My cousins are coming over from abroad to Syria and they want to learn how to play backgammon, but I found out there are a lot of different types. Moroccan, French, Sheshbesh, tawla 31

Which one is the best?? And is there a good website or video???

Clock, dice (optional) and scorekeeper web app for over-the-board backgammon play.

I got fed up with tiny travel dice — so I ended up building something to replace them. It's a web app, free to use: https://bgpips.app

Nothing to install — open it on your phone, add it to the home screen for chromeless experience, works offline. It does three jobs, all for playing on a real board:

Dice — tap to roll. Properly random (cryptographic, with rejection sampling, so no modulo bias and every face equally likely), and opening rolls exclude doubles. The rolling is a port of Backgammon Galaxy's open-source dice_roller. The last few rolls stay on screen, for when you've forgotten what you just threw.

Clock — the two-shot reserve format from online and tournament play: a short delay each turn, and only the time past it comes off your reserve. Presets are Fast (10s / 1:00), Standard (12s / 2:00) and Casual (15s / 3:00).

Score and cube — match scoring and the doubling cube, Crawford rule included.

Handicap system - each player can set their own clock speed, so you can give a weaker opponent a bit more time — a built-in handicap for a fairer game.

Not affiliated with Backgammon Galaxy in any way. I've just ported their openly-licensed dice algorithm and followed the same timing conventions, with credit in the app.

Actually useful if you want to give it a shot. I'll be using it anyhow.

https://bgpips.app (this is a pun on PG Tips - a popular brand of tea in the UK haha)

The summary in open gammon show score. then PR (or ER dunno) with some verbal classification. Then a axis with the player PR is placed. But what is the gaussian density function around the PR showing? one sample is hardly distributed

Hi all after a recent game I had an interesting problem come up. I had the villain on the bar with five made points in my home board and some checkers back in his crunched home board. whenever he rolled the number of the open point I always hit him.

When he rolled a number that caused to leave a blot on his own home board, I also hit that. I ended up winning the gammon (one pip away from backgammon) but I have the following question:

Are there some scenarios where you shouldn’t hit the blot in his home board in case he could make a point in your home? For example lets say his golden point (my 5-point) was open along with some other point. let’s also say his home board isn’t that crunched with four made points still.

I think that hitting would still be right. Does anyone think different?

Hi, please let's discuss here if you can see a pattern on backgammon.com where it uses bots as new players. My opinion is that they have a system that cheats, including on dice rolls. I and 2 of my friends are almost always losing when playing with new players. And guess what, these new players have no points but they are playing for a long time. I thought I am the only one seeing this, but the other friends are seeing the same thing. My opinion is that they use a system called emotional carousel to keep the people more on their website by using bots and cheating on dice rolls.

alright so this was on backgammon.com [having problems with backgammon galaxy]

My name is "Skeleton" if that matters, I was white and I won all 3 games [well I got 2 cube forfeits]

https://backgammon.com/analysis/match/55C3MG2E/2Q9Q9K4D

Been working on this for a while. Full backgammon in a web page: pick your match length, live doubling cube with real match-play logic, a 15-roll opening book, and a GNUBG-based engine. You play White, computer plays Black. There's an auto-finish (>>) for pure races.

No app store, no download, no account. Just open the link and play:

https://muse.ai/s/backgammon-nxf6vxqbxcsu81

Hello everyone,

It’s been almost a year since Minimalist Backgammon Trainer was released. It has evolved significantly since its first version in an effort to provide the best training experience possible. Today’s update keeps us on track :)

As a reminder, MBT (completely free and ad-free) is pure training powered by GNUbg. No matches, no games. You tap “Play,” and GNUbg will simulate a realistic game in a couple of seconds and pause at a specific position. It’s then up to you to make the best decision. Still available for the web and Android.

So let me introduce the “My Positions” section.
The idea is simple: you’re playing and come across a position that you find interesting, relevant, or intriguing, in short, something you’d like to review later.

From the “Hints” screen, you can mark this position so you can find it again in the “My Positions” section.

From there, you can then tag it, add a note, and, of course, replay it whenever you want.

So, as positions arise, you can build your own database to revisit later (save up to 501 positions per cube or checker play mode).

In addition to this, there are several new features:

- I’ve added “Beginner” mode. Unlike “Master” mode, which only includes the most difficult decisions, “Beginner” mode will only present positions to the players where the difference between the best move and the second-best move is at least 0.04. For the cube, the difference between the correct and incorrect decisions must be at least 0.08.

- In the settings, you can now select different blunder thresholds so that the "Blunders" section isn’t limited to errors of 0.08 or more.

- I’ve added an option to alternate between CW and CCW (clockwise and counterclockwise) with each game. You have the default setting, which will be used for “Blunders” or “My Positions.” And there’s an option to enable the alternation, which reverses the orientation with each new simulation in the game modes and in the evaluation.

- In "Custom Position," you can now paste an XGID, and I've added an "invert board" button to easily switch to your opponent's position (or in case the board is imported upside down ^^).

- The first letter of GNUbg or Me is underlined in black (or white, depending on the theme) to indicate who has the black (or white) checkers when playing the cube, counting pips, or evaluating the position.

- Small arrows allow you to quickly navigate through blunders or marked positions, so you no longer have to go through the menu and the dedicated section every time.

Finally, to celebrate this first anniversary, MBT is offering 4 board styles. I’ll say right away that there won’t be any colors, the minimalist. Grayscale look is here to stay! You’ll find these options in the settings.

I hope you enjoy them, and if you have any comments or feedback, please don’t hesitate to share them :)

And I’ll wrap up this long post by thanking everyone who’s left comments here or elsewhere, and of course all the players who enjoy and use Minimalist Backgammon Trainer.

See you soon!

Hey, guys! First of all, this post is not (yet) directly about the release of another backgammon app, although that is the ultimate goal.

Storytime
A little backstory... thanks to my cousin Vasillios, I discovered the beauty of playing Tavli about two years ago. Afterwards, a friend and I started playing regularly and kept track of our head-to-head wins and losses (39–47 so far 🙃). We always had heated discussions about who had more dice luck overall (its him for sure!). We started talking about how nice it would be to play on an app that tracks statistics and offers a ranked mode.

Unfortunately, we were unable to find a proper Tavli app. Fortunately, we both work in IT. We started drafting some initial ideas, brought two more friends on board, and began working on it. We are now a team of a backend engineer, a talented frontend developer, a UI/UX specialist, and a project PM/PO. Sounds like the perfect setup for this project, right? After 1.5 years of development, we started our closed beta with friends and family. We have hooked many peers of ours along the way (we should get some commission from our local board game merchant). That said, we can now move on to the interesting part!

Vision
We want to build a partially open-source ecosystem for backgammon-like games, such as Tavli (Portes, Plakoto, Fevga), Tavla, and, of course, Backgammon. Furthermore, we want to provide a neural network for each of these game variants for bot play, analysis, and learning. Lastly, we want to provide a top-notch native user experience for app and web players.

Game Engine
The game engine provides basic capabilities, such as generating move sequences, applying dice rules and using a dice roller, and applying variant-specific rules and board models. These capabilities allow you to play a game in any supported variant. Built from scratch, the engine is as abstract and extensible as possible to allow for the implementation of new game variants (e.g., Nardes). The engine provides the foundation for the game service and neural network training framework.

Neural Net Training Framework
Initially, we searched for existing open-source implementations that we could use for bot play and analytics. As you probably know, there are a lot of them for backgammon! We also built an integration for the WildBG service, which we are still using for initial benchmarks. However, we could not find anything for the subgames of Fevga and Plakoto. We would love to build an integration for the Palmedes bot. Anyway kudos for your paper on it!

So, we decided to build one from scratch and named it Mars. This was and still is a challenging task because none of us had any prior knowledge of neural network training or deep backgammon game theory (we are all average players at best). We now have an abstracted neural network model layer that allows us to implement a specific network for a game variant based on some native board encoding and additional handcrafted features. The heart of the framework is a simple console application that generates training data for self-play or head-to-head games, as well as neural net training and data shuffling utilities, and diagnostic tools for evaluating training results. The resulting neural network is then exposed as a service for move and cube evaluation. Currently, our Mars bot outperforms the WildBG service in a statistically significant manner. Training for Plakoto and Fevga is still missing.

Feedback
We want to gather some feedback from you guys. Does that sound interesting? Would you like to join our next beta phase? Would you like to join our Discord channel and be involved in the development process? Do you think our project has a unique selling point?

If there is interest, we could make more dev diaries like this one. They could cover the future roadmap, planned features, monetization ideas, beta access, community involvement in future development, and a deeper introduction to the neural net training process. Let us know in the comments!

Links
https://github.com/gammonx/gammonx-server
https://github.com/gammonx/gammonx-training
https://github.com/carsten-wenderdel/wildbg
https://nikpapa.com/Palamedes/

TL;DR We developed an open-source project that includes different backgammon variants, such as Backgammon, Portes, Plakoto, Fevga, and Tavla, as well as a framework for training neural networks from scratch. What do you think? Let us know!

I am thinking of something like a leather conditioner, not sure if there is anything similar for this type of material.

5 point match. score 0-0. blue holds the cube on 2. Blue to roll.

Question 1. Should they double?

Question 2. Should yellow take it if he does?

Blue rolls 3,2 moves to the 7 point.

Question3. Should yellow double?

I run a channel called Know2Play, and I wanted to make the fastest, most comprehensive visual guide to the game.

If you've always wanted to learn, here are the absolute basics to get started:

I put a ton of work into animating the board so you can actually see how the pieces move, the horseshoe track, and how the doubling cube works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfcVOSTwduU

Let me know what you think about it.

Enjoy my Backgammon oddity #19 (and the previous ones too)!

What backgammon book would you recommend for a 10/11yo kid

The kid has some very basic knowledge, loves to play and I'm sure she would love to read and learn more about the game.

I wonder if there are any specific books for kids or anything that makes backgammon easy to learn.

Please fix it that's pretty sketch

Doesn't happen every time maybe once a day

Soooo just read the previous post about people dumping half baked vibe coded BG apps 😂😂👏🏻

My app is NOT THAT. Did I use AI? Yes... but here there is back story.

I built the App myself so my partner and I to get used to using a clock (phone convenience), and to also record our match history so we could remind each other who is the boss.

People started asking about it, so I used AI to build all the other multi-user bits that I typically wouldn't have time for - which allowed me finish it within weeks instead of months, and a now I can share it with the community for free. Apart from the clock, the part I like the most, is keeping all my IRL match history in one place.

www.pipster.club

I frequently play Backgammon Pro v4.42 on my phone. It has eight difficulty levels. My question is: how does it increase the difficulty?

I notice from the game statistics that the difficulty changes. I win most of the time at the lower levels, and at the highest level, level eight, I win slightly less than half the time. I just can not put my finger on what's different.

It's because I'm giving too many gammons to my opponent. First time I get a situation like that, interesting. Thought I'd share with the good people of r/backgammon

Another update on BackgammonDB I wanted to share - full match analysis. Upload a file that doesn't have any engine analysis, eg a txt/mat file from Backgammon Galaxy or OpenGammon, and you'll be asked if you want analysis across the whole match on the server.

For those who haven't tried BackgammonDB before, it's a completely free study tool that I've been working on for the last ~8 months or so (I first shared it in this community back in June). It's come a long way since then - features now include: lifetime profile stats, advanced match review, position editor, advanced position database, study/flash card system, star/tag/annotate positions, create notebooks of reference positions, library backup, and a 4-million position opening book (discussion here).

Everything runs in the browser, and there's no sign up. You can import hundreds of matches, and create a database of tens of thousands of positions, very quickly. Supports xg, sgf, mat and text files.

My brother and I had this position come up in a game. I was black and rolled a 5 and 3. I have the obvious option of opening the 6 slot in my home (which in most cases seems like the default best option as it leaves no option for white to take), but we realized that there may be value in simply taking the 3 and 5 out.

We reasoned that given whites position is so far ahead, opening the 6 with no option to retake, all but ensures white winning, whereas if I open the 5, sure, it may be risky, but the odds of him getting back in are now combined with the additional opportunity I’d have to take him and restart the cycle.

I still went with just opening the 6, as it still made intuitive sense, but maybe someone with a better grasp of the game has a different opinion?

(I proceeded to lose, although it did come down to the last roll).