Board Game Arena

I love to play backgammon, but I must say, respectfully, that the boardgamearena.com backgammon UI is really quite frustrating. I generally play turn-based (turn-a-day), and there are two significant problems. I will explain the two problems, and give my suggestions on how to fix them.

The main problem is the timing of way the dice are presented. When it is my turn, the UI shows my dice, let's say a 2 and a 3, and tells me, "you have to select a column." So I look at the board and figure out where I want to play a 2 and a 3. Then I click and commit my move for the 2, for example, and look back at my dice, and suddenly see that they have changed to a 2 and a 6, for example. Now I've played the 2 in a spot I never would have chosen if I had known I was going to have a 2 and a 6. Really, it's quite a problem.

On yucata.de, there is a wonderful "reset move" button where you can restart your turn. I cannot describe how much more pleasant it is to play games on yucata.de due to this one feature.

But even without a "reset move" button, your backgammon game would be tremendously improved if the dice were not presented with one pair of dice values at the start of a turn, only to have them change a few seconds later (about the time it takes for a player's eyes to leave the dice to figure out where to play) to a new pair of values when the player isn't looking.

My request: at the start of a player's turn, simply don't show any dice until the player's current pair of dice for this turn has been rolled. I'm not sure what the leftover dice are that you show at the start of a turn (perhaps the previous player's used dice?), but the website is timed perfectly into tricking the user into thinking these dice are his/hers to use, and then changing them to completely different values a few second later. This happens to me on approximately 50% of my backgammon moves, and it is, as I said at the beginning of this post, really quite frustrating.

The best thing would be to simply not show any dice at the start of a player's turn. Thematically, think of this as the player having the dice in his/her hand, so that he/she cannot see them. Then, when he/she rolls them, they become visible.

The second problem is that, in backgammon, you should always be moving your pieces from the far side of the board to the close side of the board. That is, your home/exit space should be on your own (close) side of the board. On boardgamearena.com, half of the time your home/exit space it on the other player's side of the board (the far side). This is quite disorienting for people familiar with traditional backgammon etiquette.

Thank you.

As to the rolls, that's probably part of a bug we've had. I've reported this as have some others, where the dice roll again. Try sometime, instead of taking your turn, to exit the game, go into it again, with the replay on, and see if rolls an extra time or two. If you keep doing that, it'll keep adding dice rolls. So that's a bug. (Go to the bug forum, follow the links, put Backgammon in the search space, and if you look through the list, you'll see this reported a few times. Give one a thumbs up.)

As to the sides of the board... I've seen the game play both ways. I actually learned it that my home space was on the far side, got used to that, later learned it was on my close side, got used to that (finally), which is what I'm used to now... I've seen the rules both ways. I'm not honestly sure which is "official." But I've heard about it "changing sides" here. Whichever way they do it, it absolutely should at least be consistent from game to game. I think that is also listed in the bugs, so you might want to go thumbs up that one too. (I'm not really sure if that's a true bug, or someone just didn't understand. If one plays the game, they should know that's confusing.)

Thanks much for your thorough reply, Liallan. I searched this issue I've give a thumbs-up to a couple of Backgammon bugs on the bug system.

Regarding which way is "up" on the board, why not let each player see it how they like, even if both play with home at bottom (or both with home at top). This is one way virtual Backgammon can satisfy tastes where physical Backgammon cannot.

ricb wrote: Regarding which way is "up" on the board, why not let each player see it how they like, even if both play with home at bottom (or both with home at top). This is one way virtual Backgammon can satisfy tastes where physical Backgammon cannot.

Well, that is a good idea, giving each player the option. But all games should be from the player's point of view, but it's sounding somewhat like one player sees it from bottom and one from the top, which is just darn weird. No game should be doing that.