Backgammon True Dice vs Tessera

Backgammon you can check. Every backgammon app says its dice are random. This one lets you prove it. Before your first move, Backgammon True Dice generates a random 32-byte seed and shows you its SHA-256 fingerprint, right there on the board. Every roll of the game is derived from that seed, so the whole sequence is fixed before you make a single decision. When the game ends, the seed is revealed and the app replays every roll in front of you. Copy the seed, the fingerprint and the roll journal, and you can repeat the calculation with any tool you like. The opponent never sees the seed. It receives the board and the roll that has already happened — nothing else. Difficulty changes how deeply it thinks, never what you roll. TWO GAMES ON ONE BOARD • Backgammon — opposing tracks, hitting, the bar, gammons and backgammons • Long nardy — one direction, no hitting, one checker off the head per turn, mars PLAY YOUR WAY • Three opponent levels, from a relaxed game to a genuinely hard one • Two players on one device, passing it back and forth • Take back a whole turn until you confirm it • Legal moves highlighted, so the rules never get in the way SEE THE DICE FOR YOURSELF • The game fingerprint stays visible on the board while you play • Full roll journal, including the rolls that decided who starts • A histogram of all 36 outcomes for you and your opponent, against what fair dice would give • Journals of your last twenty games, so you can check a suspicion days later BUILT TO BE QUIET • Works entirely offline, in airplane mode, on a plane or underground • No account, no sign-in, nothing to set up • Not a single system permission requested — no contacts, no location, no notifications • Nothing is collected: no analytics, no tracking, no networking code at all Backgammon and long nardy are traditional games with centuries of history. This app adds one modern thing to them: dice you do not have to take on trust.

In Mesopotamia, someone pressed the rules of a board game into a clay tablet, in cuneiform. Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist at the British Museum, read that tablet in the 1980s and worked out how the game must have gone. This app is a collection of games like that one. Right now there are three: ancient Mesopotamia, Viking-age Scandinavia, and West Africa three hundred years ago. More are on the way. The Mesopotamian game is free. One purchase unlocks the rest, and any game added later is included. ■ The Royal Game of Ur (Mesopotamia, around 2600 BCE) One of the oldest board games we know of. Race seven pieces to the end and you win. Leonard Woolley, a British archaeologist, dug the board out of the ground. Irving Finkel reconstructed the rules from two clay tablets found at Babylon and Uruk. ■ Hnefatafl (the Vikings, 8th to 11th century) An unusual game where the two sides don't have the same job: one player runs the king for a corner, the other tries to surround him. Chess pushed it out of use in the 12th century. Then in 1732 the botanist Carl Linnaeus found it still alive in the far north and copied the rules into his journal, under the name tablut. That one page is why we can still play it. ■ Oware (West Africa, the Ashanti Kingdom, about 300 years old) Take seeds from the pits, and the first to collect 25 wins. It started in the Ashanti kingdom about 300 years ago and is still played on the street in Ghana. Schools in West Africa and the Caribbean use it to teach arithmetic. One phone is enough to play alone or with someone sitting across from you. If you'd rather have one each, connect two over Bluetooth. Every game comes with its own history section, and achievements to collect as you get better.