.2). Sadly it still has no cube.

 

Strange but fun - Backgammon - offline by SNG CT

This one took me a long time to review. Even after playing 35 games against its four levels of AI, I‘m still unsure what to think about it. One thing is for sure, it‘s not for a serious match of backgammon, one in which you can learn from a superior AI and improve your skills. And it wants to make money by making you watch ads and buy coins. And it doesn‘t shy away from fairly unconventional ideas to achieve this.

But let‘s start with the basics. First off: this is about money games. No matches.

The game pits ou against four difficulty levels. Each level raises the stakes - at the beginning you have to compete with the „beginner“ AI because you can‘t afford the price of admission to play against advanced or expert. After you‘ve selected your level you‘re treated with a screen in which you can enter your bet and your maximum bet. From this it calculates how often you can double. 

It took me a long time to figure this one out. First fun fact: this app called Backgammon doesn‘t know what a Backgammon is. It does know what a Gammon is, though. So it calculates in my example: maximum bet is 50,000 coins, my selected bet is 14,400 coins. If I would double and lose gammon I would lose 57,600 coins which exceeds my maximum bet. Therefore I may not use the doubling cube.

Hint: you want to select a bet that allows you to double because the AI has no clue about how to double well, doubles like a „now I‘ll win for sure“ beginner, accepts doubles it should really, REALLY drop. Easy money.

After these two easy steps, you‘re sent to the actual game.

Two things here: a) for some reason much screen space is invested in showing you and one of many virtual opponents. And b) this layout makes the board tinier than possible,, and there‘s no way of showing it full-screen. No problem on a big iPad screen, but still…On a 16x9 iPhone screen this is no issue.

IPhone.

Apart from this, the user experience playing this backgammon is awesome. Nice undo, unobtrusive  support figuring out which checker can move and where it can move, nice drag-and-drop playing if you wish (I love drag-and-drop in Backgammon because it slows me down a little bit and lets me think if this is really what I want. With click-and-click you move fast. And err fast.. And d&d feels like a real board). The app offers a multitude of beautifully rendered boards.

Part of this game (that I was using only in one game to understand it) is: you can watch an ad to re-roll a poor roll. Yes, seriously. There seems to be a limit to this (3 times per game?), but it tilts the odds massively to your side - getting rid of the two or so biggest anti-jokers will massively make you a favourite.

Here it is: watch and reroll.

If you‘re a reasonably good backgammon player, you won‘t need this feature, though - the AI is nowhere as unbeatable as XG, NG, BGBlitz are. But for mysterious reasons I love playing against those little virtual bots. They cover an interesting “white space”: backgammon apps tend to fall in one of two camps. There’s the bleeding-edge neural network bots that play vastly superior to you, and there’s AIs that some guy had to handcraft by creating a bunch of rules, rules that misunderstand 50% of board positions and play like a beginner. You know, the ones that double against your 6-prime because you’re 10 pips down.

This app claims to use a neural network AI that has been trained a million matches. Maybe that’s not enough, but the AI happens to play well, without the horrible blunders that handcrafted AIs annoy you with, but a bit worse than me (XG calls me “advanced” most of the time, “intermediate” if I don’t focus enough). And strangely, the intermediate AI beats me more often than the expert AI. So, at my level of play, I get opponents that I beat more often than not, but that offer good resistance and challenging games, which probably is what many players want. Your mileage may vary. Oh yes, and I’ve mentioned that it doubles poorly, so the joy (pain?) of figuring out whether to take or drop a difficult double is not something you get in this app.

What else can be said? You can buy virtual chips for real money, and if you’re a beginner you will probably have to do this to keep playing (there’s a daily 1,000 coins bonus, as in many F2P games). You can pay 5 bucks to remove ads or watch a boring ad video after every single game. While playing you’re building up experience, even have an experience level, but I haven’t figured out what this level is supposed to do. The app offers no tutor features of any kind.

All in all, if you like money games, want a good but not too good AI to play casual games against, “Backgammon - offline” might be an app to consider. If you’re a backgammon newbie you might face “out of money” situations, though.