Strange but fun – Backgammon – offline by SNG CT

Review

Quick facts

Summary: fun money games against an intermediate AI on four levels

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 start screen

The game pits you 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.

Placing your bet, in virtual coins

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.

The game screen, iPad

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 16×9 iPhone screen this is no issue.

Game screen, different layout, 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 okay, without the horrible blunders that handcrafted AIs annoy you with, but not on paar with a reasonably good player – after 2 transcribed games, XG2 rates it “casual player” with a PR of 20. 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.

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