A great teaching tool?
No, it is not. It teaches a new player that the only way to have any chance at winning is to never, ever leave a tile open, because the AI will hit it and it takes forever to bring it back off the bar and into play. Statistics cannot prove that the dice are rigged, but an analysis can show how improbable certain events are. The computer gives itself the opening move far too often, and game-saving rolls so often as to be laughable... whereas the meat player experiences the opposite. Need a 4 or a 6 to bring a tile in? The computer will get in on the first roll but meat player will be there a while. The improbability of not being able to get in when the AI has only three points blocked, yet it takes the meat player 4 or 5 rolls to get in, is laughably obvious. Only one slot open? Exact same thing. Somehow the computer always gets exactly what it needs. The computer also pads the number of doubles the meat player gets by giving him an improbable number of doubles when bearing off at the end, but when meat only has one or two tiles left and doubles gives no benefit. The numerous ways this program rigs the dice are obvious, and here in the reviews it is obvious that a lot of us see it. A very basic analysis on a 200 game sample shows a huge bias in favor of the "AI" where bringing a tile into play is concerned. The computer is given optimal rolls far too often to be random. After noticing that the computer won the opening roll far more often than it should, In a 100 game set the computer won the opening roll 83 times. Improbable but not impossble if random dice were used. When it has one possible number to bring in a tile, it hits that number about 90 percent of the time. And if there is a roll that will turn the game around, like only a 5 will bring in the tile and the other die rolling a 4 will take an opponent out... well, well, it hits that almost every time. The fact that ALL of these improbable events favor the AI leads to the conclusion that yes, the dice are rigged. If you need to bring a man in, somehow it takes far more rolls than statistically necessary to roll an open number - game after game after game. I have played this game hundreds of times and marked down the numbers of suspicious events like the aforementioned, and the result is that the computer is favored when supposedly random improbable events happen by over 5 to 1. The game is smooth, good graphics, but the supposed randomness of the dice is an absolute joke. I gave it 5 stars just so MAYBE the developer will let it show up in the review list.
Brent God about
Backgammon NJ HD, v5.3.5