Less well known than chess or draughts, backgammon is addictive and compelling. In some ways like sophisticated Ludo, your task is to pilot your counters back round the board to their base, at the same time knocking and blocking your opponent. On-screen dice indicate the moves you can make, either one piece for the total, or any combination for individual men. Catch an opponent's piece undefended and you can banish it from the board. He can only resume his master plan when he succeeds in releasing it. Great fun.
Written principally in BASIC with some machine code, this offering from CP features a black background, so no eye strain, re-definable colours, and an attractive representation of the board, though movement is rather flickery and the dice are by no means state-of-the-art graphics. Illegal moves are simply not accepted, as opposed to the message the inlay leads you to expect. Otherwise the instructions are good, though a little terse.
Settling down to a good game revealed two fatal flaws. In my first game, when inputting a coordinate, I accidentally pressed ESC instead of a number. The program crashed a move later and the computer reset. I loaded again, and after a few minutes play, the game ground to a halt with a BASIC "improper argument" message, and the program disappeared, it being a protected me. Very sad; this could have been a useful acquisition, but with the bugs present, it cannot be recommended.
11th June 1985
