Hypergammon is a variant of

backgammon Backgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back at least 1,600 years. The earliest record of backgammo ...

Rule variations

Each player begins with three pieces, rather than fifteen. At the start of the

game A game is a structured type of play usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or video games) or art ...

, each player begins with one piece on each of the three most distant points of the board (the 22-point, the 23-point and the 24-point). Hypergammon is often played using the Jacoby Rule, which is also used in

money games. Under this rule, gammons and backgammons will not count extra until the cube has been doubled.

Gameplay

As a consequence of the reduced number of pieces, many people believe that hypergammon relies more heavily on

luck Luck is the phenomenon and belief that defines the experience of improbable events, especially improbably positive or negative ones. The Naturalism (philosophy), naturalistic interpretation is that positive and negative events may happen at a ...

than backgammon. The difficulty of getting two pieces on the same point means that both players nearly always have blots on the

board Board or Boards may refer to: Flat surface * Lumber, or other rigid material, milled or sawn flat ** Plank (wood) ** Cutting board ** Sounding board, of a musical instrument * Cardboard (paper product) * Paperboard * Fiberboard ** Hardboard, a ...

. The combination of the fact that bearing off can be completed with a single lucky roll of doubles, and that it is nearly impossible to protect blots from being sent to the bar, results in gammons being scored much more often than in backgammon. This also means the lead in a game can swing very quickly. In fact, for most players, the skill-to-luck ratio (or, more precisely, the error-to-luck ratio) is much higher in hypergammon than in backgammon, which means that a skillful player can achieve a statistically significant lead much more quickly in hypergammon than in backgammon. The best moves in hypergammon (especially doubling decisions) are often subtle and less easily conceptualized than those of backgammon. Hypergammon has been 'solved', in the sense that

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

s can now play perfect hypergammon. Nevertheless, it is still a very challenging game for human players. The development of

heuristic A heuristic or heuristic technique (''problem solving'', '' mental shortcut'', ''rule of thumb'') is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless ...

s for expert play is very much an open topic. In the early 1990s Hugh Sconyers solved Hyper Backgammon using a computer. There are over 32,000,000 possible positions when you include the double cube. In addition, Sconyers solved 1, 2 and 4 checker backgammon, which have similar starting positions.

Popularity

Coming out in 1991, Hypergammon was and is known to be part of an online computer application. It can be played in real life as a

board game A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects () that are placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components, e.g. dice. The earliest known uses of the ...

too, but even now, people competitively play the game and try what they can to keep their rank one title. Marc Olsen is known as a 'grandmaster' Hypergammon player, and has written about strategies for playing the backgammon variant.

Competition

Hypergammon has been included within the

Mind Sports Olympiad The Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO) is an annual international multi-sport event, multi-disciplined competition and festival for game of skill, games of mental skill and mind sports by Mind Sports Organisation. The inaugural event was held in 1997 i ...

program, for the first time in the in-person event in London 2023, after holding it in the online versions in 2020 and 2021 and the online Grand Prix.

Hyper Backgammon at the Mind Sports Olympiad

References

External links

Backgammon Game variants {{board-game-stub