danoschek: "Miles are standard, but just about nowhere else"
alanback: "miles" is a standard unit of measurement, but only in the US."

lolol. Excuse me!! And just who gave the Yanks the miles in the first place, may I ask??!! Britain is "just about nowhere else", lolol. Damn cheek!!

Aah, that felt good. So how was that for a fine display of nationalistic indignance, eh? ;-)

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Now, to the backgammon.

Walter mentioned two situations where a player cannot move, one being when a man is dancing on the bar because of a closed table. He says that the other "has probably never occured in Backgammon" so I'm inclined to wonder what he envisages. This gives us the third possibility of a player having one or more men stuck behind a 6-prime while all the rest are either on the ace point or have already been borne off. The first of these is uncommon but not rare while the latter is rare. (And the times when the trailing player actually wins from that position are *hugely* rare but *most* satisfying, lol. One of the backgammon book authors - sorry, can't remember who - witnessed this once and uses it to illustrate the never-give-up! principle.

I've only just joined here so I don't know whether an autopass rule would help or hinder the game flow. Certainly at Vog (www.VogClub.com), where I play regularly, the dice will always be rolled and a message shown for a second or two stating that I cannot move. Although this adds a delay to the game, it keeps intact the my-turn-your-turn aspect and I prefer that. Without this delay the board can change unrecognisably in a flash and I then have to spend much time working through the sequence of moves to get my mental board caught up with the real one. It's actually quicker to suffer the non-turn delay and keep my brain on track.

One thing that would be lost if an autopass rule were implemented and that's the ability of the stuck player sending an "Aaaggh!!" message or some such. ;-) Another thing lost (from autopass in a no-point-rolling situation) is the ability to see how many 6-6 rolls you've lost out on while stuck, lol, though this needn't be the case if those rolls are made on your behalf but without requiring the moving player to pause in their own playing.

My vote at this time would be for autopass to be an option that *both* players must select. And, if it can be explained easily enough (your explanation made perfect sense to me, Walter), to have two autopass options - for there *is* a valid distinction. I might accept a no-point-rolling autopass but would never want a your-roll-goes-nowhere autopass; it would be experienced as a disconcerting "jump" in the game.

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No doubling cube? Ah, well I can live without it. My apprenticeship consisted of learning how to beat an aggressive bot in 3-point matches. I would never have learnt proper chequer play if the cube was a factor unless I accepted everything - and then I'd have got hammered. Once I got to a decent rating I decided to take up the cube. Then Wham! Bam! my rating took a hell of a knock, lol. I'm still getting the hang of the cube. Maths of cubing?? Ha ha. I'll just use intuition for now thanks; I'll do the maths in a year or so ... maybe.

I thoroughly recommend learning the game without the cube until you reach a stable level and then introducing it. You'll reach game states that you'd otherwise rarely reach - because either you or the opponent drops before you get the chance to explore. Or you have to suffer, as I did when I first came up against players who knew a decent backgame, from having to accept the cube and an almost certain loss - just to find out how the game situation will pan out.

But gammons and backgammons don't count? No chance to smell the SIZZLE?? This ain't real backgammon yet, then. :-((

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alanback: You guys seem quite worried about someone missing their chance to double while sitting on the bar with the opponent's home base closed. It's hard for me to imagine that this would happen as this is a very disadvantagous type of position to find one's self in

Grenv gave the example of when you have borne off most of your men and one of the last few gets hit and stuck on the bar. Then, doubling from the bar will win the game unless the trailing player wants to pay the price of risking you escaping too soon and racing home to a win.

Another situation is in prime-vs-prime games where you have the better timing - *because* you have a man stuck on the bar - and you know your opponent's table is going to have to collapse. You may collect another blot or two if the table collapses untidily and you certainly get free and home to bear off before having to release your opponent. It's often a no-brainer drop if you're the player with the collapsing table.

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Non-backgammon point. What's with the poxy little message box that's only three lines deep and 60 characters wide. That's using about 2.5% of the available screen space - and that's on the smaller monitor! Jeez. It's a most annoying and yet common web design blunder, well that and marquees, and Flash graphics, and putting the [Move] button at the bottom of the page below a load of stuff that doesn't change so I have to scroll down to make each move, and .... oops, I'm about to go off on one .... better stop now. ;-))