FaceMe Backgammon 12+

I’ve been playing backgammon on line for 15 years and most of the apps I’ve played on I’ve deleted after a very short time because the dice algorithm was designed to make you buy more chips. Poor show, but this is a business after all. I’ve played this App for 10 years or more and have slowly made my way up the leader board and have played the same players multiple times and have had an enormous amount of pleasure playing. I accepted that there would be times I felt like I shouldn’t have lost and the dice were not true, but this was a rare occurrence until recently. I’ve probably played 10,000 games or more and was confident that 99% of the games seemed fair; good and bad luck happen. Now the dice are now sometimes so predictable that I often call them before being rolled and the amount of doubles is absolutely absurd. I think this happened because this particular app doesn’t require you to buy chips and that's bad for business. I still use the App, but the majority of the enjoyment has been robbed by this new changed algorithm. Too bad. I’m now looking for an alternate app, but don’t hold my hopes up that things will be better else where.

Aside from a few little quirks, like not saving the game state permanently, this is a fine Backgammon experience. I appreciate the quick play and the choice of board designs. The doubling decisions need a bit of work but the rest of the AI is pretty good!

So if I have this right, the Roll Again feature allows the user to try and cheat the cheating game? I’ve never used Roll Again because I want to believe that random means random, but that just makes me more of a sucker. Is that it? The more games I play, the worse it gets: More useless rolls, useless doubles, rolls that jeopardize pips, a dozen rolls (first roll when I get on the bar is almost always a double six) trying to get off the bar when there are three open spaces when Computer generally gets off on the first roll with one open space and pulls off miracle rolls consistently. I get smacked around over and over again, then get a game or two where I get all the breaks and start to feel like the game doesn’t cheat until it starts whupping me again. Developer can (and does) repeat that the game doesn’t cheat, which is what any cheater would say, but the Roll Again feature just suggests to me that if I can’t beat Computer, I can join the Computer. Nah.