Backgammon: Pips & Odds

pando

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About this game

Backgammon: Pips & Odds is a backgammon game that shows you the numbers other backgammon apps keep to themselves.

A turn is only 36 possible rolls, so the odds can be counted rather than guessed. Leave a checker exposed and the game tells you how many of those 36 rolls would hit it - counted on the board in front of you, not read off a memorised table. Sit on the bar and it tells you how many rolls get you back in, and how many of your opponent's home points are closed. The pip count for both sides is always on screen.

WHAT YOU GET
- Hit odds on every exposed checker, counted from all 36 rolls and every legal reply
- Entry odds when you are on the bar
- Pip counts for both sides, always visible, with who is ahead
- Match play to 1, 3, 5 or 7 points, with the doubling cube and the Crawford rule
- Two players on one phone
- A full game saved after every turn, so leaving mid-match costs nothing

THE DICE, IN THE OPEN
Every roll comes from a seed the game shows you, and the same seed replays the same match. The game counts the rolls for you as well: how many times each of the 21 combinations has come up, and how many times it should have by now, for you and for your opponent side by side.

Difficulty never touches the dice. The levels change how the opponent judges a position, nothing else.

One honest warning that the game repeats inside: that counter is evidence the game is straight, not an explanation of why you lost. Over a few games the counts look lopsided, because that is what 36 possibilities do.

WHERE IT STAYS QUIET
When contact remains between the two sides, the game does not advise you on the cube. Getting that right needs rollouts it does not run, and a confident guess would be worth less than nothing. In a pure race, where pip counts are enough, it shows an estimate and says what it is based on.

The opponent is a straightforward engine that looks at every legal way to play your roll and picks what it likes best. It is not a neural network and it is not world class.

Everything runs on your phone. No account, no sign-up, no server, and it works with no signal at all. There are no coins and no chips - a game never waits on a balance.

What’s new

First release.

Backgammon with the numbers on the board: how many of the 36 rolls would hit each exposed checker, how many get you in from the bar, and the pip count for both sides. Match play to 7 with the doubling cube and the Crawford rule, two players on one phone, and a dice audit that shows every roll against what it should have been.