Another month, another backgammon app in the app store. Backgammon Pro, by Optime Software LLC, costs €2 and claims to be the best Backgammon app available for iOS, with an outstanding AI with three difficulty levels.

If you follow my pages you’re probably frowning already. I did. There are two kinds of backgammon app. The ones that use a state of the art neural network AI, mention this in the app store, and play on superhuman level, and the others.

But I had to invest the two bucks and try it out.

My first impression was not all bad. The app supports full match play, including the Crawford rule and post-crawford situations, with matches from 1 to 15 points. You can play with or without the cube if you wish, you can select between two good-looking board layouts, and you can have a good time with it.

But if you’re looking for a challenging player, look somewhere else unless you’re a total beginner.

I played four matches to 5 against its strongest AI setting, hard. Won all ofthem, The first was for fun, and playing it I didn’t feel it plays particularly weak. I’ve seen other apps make blunders on a different scale.

But then I played another 5-pt match with XG2 watching over us. And while I’m not impressed by the PR16 it rated me, Backgammon Pro received a “Distracted”, PR 57! Compared to a top backgammon app that has a PR about 2, this app blunders about 30 times as much.

For those of you that are not so much into figures, let me show you two examples of the kind of mistakes this app makes.

White to play 42

Shouldn’t be too hard, right? White is leading 3:0. The cube is at 2. You can either play 20/18 20/16, lose a gammon at 4 points, and continue at 3:4. Or you can play 13/9 8/6 like Backgammon Pro, lose a backgammon and the match. In hard XG2 numbers, this was mistake worth a 1.6 points of equity.

Now this could be a special bug in endgame handling, so let’s have another one.

White to play 44

Here the best move is fairly clear: White is ahead in the race. Move the blot from 15/11, and the three checkers from 13/9. Unless I roll a 4, the game is pretty much decided. But Backgammon Pro concluded that now is a good time to make a few points in the home board and played 8/4(2) 6/2(2), a blunder worth 0.41 points of equity.

Yes, with an overall PR of well above 50, those blunders are to be expected; still, maybe the examples show how week the AI really is playing.

Still, if you’re a beginner at this wonderful board game, and need a bot that gives you a chance or if you’re an okay player and sometimes want to destroy a bot, this is not the worst app you can buy. The boards look beautiful, it implements the rules well, and it doesn’t play as horrible as some other bots.

Other small points: there is no tutor or something like that (at PR 57 not something you would ask for), it features a two player mode.

Oh yes, I’ve seen app store reviews thinking that it cheats. It doesn’t. It had some streaks, I had some streaks, all normal. I’m only playing an advanced level of backgammon, around PR10, and I’m beating it soundly.