A hidden treasure: Backgammon KG

Apple‘s App Store is like a big ocean. If you‘re a fish who manages to live at its beautiful coral reefs, or at its wonderful famous beaches, plenty of divers will get to see you. But if you live down there in the black depths far below the surface, chances are you‘ll never get into a diver‘s sight. 

Backgammon KG is such a creature from the deepest seas. Unlike companies who have read their SEO (search engine optimisation) books and know how to get their app into your search results, its developer Keith Gould probably just wanted to create a good, free backgammon and nothing else. As a result it is near impossible to get it into your app store‘s view. I‘m regularly hunting for new backgammons, scrolling through long lists of apps, but this one never appeared. Only as a related game to another app it showed up. I downloaded it to my trusty iPhone and was amazed at what a beautiful deep sea fish I had found.

Backgammon KG on an iPad Pro

The thing is: there are many (MANY) backgammon apps on the App Store. But there isn‘t a single one that you can call full-featured without blushing and that is really free. Only this one. Backgammon KG. On the German App Store it has a single (one star “this app is cheating”) rating which suggests that only few people ever tried it.

Graphically it’ fine, but there‘s not too much to write home about; the UI gets the job done, the app has a clean and consistent look, you‘ve got 10 board designs to choose from. But I‘ve seen more beautifully looking backgammon apps. One complaint: sometimes, mostly in the lower row of the board, you have to click slightly left to where your checker should move or it will move one point too far. And a minor complaint: there is no native support of the iPad - it’s using app scaling which makes the app look low-res.

Some of the designs (here: metal) are, well, daring

It’s real strength lies not in its presentation but in its scope and in its price. Backgammon KG is really, actually, totally free. Not free as in “buy 1000 coins in-app to unlock this and that”. Not free as in “whenever you like it least it will confront you with 20 seconds of video to watch or with a blinking ad image. No. Really, actually free. Download it. Play backgammon.

And backgammon it plays. Not the “what doubling cube?” kind of backgammon that half of the apps support. Not the “there is something else than money games?” kind of backgammon. Not the “my developer got the task to build my AI in 10 working days so I play like the ultimate backgammon noob” kind of backgammon. Real, actual, strong backgammon! You can play matches from 1 to 11 points, with Cube, Crawford and everything else working the way it should.

Backgammon KG’s AI uses the same fundamental approach that all the top apps rely on - a neural net based machine learning approach that was trained by millions of self-play games. It shows that the app could have used a few million more of those self-play games. It’s strong, really strong, but not as strong as XG mobile or the BGBlitz inside True BG. I’ve played 4 test matches to 3 points, one myself, one pitting Backgammon KG against the PC program XG2 on an extremely strong level (“roller++”). My conclusion: KG’s checker play is world class level. Not perfect - sometimes an error or even a small blunder creeps in. But good enough for quite everybody to get a good challenge. Cube handling is not as strong; Backgammon KG plays a very defensive cube, missing good cubes quite often. So in the end XG2’s assessment of KG in the four matches was once advanced and expert each, and twice world class. Not bad for a free app.

The little red lamp shows the tutor’s opinion on my move (error!)

Also, the game includes a (nearly) full-featured tutor - great to improve your skills. If you activate the tutor in the settings, you’ll get two things: a little lamp that is white (“perfect”), green (“small error”), yellow (“bigger error”) or red (“blunder”). make a move, see the lamp, and take back/experiment to see what the game recommends. Next to the lamp you’ll find a “Moves” button. Hit it and see all possible moves, ranked from strong to weak, along with two mysterious figures that I haven’t understood.

The tutor’s move list

So to find out the best move, click on the first row and behind the semi-transparent list the move is made. Close the list to see the full thing. Undo if you want to still consider different moves.

I can’t stress enough how cool the combination of a strong AI and a tutor is - apart from reading Backgammon books or watching Backgammon videos of pros commenting pro matches this is the best way to hone your backgammon skills. And while I believe the top apps deserve your investment of around 10 bucks, this one does the job really well, completely free of charge.

One minor gripe: the app doesn’t tutor your cube decisions. This is sad because, at least for me, cube handling is the toughest part of backgammon. To make a proper cube decision you have to assess your winning chances, your / his chances to gammon, the volatility of the board, the likelihood of losing your market next turn. After decades of Backgammoning I still regularly make cube errors on the level of “this has cost you half a point”. But then, Backgammon KG isn’t much better in this respect, so a cube tutor wouldn’t teach you that much.

The default board design 

 

A few more words on features: Backgammon KG includes four playing levels, offers statistics on your playing performance, and tries to keep you motivated by gradually unlocking more board designs whenever you win a game on expert level. For the final “Andromeda” design you have to win 200 games. Not an easy job (though you can cheat by stopping and re-starting the app again and again with your last winning move on the board, but that wouldn’t be appropriate, would it?)

My conclusion: this is one of my top three recommended backgammon apps. True Backgammon costs you good money and offers the most beautiful experience. XG mobile isn’t as beautiful but IMHO a tad bit stronger, and an excellent choice for good money. And Backgammon KG is nearly as good without costing you a cent. Now go ahead and download it, what are you waiting for? :-)

 

Update (Sep 2022): as part of my project to have XG2 rank every app in a big table for easy comparison I've played a few matches against Backgammon KG and analyzed them in XG2. Result: it indeed plays quite strong, at a strong expert level, almost world class - PR 5.7. You hardly find a human opponent that is that strong, and gives you free backgammon teaching.

 

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.

Bad luck in Backgammon

Recently I thought about luck in backgammon, particularly bad luck. Don't you hate it when the dice roll exactly the way you don't want them to? Don't you love it if you need a 51 to turn the game around and you get... a 51! Wouldn't you want that bad luck gone in the game?

I ended up with two experiments with XG2:

Experiment 1: The perfectly lucky game!

Suppose you take out all luck from Backgammon by always rolling the best possible dice. A joker every move.  Wouldn't that be cool? How would the game look like?

It turns out that the perfectly lucky game (for both sides) is incredibly boring.

(For the details on how to get XG2 to play the perfectly lucky game, look below)

Here's the transcript. Brace yourself for some serious boredom.

1) 31: 8/5 6/5

Luckier than the other good candidates like 61, 42, 65.

1) ... 66: 24/18(2) 13/7 (2)

This leads to this position:

 In this position, 66 isn't the best roll you can get - the 7 point and the 18 point are made by white so it would actually be very awkward to roll a 66 now. The best roll here is 44.

2. 44: 24/20(2) 13/9(2)

Now, again, 66 isn't the best roll for white because you can't bring the back men on 18 home with it. The joker now is 55.

2. ... 55: 18/8(2)

And here we're at the end of our game already. Blue's joker is, obviously, 66, bringing home the two checkers on 20 and turning the game into a pure racing game, where always 66 is the joker, and where white wins because blue rolled only a 31 and a 44 where white rolled a 55 (in addition to 66 rolls).

For completeness:

3. 66: 20/8(2) 

3. ... 66: 13/7(2) 13/1

And the two groups are separated. In the further "battle of the 66", white wins like this:

Now that wasn't too dramatic, was it? I was expecting great swings, dramatic luck, but all I got was boredom (NB I got the great swings - the game's analysis cycled between "white wins" and "equal" for most of the time, but the game was just boring). Also notice that there wasn't any close decision here, all was straightforward. Seems the joker typically leads to a very straightforward move.

Conclusion: too much luck is boring :-)

Experiment 2: my "Luckgammon" variation 

Considering what to do to reduce bad luck in Backgammon I thought of this variation:

Instead of rolling and moving, you roll three times, and pick the roll that is most lucky. Then you move.

(For the setup how to achieve this with XG2 look below)

The idea behind this is that it keeps some randomness in the game, but you never roll those awful anti-jokers and you hit a good or very good roll nearly always.

Now these games have to be taken with a good grain of salt - XG2's perfect play is tailored for the normal backgammon; if you can roll 3 times, the probability to hit a checker, to enter a 4-point board etc are vastly higher than what XG believes, so the best move is probably different to what you believe. Even the luckiest move might be different than in normal BG, so my method of selecting the luckiest move is slightly flawed as well, or isn't it? Tricky.

Anyway, I played four games like this. Believe me, it is TEDIOUS to play these games. See separate post for the details. Two games I played "me vs XG2", two I played "XG2 vs itself". All four games were, again, fairly boring. Not as boring as the joker game, but still nothing compared to the drama you get in plain, normal, ordinary Backgammon. Actually I had difficulties picking good positions to show you, positions where a tricky decision has to be made, a position where an ingenious move has to be found, where you have to see the right game plan. There's not much there.

Bad luck is the icing on the Backgammon cake, it seems

Now four games isn't representative for sure, but still, after playing these games it seems to me that my Luckgammon isn't so much fun. It seems that without the occasional really poor move, without figuring out what's the best you can do with an awkward roll, without the frustration of dancing four times in a row, the game gets shallow and stale.

So the next time you bite into your keyboard in frustration over that poor roll or in anger over your opponent, of course, hitting you, although there were only 4 of 36 rolls that would allow him that, maybe it helps you to know that the tough luck makes this game the fun that it is :-)

Appendix: How to get XG2 to always roll the perfect roll

1. Start a new game transcription
2. For every move, do the following:
1. click on the last move that was made. You should see XG's analysis with the best moves and their equity. 
2. Right-click on the best move, select "Dice Distribution".
3. On the tab "dice map", pick the reddest roll - this is the roll that is your anti-joker for the next move, i.e. the joker for your opponent for the next move.
4. Go back to the current move, manually roll the roll you've seen as joker in step (3) 
5. Hit CTRL-H to get a hint, if necessary, use XG Roller+/++ to make sure you pick the right move. Do the best move in XG's list.
   

For the first move I had to try out the various good rolls because XG won't show you any info before the first roll, so I selected all good rolls (65, 42, 61, 31) and looked at XG's luck rating after the roll, and picked the one with the highest luck after the roll - 31. 

Appendix: How to get XG2 to play Luckgammon

First, start a new game transcription. Make sure you can easily distinguish the two players (e.g. by calling them the colors of their checkers). 

 

Then for every move do the following:

1. Hit "R" to roll a random roll. Have the "Overview" panel open and note the roll and the luck value of the current player. Do this for 3 times. Pick the roll with the highest luck value.
   (special case: if you've got a checker on the bar, and your roll dances, you have to hit "T" to take back the roll, twice, to get back to your current roll)
   
2. Hit "T" to take back the current roll, enter the roll you picked as manual roll.
3. Do your move, maybe using CTRL-H to get a hint of XG2 on what to move.

 

Even the Gods blunder sometimes

Played a match against the wonderful True Backgammon on my iPad today. Very surprising: BGBlitz on 2-ply believes I played at PR 6.0, and that the BGBlitz in True BG played at PR "-0.5" (better than perfect :-) ).

But if you feed the match into XG2, or if you go for a BGBlitz 4-ply analysis, things change dramatically. My rating moves to PR 7.8, BGBlitz's rating to PR 6.5.

It turns out that BGBlitz doesn't seem to deal well with avoiding backgammon losses. Both the BGBlitz engine inside of True BG nor BGBlitz for the PC blunder seriously in this position.

Blue to play 32. 

Not too hard, right - blue must run away from being backgammoned and should play something like 21/18 20/18. Actually, 24/22 21/18 is best, avoiding trouble when rolling a 11 next.

But True BG played 24/22 7/4, and BGBlitz on up to 3-play finds this move just great. Only on 4-ply it agrees with XG2 that this is a serious blunder (BGBlitz: -0.19, XG2 rollout -0.178)

And so it happened: I won this game with a Backgammon :-)

Three reasons I love DailyGammon

Summary (TL;DR): if you look for "correspondance backgammon" and you don't mind having nothing else (no PR matches, no fancy UI), then DailyGammon is what you need.

 

One of the curses of the Internet these days are clickbaiting articles like "3 reasons you need to do this" or "5 best somethings". But, well, there are three reasons why I love DailyGammon since I finally found it (took me a long time), so I'll list them here and risk that you think "OMG clickbait!"

Before I start, let's get a few things out of the way: UX-wise, DailyGammon can't hold a candle to state of the art sites like Backgammon Galaxy. This is what it looks like:

And there's no drag-and-drop moving, no animation in seeing what your opponent moved (instead you get beautiful pink arrows) etc.

Also, other than Backgammon Galaxy or Backgammon Studio Heroes it doesn't really advance what online Backgammon can be (e.g. have "Extreme Gammon" watch over your game, rate your strength, so you play not only for winning matches but also for the lower PR).

But that's fine. DailyGammon is excellent at one thing: offline (asynchronous? correspondence?) backgammon. And this is what I love, for three reasons.

1. I can finally play 7pt, 9pt and even 21pt matches

I love backgammon and I'm trying hard to improve my skills. In a position I try to find the best move, and sometimes this takes me a minute or so. And this is a great minute, weighing the alternatives, trying to keep pip count in mind, think whether offensive or defensive play is the right way forward, imagine what might happen after I moved, look for duplications etc.

The problem is that this way a 9pt match will take an hour or longer, which is not the amount of time I usually have in one sitting. My day allows for five minutes of backgammon now and 15 minutes then. 

Unfortunately unlike in Chess, correspondance Backgammon is not a thing. Most sites don't support it. But DailyGammon does :-)

2. I can play relaxed matches

Maybe that's just me, but even "casual" games on Backgammon Galaxy cause my adrenaline to flow madly inside my body, causing my mind to miss great moves. Maybe I'm just not a "strategical thinking in high time pressure" guy, and maybe that's just me (on lichess my correspondence rating is 600 ELO above my blitz rating ...)

3. I can actually finish 7pt, 9pt and even 21pt matches

This is where DailyGammon really shines. The guys behind the site have clearly thought deeply about how to do correspondence backgammon and came up with an ingenious solution to an obvious problem. Other than chess or go, Backgammon has plenty of situations with obvious or forced moves. Opening DailyGammon, going into a match, pressing "roll dice" and "submit forced move", and coming back an hour later or so is just not working out. 

For this problem, DailyGammon uses a computer guessing mechanism - after your move it rolls the opponent's dice and makes the most reasonable opponent move. Then it will ask you "if your opponent would roll this and move that, how would you continue?". This way you play a main variation for 3 or so moves before submitting your move. 

When your opponent logs in later he can instantly play this sequence until he decides for a different move than what the computer thought (or until he doubles). If this happens, the rest of your pre-moves are rolled back, and the game continues (with different dice rolls then). 

This speeds up the game dramatically. You can finish a single game in a few days.

The flip side of the coin is that things can get a bit confusing, and that chatting is tricky. Suppose you're playing five games at the same time. In game #3 you make a move, and then do 3 more moves conditionally based on what the computer thinks your opponent will do. Then you move to game 2, then to game 4. Then your opponent of game #3 comes and makes a different move for move 2, gets different dice afterwards. You come back to game 3 at a state that you just don't recall. Also, chatting "well that 66 was fairly lucky" is tricky because this might be move 3 of such a conditional move sequence, and if your opponent moves differently one move before he might never roll that 66 and not get what you're talking about.

Actually in my first game I clicked one move wrongly and submitted the move which was the third one of such a sequence. As the move I clicked was really stupid I chatted "oh well mouse click, meant to play that move". My opponent played differently, my wrong move never happened, my opponent was confused about what I'm writing...

4. (bonus reason): The people there seem to be more polite than on other sites

With Backgammon being Backgammon, the game where normal people rage-review apps because they can't bear being destroyed by superior engines (THEY CHEAT FOR SURE!), it's easier to come across inpolite language in Backgammon chats. So far I have the impression that on DailyGammon the crowed is more polite than on most sites.

The snail and the cheetah - non-random 21 vs 65

Let's pit the slowest of all rolls - 21 against the fastest non-double - 65 and see what happens.The game starts fairly normal. This time I'll be using a nice BGBlitz theme to show the positions.

1. White 21: 24/23, 13/11

2. Black 65: 24/13

 

3. White 21: 13/11 6/5

You see it coming already?

 

4. Black 65: 24/13

 

5. White 21: 11/9 6/5

 

Still no moves to write home about, but white now has made the 6 point and the 5 point, which can be annyoing if you (as black) only roll 65...

 

6. Black 65: 13/2*

 

Not many alternatives here, but now a 21 will cause serious trouble for black.

 

7. White 21: Bar/23 23/22

 

 And with this position, a 36 move dance nightmare begins for the black cheetah, sitting helplessly on the bar, while the snail moves forward...

and forward...

and forward.

(I hope you understand that I'm sparing you the boring details)

 

Until in the end...

black can come in with a 6! Yay!

In the remaining game, even the big 65 rolls are not enough to catch up. In this position, black resigns.

Now that was unexpected. I was expecting a tough fight, where white falls behind in the race, needs to keep contact, etc.

But of course, with 6 being made from the beginning and 5 being the most important point, always rolling 65 can be painful.