Backgammon Blitz Review
1,500 years ago if you wanted to play backgammon you’d actually be playing tabula and you’d need to get yourself a board, an opponent and a comfy spot somewhere in the Byzantine empire to settle down and enjoy a few rounds.
40-odd years ago you could play against a decent computer AI if you had a spare room or two to fit the mainframe computer in. Ten or so years ago you could play against other humans, remotely, for the first time online (on a server which, incredibly, you can still play on today – check it out here!). Now, though, you can do all of that with Backgammon Blitz on Steam – and you won’t need a converted bed-sheet toga to do it in.
If you’re not familiar with possibly the oldest board game on the planet, it goes something like this: two players face off on a board split into 24 segments, each with 15 checkers (or nibs), in an effort to be the first to remove all of their pieces from the board. Players start at opposite ends and must move their pieces right around the board before “bearing off” (removing your pieces). Rolling dice gives you the number of moves you can make (you can split the dice between two nibs if you fancy, or use them both on one big move), rolling doubles gives you double the moves again and landing on a single opponent piece (called a blot) banishes that piece to the centre of the board so that your opponent has to put it back into play at the start of the track.
While this might sound a little complicated to the uninitiated, one of the reasons that backgammon has been around for nearly 2,000 years – actually a lot longer if Isidore of Seville is to be believed (he states that the Greco-Roman game tabula was created during the Trojan war) – is that the game itself is sublimely simple. A couple of rounds of Backgammon Blitz and you’ll have figured out how the pieces move and you might be starting to formulate strategies in regards to blots and how best to bear off. Actually, it’s a pretty good job that it’s quite easy to get the hang of because the training games in Backgammon Blitz are rather basic. The game does an okay job of establishing some bare-bones rules but, for the most part, the tutorials focus on the doubling cube – something that, as far as I’m concerned, didn’t really need much explaining – I’d have much rather preferred a couple of slides on advanced tactics or how best to bear off (I’m still struggling to perfect my end-game).
In terms of the base game, Backgammon Blitz doesn’t mess around with the time-honoured classic – you’ll have your pick of all the bizarre extra rules to implement if you wish (the vast majority of which are all about the sodding doubling cube). What it does do is present the game in beautiful style – each of the boards are stunningly well-crafted, complete with individually designed nibs, dice and that old favourite: the doubling cube. That said, the overlay to help you identify which pieces can move and where they can move to is incredibly bland and sticks out like a sore thumb, practically ruining the great graphics every time it’s your turn. There are no such issues with the sound, however.
The effects are great – the dice roll sounds incredibly real; the click of the pieces are just right (and tailored to match the surface you’re playing on); even the bloody doubling cube sounds good. Not only that, but the music selection is pretty wonderful. There are no big names in there and no songs that you’ll recognise in Backgammon Blitz, but they’ve covered most of the more popular genres and the menu allows for you to activate and deactivate the genres of your choice – just want jazz? Turn off the rest. Fancy a little selection while you play? Leave all the genres selected and just see what comes up! Sure, they’re not the best produced tunes you’ll ever hear and some of them are a little too close to elevator music, but they seem to fit well with the game as a whole and I’ll defy anyone to listen to one for a few minutes and not be humming it in the shower later.
Backgammon Blitz gets backgammon right – but big deal – if you Google “backgammon” you’ll find umpteen browser backgammon games, free to play, right now. So what makes Backgammon Blitz any different? In order to stand out from the crowd, Birmingham-based VooFoo Studios have added in “Blitz” mode – just in case you were having too much fun with backgammon to start with. In Blitz mode you’ll accumulate “blitz bullion” with just about every move (though some award more than others) and, on your turn, you’ll have the chance to spend your bullion on power-ups that can freeze an opponent’s nib, block your opponent from taking your blot, guarantee a double on the dice roll, force your opponent to use only a single die next turn and more. You can only use three power-ups per game but, for the first few games you play, that’ll be more than enough. New power-ups unlock as you play more of the game (or you pay beaucoup blitz bullion to unlock them early) so you’re going to be limited for the first couple of rounds – unfortunately not so the computer, who has access to all of the power-ups from the get-go and who seems to have a penchant for boosting their dice rolls.
Now, I’m by no means a great backgammon player – I’d consider myself capable of holding my own… just… providing I’ve got an experience/age/height advantage over my opponent (someone who, ideally, has never even played backgammon before) – but even I had no problem beating the computer on intermediate difficulty without using a single power-up, though the AI had made use of all three about half-way through the game. In fact, I’ve even played on master difficulty and still won – something I’ve never been able to do against a good, higher-level AI in a chess game (a game I have far more experience with). You might assume that that’s because backgammon is a game of chance, but you’d be wrong. Yes, the dice rolls are all luck and, were I to continually roll doubles I’d probably be in with a better chance of winning a fast-paced game but there is so much more to backgammon than that – even without the unnecessary power-ups to befuddle yourself and your opponents with. Strategy and tactics play a large part; identifying when to try and grab a blot to set your opponent back, setting up strategic choke points and walls of nibs so that your opponent can never get past and simply racing around the board as fast as you can, consequences be damned, to be the first to home are all backgammon staples and, yet, the AI in Backgammon Blitz seems woefully inadequate to the task of doing anything other than marching sedately around the board and dropping on blots whenever it feels like it – a bit like I did in my very first game.
If you feel you’d rather play against a real human, Backgammon Blitz has that covered, too. You can, if you’ve managed to avail yourself of a backgammon-playing companion, choose to play a local two-player game on the same machine or, if you’re a little more daring or a little more lonely, you can opt to play online – though you’ll have to have way more patience than I had. Several times I tried to connect to the wider world of backgammon players and, every time, I ended up waiting for what seemed like days for the server to connect and find me an opponent before cancelling in frustration and going back to an AI game. The leaderboard optimistically lists over 5,000 users (I know this because I’m up there in the high 5,000s) but I also didn’t have the patience to scroll through them to see where the players who have actually logged online games started – though I can tell you that I couldn’t find one in the 4,000s, either.
As I said: backgammon isn’t anything new – no one making a backgammon game is going to make huge waves in the gaming community – and it’s certainly not the most high-octane and “Hollywood” of games – no one, apart from Woody Allen, would ever be able to make a film out of it (unless it was some sort of documentary on the History channel). But being old doesn’t mean it’s worthless (look at Woody Allen): backgammon has withstood millennia of new pastimes, distractions and pretenders to its ebony and ivory-inlaid wooden throne and is still counted amongst the most enjoyable and popular games ever. Unfortunately, the same probably won’t be said for Backgammon Blitz. Yes, it’s pretty and yes, it sounds good but the inclusion of an arcade mode, with its mainly pointless power-ups, cannot excuse the fact that poor AI and an incredibly limited (if they exist at all) online community means that you’re not going to have a very challenging or rewarding game experience – even if you do win all the time.
