Placing your bet, in virtual coins<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nIt took me a long time to figure this one out. First fun fact: this app called Backgammon doesn\u2018t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201enow I\u2018ll win for sure\u201c beginner, accepts doubles it should really, REALLY drop. Easy money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After these two easy steps, you\u2018re sent to the actual game.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe game screen, iPad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nTwo 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\u2018s no way of showing it full-screen. No problem on a big iPad screen, but still\u2026On a 16×9 iPhone screen this is no issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGame screen, different layout, iPhone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nApart 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHere it is: watch and reroll<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nIf you\u2018re a reasonably good backgammon player, you won\u2018t 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 \u201cwhite space\u201d: backgammon apps tend to fall in one of two camps. There\u2019s the bleeding-edge neural network bots that play vastly superior to you, and there\u2019s 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\u2019re 10 pips down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This app claims to use a neural network AI that has been trained a million matches. Maybe that\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What else can be said? You can buy virtual chips for real money, and if you\u2019re a beginner you will probably have to do this to keep playing (there\u2019s 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\u2019re building up experience, even have an experience level, but I haven\u2019t figured out what this level is supposed to do. The app offers no tutor features of any kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All in all, if you like money games, want a good but not too good AI to play casual games against, \u201cBackgammon – offline\u201d might be an app to consider. If you\u2019re a backgammon newbie you might face \u201cout of money\u201d situations, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Review Quick facts AI strengh: intermediate (PR TBD) multiplayer: no tutor \/ analysis: no price: free, in-app coins \/ ads (videos) download in the app store 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-386","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/386\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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