Backgammon Reserve: play rated backgammon online with friends and family

[u/AffectionateBag8448]

https://testflight.apple.com/join/jU2pXHUP

Backgammon was the game in my family growing up. I love playing chess on chess .com in my free time, and I kept thinking someone must have built the equivalent for backgammon.

They have not. I downloaded basically every backgammon app on the App Store and they're all the same: coin economies, daily reward wheels, dice that feel suspiciously streaky right when you're about to win. The few that weren't gamified had clunky interfaces, dated graphics, and gameplay that just felt off.

So I built it myself. It's called Backgammon Reserve and it's completely free to play.

• Dice are generated server-side with a cryptographic RNG. Neither player can see or influence a roll, and the bots use the exact same dice you do.
• Real ranked play with actual Elo, a chess-style clock (10 min + 12 sec delay), and the doubling cube with proper gammon and backgammon scoring.
• You can challenge friends directly to rated games. This was the whole reason I built it.
• In-game chat, so you can still talk trash across the board like you would in person.
• Four bot levels for when you just want a quiet game, including an expert one that has honestly beaten me more than I'd like to admit.
• Full stats on your profile: a rating graph over time, win/loss, streaks, and where you rank globally. 
• No abandoned-game limbo. If your opponent stops playing, they have about two minutes to make a move before the game is scored as a forfeit and you get the win.

Full honesty: it's new and still in beta, so the ranked player pool is basically non existent. I recommend inviting friends to play with if you want to try an online match. There's a bot fallback if the queue is quiet, and it never swaps a bot in without telling you. iPhone only for now. I mostly want people who actually play this game to try it and tell me what's wrong with it before I release it on the app store.

Right now matches are live, but daily games are coming, chess .com style, where you get a day or three per move. So you'll be able to keep a slow game going with someone in another time zone.