Backgammon 3D - Tawla 31

A backgammon board you can almost pick up — and dice you can actually check.

A REAL BOARD, IN 3D

Every other backgammon app draws flat pictures of checkers. This one renders a real board: turned checkers with dished tops, stacks whose height you read at a glance, dice that tumble and settle, a doubling cube on the bar. Three views, from a near top-down for pure readability to a wider angle over the table.

DICE YOU CAN VERIFY

"The dice are rigged" is the oldest complaint in backgammon apps, and no app has ever let you check. This one does. Before the first roll, the game publishes the SHA-256 fingerprint of a secret seed. Every roll is derived from that seed with HMAC-SHA256, together with a seed you can change yourself. At the end of the game the secret seed is revealed and the app replays the whole sequence in front of you. A rigged roll would break the fingerprint. It is the only honest way to make this promise.

TAWLA 31 — THE EGYPTIAN GAME

Switch to Tawla 31 and the whole game changes. This is the tawla played in the cafés of Cairo: all fifteen checkers start on your opponent's one-point, nobody is ever hit, and a single checker is enough to hold a point. You no longer fight by knocking each other off — you fight for the road. The winner scores one point for every checker the opponent has not borne off, and the match runs to 31. Turn it on and a glass of Egyptian tea sits on the table beside the board, with the murmur of a full café behind the game.

PLAYS FULLY OFFLINE

No account. No sign-in. No internet. No ads. Open it on a plane, in a tunnel, anywhere — it is the whole game, on your phone.

AN OPPONENT WORTH PLAYING

Three levels. Beginner makes real mistakes, so a new player can win. Intermediate plays a clean, consistent game. Expert looks ahead at your reply before choosing its own move. The engine understands the rules that half the apps get wrong: you must play as many dice as you can, and when only one is playable it must be the higher one.

EVERYTHING THE GAME ACTUALLY HAS

- Two games in one: backgammon, and Tawla 31 (Egyptian rules)

- Single games or matches to 3, 5 or 7 points

- The doubling cube, with take and pass

- Gammon and backgammon scored properly

- Bearing off with exact and inexact rolls

- Undo any move before you end your turn

- Legal destinations highlighted, so you can learn by playing

- Pip counts for both sides

- Three boards: walnut, olive wood, ebony

- English, French, German, Turkish and Arabic

Backgammon, tavla, nard, shesh besh — whatever you call it, the game is five thousand years old and still the best race there is.