More New Backgammon Variations
After our first article on other game variations of backgammon, many players wrote in with their own favourite ways to play. This second collection presents two of them. Both use the standard backgammon rules with only small changes.
One-point matches
A one-point match is ordinary backgammon with two differences:
- Gammons and backgammons do not count. Every game is worth exactly one point.
- The doubling cube is not used.
These two changes alter the strategy a great deal. Since you can never lose more than one point, staying back and playing for a late hit is a real option, and players are much more willing to hold anchors and play back games. Every game is played to the end, because nobody can be doubled out, so positions turn around more often than in normal backgammon.
Tournament players meet the same situation regularly. In the Crawford game, and in any game at double match point (when both players need one point to win the match), gammons and the cube play no part in the result. Practising one-point matches is therefore good training for the end of longer matches.
A few habits change in this format. A gammon is no longer a threat, so you can leave blots more freely when the alternative is a weak position. On the other hand, a gammon is no longer a reward either, so there is no point in risking a won game to win it bigger. When you are ahead, play safe and simply bring your checkers home; when you are behind, keep your anchors and wait for your chance, because a single late hit can still win the game.
The format has its fans and its critics. Some players find it hypnotic; in New England it earned the nickname "the crack of backgammon".
Hypergammon
Hypergammon keeps all the normal rules, including the doubling cube, but each player has only three checkers. They start on the player's 24-, 23- and 22-points, deep in the opponent's home board. With so few checkers, games are short and full of contact: hits, races and blocks follow each other quickly, and a single roll can swing the game.
The small number of checkers also makes every decision easier to see. There are fewer candidate moves, so you can concentrate on the basics: when to hit, when to run, when to hold back and how the cube should be used when a position changes quickly. Many players find hypergammon a pleasant warm-up before a longer match.
In the version our readers described, matches start at 7 points in the early rounds and get longer in later rounds. Because there are so few checkers, hypergammon is small enough for computers to have calculated its positions exactly, and programs such as GNU Backgammon can play it.
Keep them coming
This is the second collection, and we hope there will be more. If you play another variant on your backgammon board, tell us about it.