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A game proposal : Tandem Backgammon

Posted By: Fabrice Liardet
Date: Monday, 21 December 2009, at 10:49 a.m.

Tandem Chess, more widely known as Bughouse Chess, is an extremely popular (and even more fun) variant of chess for 4 players, generally played at tremendous speed. An idea I had yesterday, plus Stick mentioning the SHG Tandem league in an other thread, seemed to coalesce nicely in a try at importing that idea to backgammon, using only the scoring system as a link between the two concurrent games.

Tandem Backgammon :

  • Two two-players teams (team A, players A1 and A2, team B, players B1 and B2) play a match to n points on two independent backgammon boards (A1 vs B1, A2 vs B2), each with its own cube and its own clock. Each pair of games is played simultaneously : the clocks are started in the same time. After one of the games is finished, the other one is played to the end, even if one team has virtually reached n points.
  • The score is computed only at the end of the two games, using the sum of the scores of both games. E.g. if in the first pair of games A1 wins a doubled gammon and A2 loses a single game, team A will lead 4-1. If both teams reach n points in the same pair of games, the match is a draw.
  • Crawford : the game after one team reaches n-1, no cube is possible. The game after one team reaches n-2 or n-3, the other team is allowed to cube only in one of the two games (but can choose in which one).
  • Unrestricted communication is allowed within a team, but not manual intereference on the partner's board.
What do you think ? It seems that it could capture some of the fun of Bughouse Chess, since there will be times when the correct play or cube action will depend on what is happening or what is going to happen on the other board. The match equities would get pretty involved. If that is not enough, a much messier variant could allow the players of a team to swap rolls when they are both at roll.

I will try to look for three players crazy enough to playtest that OTB.

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