Normally I’m trying to be thorough when writing about apps and sites here, covering every major feature. I can’t hope to do this with Backgammon Studio Heroes (henceforth just “Heroes”), a site I’m using for years without even touching 90% of its slightly disorganized menu system. So I’ll go for a “why I love this site and what makes it special” approach in describing this wonderful site to you, only covering what’s frustrating or annoying in the end.

For me, the heart of the site is a backgammon board for multiplayer games that is convenient to play matches with, a good challenge system that allows me to easily challenge that friend I want to play with, and the extremely cool “consultation match” format that takes friendly matches to a new level, for me at least.

The first step of playing on Heroes is logging in. This is harder than it seems; the server is quite crowded and if it’s getting too full it will throw you out after a few seconds (unless you’re a paying user). Fortunately there’s a less crowded server called heroes3.backgammonstudio.com that you can play on as well (but honestly, the author of the site deserves a bit of your cash for his hard work, right?)

But let’s start with the heart of the site.

This is Heroes’ user interface when playing a match. Right to the board you can see a lot of different information displays (all configurable in the huge settings menu (of course 🙂 )). I’m playing a consultation match, which means that after each move you get real-time info on it from a world-class level bot (gnu backgammon on 2-ply setting). The color-codes in the move list show errors and blunders, mouse-over or click on any move to see an analysis of possible moves and their equity changes. You also get a running rating of your current performance as PR, and the wonderful luckmeter (no more shouting “YOU ARE SO LUCKY!” at your opponent without good reason 🙂 ), and a just as awesome “awesome in a row” count that tells you how often in a row you’ve been choosing the best move. And if you want, you can configure voice settings so that, for example, a lady with strong Brazilian accent shouts “Awesome!”, “Double blunder” or “Terribly unlucky” after your moves.

A particularly cool feature of Heroes is that you can see your opponent considering different moves as she does, just like on a real board. Every checker you move back and forth is shown to the other player. Wonderful.

The whole board can be customized completely – select from a huge number of textures for anything, or just choose one of many pre-made boards. Like these:

Before playing you need to find a player and challenge her/him. There’s a big and complicated screen for this, as well:

You see, there are a number of different rooms, and players in each room. Each player has a status like “ready to play” or “do not disturb” or “friends only”. They are shown on the left side. The large panel on the right shows the games currently in progress. Now this wouldn’t be Heroes if match making would be simple. You first select the player you want to challenge, and then choose one of the 21 different match types (hint: match and consultation match are good), a match length from 1 to 25pt, check whether you want the result affect your rating (e.g. 1560) and/or your PR (e.g. 9.5) (and no I have no clue why these are independent). You can select one of 16 different clock settings or off, and a couple more things like whether to show the pip count. And once you’ve done all that you can, finally, play.

There is so much more I could write about – if a player leaves during a match the match is automatically stored for continuing later; there are tournaments to join, statistics of all your matches incl. the option to replay them (on the main server), a message and chat system, an observer system, obviously in-game video? and you can customize the hell out of Heroes – so much, actually, that I was asking myself “how did I do this? and how do I undo it?” more than once.

That’s maybe the only drawback of Heroes; where Backgammon Galaxy offers a simple and totally slick, albeit limited UI, Heroes has everything and more, but a steep learning curve, and a UI design that is a bit rusty. But as there’s each and every feature there, that’s a minor issue.

Personally, I’m using this site regularly to play with a friend; nearly impossible on Galaxy (you can’t challenge a player there), easy here.