8. Backgammon

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Backgammon is the best roll-and-move game there is. And it's also the oldest game on this list. For those who think it's a random dice fest, I have a story for you...

(Note: The story may prove my shortcoming as a Backgammon player more than it proves my point. But I still think it's worth pondering.)

This story is about a piece of Backgammon software called Jellyfish. You can find Jellyfish here:

http://www.jellyfish-backgammon.com/

Jellyfish kicked my Backgammon-playing-ass on a regular basis. I could pull off a win about 10% of the time, but for the most part it trashed me. To the inexperienced eye, it appeared that Jellyfish cheated more than a desperate housewife. It always seemed to roll exactly what it needed, meanwhile my pieces were constantly getting stuck, trapped, whatever.

I tried to temper my rage by manually entering Jellyfish's rolls. Ha ha! Well, that didn't exactly work. It still came through with "miracle" rolls, while the only times I would roll double sixes was when I couldn't use them. Aarrgghh!

Finally, I came up with a foolproof plan to thwart the evil Jellyfish. I decided to let the cheating computer roll the dice for both of us. I played a typical game (got crushed as usual) but I recorded all of the dice rolls on a sheet of paper. Then I played another game, this time entering my previous dice rolls on his turn, and entering his "lucky" dice rolls on my turn.

I'll bet you can guess what happened. That's right, I got whipped.

Again, this may prove nothing more than that I suck at Backgammon.