Playing Backgammon With A Computer

A Little Gaming Background

I’ve always been a fan of board games and loved playing Backgammon since I discovered it a long time ago.

It is sort of a cross between Ludo and Draughts (or Checkers) but is a really simple concept. Get all your pieces off your board before your opponent with the added option to gamble on the result if you are so inclined with the doubling cube which foes up to 64 (six sides 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64) though I have only gambled for game points.

I have not played Backgammon with a human for maybe forty years. I also play chess, draughts, scrabble and now Wordle but these days it is only against a computer. I used to play Scrabble and Words with Friends but they became so full of adverts and often failed and drained my phone's power that I gave up. I was playing against human opponents but eventually, I probably scared them off and there were the performance issues.

Wordle is actually very good, no adverts and not a time vampire.

I do like games like Quake and the like but I find them too difficult on tablets and phones, though I can just about enjoy them on the computer, although they really are a graphic extension of the original Colossal Cave Adventure that I first encountered on a Honeywell Mainframe when I worked for Littlewoods many years ago. It was also known as Adventure or ADVENT and is a text-based adventure game. Released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods and I found it in 1980 on the Honeywell mainframe. You can see the start in the image below.

So Back To Backgammon

I have an Amazon Kindle Fire and don’t have any games on it. I have tried a few such as Worms, and some First Person Shoot-em-ups but really couldn't get the hang of them on the Kindle. Then I thought about board games because Wordle came up as being available, but I play that on my phone and the two versions would not connect up.

I saw Chess as well and think about the Half Man Half Biscuit song “Bad Loser On Yahoo Chess” and that happened many times when I used to play Scrabble online, people just disappeared when you were winning.

Then I did a search for Backgammon, and there is a version that does have sometimes annoying advertising but it is between games, so I installed it and have found it an excellent implementation and while it does stretch my thinking, it is also quite relaxing. You can get it here.

I started off at the easiest level and won 103 games to the Kindle’s 6 games. This was too easy so I moved to Level 2 which was only slightly more challenging, so I went the whole hog to Level 7 which is like playing against a real person.

My score at the moment is me 45 Games, Kindle 42 Games, so you can see it is a far more even playing field and each game is a challenge but not impossible. Sometimes you think it is cheating when the computer gets lots of perfect dice throws and you get rubbish ones but that is just the nature of life and the game.

A Backgammon Conclusion

Because it is on a portable device with a decent-sized screen I can play this anywhere, when I am waiting for a job to run or a program to start or food to cook. It is a very pleasant distraction for me.