| |
BGonline.org Forums
Nackgammon Shuffle
Posted By: Nack Ballard In Response To: Nackgammon Shuffle (Chris Haviland)
Date: Tuesday, 27 September 2011, at 1:35 a.m.
Randomly place two two-checker anchors in Opp’s inner board, a four-checker point in Opp’s outer board, a three-checker point in one’s own outer board, and five checkers on the 6pt (or lower is possible). Make the opponent’s position symmetrical (which means your own points do not mirror each other). In other words, randomly rearrange the points in Nackgammon without straying from the original quadrants. I call it NGS (NackGammon Shuffle).
I wrote that paragraph in an e-mail to Stick a few months ago (in response to his e-mail entitled "Bored of regular backgammon"). I assign my subvariant the term "NackGammon Shuffle" because it is loosely similar to the concept of Shuffle Chess, where the back rank pieces are rearranged randomly by a computer program (with some restrictions): that becomes the players' starting position.
Starting with the four-stack in the inner board lower than the 6pt tends to reduce the larger skill advantage the stronger or more creative player enjoys in Nackgammon. OTOH, it encourages one to more aggressively unstack those low-point checkers, which, dice willing, may pose some unusual decisions. Starting the four-stack lower than the 4pt, though, largely means that the players each have only eleven checkers in play, which is somewhat contrary to the underlying spirit or purpose of Nackgammon.
I suppose I would say that Nackgammon is the main variant, the NGS (NackGammon Shuffle) subvariant keeps the four inside checkers on the 6pt, and allowing them to be instead on the 5pt or 4pt is a subsubvariant.
I've also toyed with what I call BGS (BackGammon Shuffle), same idea but with only two back checkers and IMO less interesting.
Nack
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.