Please note: it seems that “Backgammon+” is now the name on Apple Arcade. In the normal app store the game now has the easy-to-remember name “Backgammon Classic Board Game Live”. I’m sticking to the simple name here.

Quick facts

• AI strengh: advanced (PR 10)
• multiplayer: yes, without real doubling
• tutor / analysis: no
• Price: free – remove ads costs $2
• App store link

Summary: If you don’t want to pay just to play a game of backgammon against a good engine, if you want a beautiful UI and a simple multiplayer mode, then Backgammon+ is for you. If you want a world-class engine or a teacher, it’s not. If you want to play actual backgammon matches online, it’s not, either.

A great UI designer can make a huge difference. Backgammon+ (henceforth BG+) shows how much this is the case for Backgammon apps. Man this is a great-looking app. The UI is clean, the buttons are few and logically placed and you never come into a “now how do I do this?” situation. In addition, Backgammon+ renders beautiful backgammon boards on iPhones and iPads of every size. For a beautiful and enjoyable Backgammon experience, you can hardly beat BG+. And on top, BG+ is the only Backgammon app I know that features a portrait mode backgammon board, and one that looks and plays great as well. Nice job, and cool for the “no, see? I’m not playing a game, I’m not holding my phone in landscape mode!” situations.

There are a few annoyances, like not being able to restart a whole match or an auto-finish of games in the bearoff phase or being unable to save games for later analysis, but those are minor. Playing BG+ is a very enjoyable experience.

Ads in Backgammon+ are there – it’s a free app, after all. You can get rid of them for an in-app purchase of a lowly $2, and if you don’t, they are nowhere as obtrusive as in other (Backgammon) apps. I’ve yet to come across my first annoying “watch this 30 secs ad and look for a hidden close button” video. Only banner ads on the start screen so far.

The engine that you can test your backgammon skills against is no slouch either. It’s not on par with the world-champion strength of BGNJ or XG mobile, but on hard difficulty nearly every Backgammon fan should get a tough opponent to beat. After 3 games, XG2 considers it as an advanced player (PR 10). This matches my personal experience; I’m playing at about PR 11, and in my combined iPad and iPhone statistics I’m trailing 21:28, so it’s a bit better, maybe PR 9, but certainly not in the superhuman areas where XG Mobiles live, not even where expert apps like Backgammon KG live.

But do you care? Personally, I like the agressive playing style of BG+ a lot. It’s great fun to play it. But I never do. Why? Do you ask? Because it is like “Jellyfish Player” decades ago, which was the most frustrating computer program I ever used…

When Jellyfish came out (30 years ago?), you could either download Jellyfish Player for free, or pay something like $200 for Jellyfish Tutor. Jellyfish was one of the first programs featuring an artificial neural net, which turned out to be the kind of software you need to do a world-class Backgammon. Jellyfish’s core is a network that is designed to learn and match patterns. You let it play against itself for a long time (millions of games), and let it adjust its network, and once it’s done it will destroy you. And that’s what the free player did. I played game after game, and game after game it destroyed me like I was never destroyed in Backgammon. And it wouldn’t tell me why. It wouldn’t tell me where I blundered, and what I should have played instead. It would cost me a huge pile of money to get that knowledge, to get a tutor that tells me where I go wrong and what I should do instead. In the end I payed the $200, and I never looked back. 

Backgammon+ is like Jellyfish player. Place your wits against it, fight it, but you will never learn why it beats you. If you can bear that (without writing “Backgammon+ cheats” reviews in the app store 🙂 ), go ahead. But for $10 you can get the good tutor of BGNJ, for $11 you get the even better tutor of XG mobile, and can start improving your skills. Yes, you can get a hint (by winning games you get more hints, probably also in-app somehow? Never found out), but this just shows you a move. Not enough.

Multiplayer is done wonderfully in BG+ with one big “but”. Matchmaking is simple and beautiful. Hit the “Online game” button, it tells you “waiting for player”, and off you go. Nice and easy. Playing the game online is done as beautifully as single-player gaming. It is soooooo close to perfect. But they don’t have a doubling cube. They have obviously decided to replace the actual doubling in Backgammon with some implementation that allows players who regularly use the app to get the option to double at any time during a game (only once, no re-double). This is not something to take lightly.

If you’re a serious fan of Backgammon you know that the doubling cube is more than an add-on that you can leave out. It’s an essential ingredient of Backgammon that makes the game much more fun, and that is incredibly hard to master well. I have no clue why the developers decided to leave this bit out, but for me this means “I will never use BGNJ for online gaming even if BG+ is overall implemented well”.