Hate it: I'm not sure why this game was so hard to get right. The basics are fine - visually ok, clear what happens when, controls are ok. The problem is the algorithm used to generate the "random" tosses of the die seems to be tied to the difficulty level. Backgammon is a combination of strategy (types of moves) and chance (rolls of the dice). Unfortunately, the design decision to make the rolls of the dice less random as the levels increase takes a lot of the fun and repeat playability out of the game.

At the easy level, the rolls seem to favor you over the computer more than half of the time. Basically, you can expect this to be easy because the computer doesn't take all of the available strategy opportunites AND your rolls are going to be generally better than the computer's. Think: lots of doubles, the rolls you need to get off the wall when you've been knocked out, and larger number rolls with numbers of 3 or higher on each die.

At the mid level, the rolls favor the computer over you in single player mode. That starts to get annoying since what you want is for the favoring to go away and the strategy level to increase.

At the hard level, the rolls go in favor of one player over the other in both the single player AND multi-player modes. I've played online when the rolls were so clearly stacked one way or the other that both of us agreed to abandon that game and start over.

Backgammon should be the kind of game you can play over and over at the hard level without knowing that the game will be determined soley by which side the game design ends up favoring. To make sure I wasn't imagining the favoring behavior, I've played a number of games with my trusty old board and RL dice. Now and then you get lucky but no one side gets consistently luckier than the other in every game. Overall, this game is disappointing.


Somewhere in the middle: