Lots of games and sports have more than one set of official rules. Major League Baseball is a well known example. How about football? Chess has plenty of organizations with rules that are mostly the same. The differences involve things besides the movement of the pieces, which are the same for everywhere. Backgammon can be played in lots of ways. Remember, some rules of Backgammon were made up in the last fifty years. Dark Chess doesn't have any organized rule making body that I know of and I've seen four different ways that it is played. I haven't played enough Backgammon to know if the "forced to use the dice rule" is the best way to play the game, but those are the common rules. I wouldn't mind a version that allowed me to control how I use the dice more than the official rules, but that's not what we have here. We have a game pretending to be official Backgammon and yet it doesn't play like official Backgammon. This is more like the arguments concerning Pente with board size and whether or not the opening moves are restricted or not.

I think this site should have the game played as is commonly played around the world. For some reason it doesn't. The rules should clearly spell out that you may play the dice as you see fit, instead of the customary way of having to play both if able or the larger of the two if only one but not the other will play. You can say what you want AbigailII, but I find the rules misleading on this point or at least not as straight forward that I would know just from a casual perusal of said rules. Perhaps you could write a clearer version and send it to Fencer? You know how translating game rules from one language to another can make for hard to read writing? I'm thinking that's part of the problem here.

Now, as for playing over the board in person, what happens if I make an "illegal" move? It's up to my opponent to do something about it, right? He has the choice of letting my move stand or making me take it back. It'd be nice to have an internet Backgammon set up so this would be how it would be played. Then it would be like playing it over the board with someone instead of having the machine enforce perfect play and remove some of the thinking involved. Even experts can miss forced moves and they should get penalized like everyone else.