AlliumCepa: Alliumcepa, if you read the posts, nobody specifically runs the site. The server is kept running, Fencer monitors the server, and still owns it. Note that it's free, it comes without any guarantees, and it's use-as-you-find-it. If you don't like it, you get your money back (meaning nothing) and you are free to play somewhere else.
Please don't feel entitled to anything else just because you paid nothing to use it and found it on the internet.

Possibly the longest BG tournament ever has finally come to an end. For those of you who were playing or following Lucky 13 (and are still alive), the tournament was completed in 13 years and 3 days. 

Since Fencer considers BK a finished product and does not support it anymore (at least he does not reply to my messages), I am posting yet another Bug Report here.
All new games I create, have the “Include unrated players” checkbox cleared. Still such players are able to accept my games, waste my time and skew my BKR.
Whoever runs this site now, can you explain please?

playBunny
Hello pB - nice to see you again. Hope things are going well for you in the South Pacific. You may need to get a new flag, as I believe you island will be flooded in about 13 years! Hope the match is over before you have to leave!

playBunny: 13 years seems quite fitting somehow aha

playBunny: Amazing story pB! A remarkable indicator of Forces outside our current scientific knowledge base. Lets call it a "miracle" then, eh? :-))

AlliumCepa: Thanks! I had forgotten that I was still in an ancient tournament. Lol. I only logged in on DailyGammon by mistake, yet somehow the timing was perfect - just a few days after you sent the message. Maybe some mistakes are meant to happen. ;o)

AlliumCepa: 'It takes brains to identify doomed game, dignity to admit their approaching loss, and respect towards opponents' time.' ... Exactly! Well said.

AlliumCepa: thank you. Appreciate it!

Clandestine 1: pB is on DailyGammon too. I've sent him a message there. Hopefully he'll get it.

AlliumCepa: here is a dialog with one of my opponents after such game:
Me: Thank you for your professional resignation.
Opponent: Excuse me,
was there anything wrong with that?
Me: On the contrary. It showed that you value my time, you are smart enough to predict when a game is lost, you can swallow your pride and terminate the pointless dragging. You do not need my painful and often fruitless explanation why would be reasonable to resign. I respect you for this.

Clandestine 1: There are many players on BK who insist playing untill very end. It takes brains to identify doomed game, dignity to admit their approaching loss, and respect towards opponents' time.
O sancta simplicitas!

Aganju: guess it pays to be early ;)

AlliumCepa: there were many a player in Lucky 13 that should have utilized the resign button. 

Francine2_49: If you say your opponent utilized the resign feature, they are to be admired. Is your idea of having fun "keep playing until the end of a doomed game", hoping for timeout?

Clandestine 1: here is one that ended about 7 hours *before* it started: ultrabrain. That is speed!

happyjuggler0: I think Guiness World records should get a call. 13 plus years for a tournament has to be some kind of record. Who would have thought age and health would be a factor in a backgammon tournament. 

happyjuggler0: Anybody stupid enough to set up a tournament with more that 2 day moves deserves what they get. I stupidly signed up foe a tournament which went for 7 years, and as far as I know it is still going, I just resigned all the games. For God's sake, I am 79 years old now, and I probably won;t be around if a tournamnet lasts 10 years.

Clandestine 1: The good news is that if playBunny doesn't know it is his turn, it will be 10 weeks if my math is right before he will timeout in his first game, and then he will time out once per week afterwards.

The bad news is that you would have to wait that long for the tournament to be over, but after 13 years I guess 13 or so weeks won't matter too much.

Anyone know Playbunny? If so, it would be great if u could send him a message that the final round of our 13 year old tournament has started. I really don’t want to win this tournament by a timeout. 

Dear all we search for good cloning backgammon players who like to join BGBedlam's Fellowship Multigammon and join some of the teams. We are still waiting with joining the open team tournaments:
Multigammon Mayhem

you are welcome

Francine2_49: Presumably you mean your match with ZikZak. Check his Last Action date. He isn't playing against you because he isn't playing against anyone.

Francine2_49: I don't get it...are you upset because someone resigned?

Francine2_49: whom do you mean? is his name Jerk??

thanks for not finishing your game cause you were not winning JERK

2300 plus bkr

Clandestine 1: thx for the reply. yes i guess so, i just wasn't sure... then i'll try to get in the game again and will clone 1, if i like it or not

Aganju: Thx for the reply. Yes I was almost sure it is like you explained. I just didn't remember to have such a situation before and as cloning BG is somehow special and has a known bug already in the programming (pip count and display issue when too many pieces on one position) - I thought I first ask around.
if I had a switch, I would have used it

speachless: normally the site would make you hit and then roll 3......at least that's been my experience. There wouldn't be an option to switch dice.

speachless: in standard Backgammon, the rule says if you can move both dice (instead of only one) you MUST do so. Of course, in a situation like this, this would be always be to your advantage (or wouldn't matter).

Assuming that the base BG rules are not changed for Cloning - except as described - this would still be part of the rules, so you MUST hit, sorry. That would be my interpretation of the rules.

Hi everyone, I think I never had this situation in Cloning Backgammon: so my question is: should I be able to switch the dices, so I can win the game by choosing 3 OR is it a MUST to move with 1, so that I get a cloned one... of course I prefer to win :-)

Cloning Backgammon (speachless vs. TheAlchemist)

but if so, than I'll accept. Maybe it's just a bug and I can ask Fencer to switch the dices, as I'm not able to... ?

Clandestine 1: you're right, I was thinking exactly the same years ago after I asked Fencer for a bug fix BUT I wasn't lucky with that... since then i defined my personal new cloning-BG-rule which says, "every piece up to 30 on 1 position will disappear even from the pip count, till the amount goes under 30" - then the disappeared pieces will be magicaly added again - (i know it isn't funny, but Fencer was really clear on that, it would take him too much to go over the programming code, so he was convinced it is a display issue, even if the pip count was affected... I couldn't change Fencers attitude, but maybe you give it a try and see how he reacts

speachless: a bug like that can change the game outcome. It really should be fixed. No other game has a bug like that, unless you're using the brainking app, then there's other bugs that can change the outcome of the game....but that's a different topic.

Clandestine 1: I was disappointed too by fencers decision, but at the end of the day, i love too much cloning backgammon to prefer him to delete the game.... i just learned to be aware of the bug, so i see when it happens.... but i'm not saying i'm happy with it, i hated this bug a lot, i just accepted that the bug will not be fixed...

speachless:that's a huge bug to ignore, especially in  cloning gammon. The game should be deleted from this site if it won't be fixed to be played properly. 

Aganju: yes you're right, but it's a known bug which fencer will not correct, i've asked him already years ago... up to 30+ on one position brainking just fails...

speachless: well I wouldn't care if they are simply _not displayed_, but the pip count should know about them - that is a significant decision point in making it a run game.
Now I can only hope hat my opponent is up for the same surprise in some moves...

Aganju: oh yes, a lot of us know this bug..... brainking can't show more as 30 pieces on 1 position, so as soon you reach more as 30 on one position it will detract around 15 pieces.... as soon you bear off your pieces, so that it goes under 30, it will add the missing 15 pieces :-) i had once around 70 pieces on one position, so it happened a lot of times in 1 game.... concerning fencer it's too much work to correct the programming, he just says it's a display problem...

Compare
Cloning Backgammon (TC vs. Aganju) and
Cloning Backgammon (TC vs. Aganju) - I suddenly have 15 pieces more!?

..board to discuss this.

anyway,I am sure people come up with many ideas for backgammon variations.
I have always had many idea for these variations.
some would be more interesting as far as strategy as others.
here is 3 original ideas that would be fun.
all thse variations same as backgammon except the new additional rules.

backgammon-frozen tag
if a piece is landed on by an opponents piece.
it remains were it is,but it is frozen=can't move until one of it's own colour pieces lands on it.
if no other pieces are behind this piece that could free it.then it is just frozen for one turn and can't be moved on the next turn.

backgammon-conversion
if a piece is landed on by an opponents piece.
the opponets piece as usual is sent to the bar.
the piece that made the hit is now designated with the letter "C".
this gives it the power of conversion.
now the next time this "C" piece lands on another opponents piece or one of his own colour.the piece is changed to it's opponents colour.
and the "C" designation is lost from the piece.

playBunny: Thanks!
I tried to trick BK by typing the double-move into the URL, but it did not execute the move, so it is explicitly checking the intermediate positions for legality.
As that situation would be quite rare, maybe even most real-live players have never encountered it and wouldn't know the rule exactly.
I guess it was inconvenient, but it will not make me lose the game. I just found it interesting.

Aganju: That's an interesting question. In the real world (and in the DailyGammon world) you are allowed to move "illegally" so long as the final position is a legal one.

At DailyGammon you are allowed to move a piece on the board even if there's one on the bar, as long as the bar is clear by the end of the turn. In live play it's very common to move two pieces together having rolled a double, and sometimes the lazy approach to moving a piece beyond a stack is to shove it into the stack and move the displaced piece to the final destination.

A computer or website that doesn't allow the moving of two pieces at the same time only does so because that option hasn't been provided in the playing interface. GnuBg does provide this facility. If you click an empty point then two pieces will be placed there if those pieces were on points appropriate to the dice roll. Similarly, both GnuBg and DailyGammon provide a greedy bearoff which may take up to four pieces off the board with one click. In the case of GnuBg it's not even necessary to have got all the men home as long as the move is unambiguous (eg. a 6-6).

My original teacher actually introduced me to the triplet of games in Tavli but it was a long time ago and I have no idea whether this situation came up. Given that two pieces can be moved together, I'd say not. If I were implementing Fevga, I'd apply the rules to the final position as that is the only point at which the opponent is affected.

Aganju: As a player is not allowed to occupy all six points of his starting quarter (1-6 or 7-12) at the same time, it is not possible to move in your case from 12 to 7 in 2 moves, as it would mean that you would occupy all six points of the starting quarter between the 2 moves. For this it would be necessary that people would be allowed to move 2 pieces in one, to prevent to occupy all six points...

In this game , I (black) rolled a 5-5, and I'd like to move 12-7, 12-7 (plus something else), but the system doesn't allow this (you are not allowed to block all 6 spots in your home). However, i am not really blocking them as at the end of my move, the ace is free again.

The question is: Do the rules mean that - 'not even temporarily", or is it a bug? Who knows Fevga well enough in the real world?

DarwinKoala: Sorry, meant "cloning", not "crowded".

Cloning Backgammon (DarwinKoala vs. speachless)

Thoroughly enjoyable and down to the wire a couple of times. I have not counted the total number of stones to be removed!