As part of the new trend of the backgammon game, (as I wrote on other backgammon reviews) there are many competitors trying to enter the online backgammon scene. One of the newest is BGroom.
The BGroom lobby looks very good and it is easy to use, though it has two major problems - the rating of the players is not available (maybe it is but I couldn't find it) and if you want to move to the real money game, well, I will be glad if you let me know how it's done… The BGroom lobby provides a variety of hundreds of backgammon tables you can choose between but only a few players are online and if they are playing or you can't find someone on your own level, the waiting could take a day or two.
13 players on the BGroom lobby...
It Seems like The BGroom's developers had made a great effort on the development of their new site and the new backgammon's interface. The 3D board looks very good; the site is very promising and the playing is user friendly. As I said before the 3D is a very important part of good backgammon software and I think that the BGroom developers took my advice and made a very realistic board with a nice sound. Everything looks good and on the design front the BGroom server can compete with the best online backgammon softwares.
After waiting for some time, I found myself an opponent. The way of playing is the same as all the good softwares and I couldn't find any significant different. The rules are the same and all in all, it is very good software.
The BGroom backgammon board
After playing a few backgammon games, I started to feel like the developers of the new BGroom software have a lot of understanding in computers but they are not backgammon players. With all the respect to the great interface and to the beautiful site, there is a serious lack of written material. The real money board is not accessible (maybe it's only a periodical problem) and the biggest problem - if you want to play backgammon, you need a variant of players and their rating should be the first thing you see. You don't want to find yourself playing against someone better or much worse than you, especially when playing on money (at least one of the situations in money games...).
If you have a lot of free time, and I mean a lot; and you don't care about your opponent rating or about the fact that there are only tens of them, the BGroom backgammon board is one of the best online backgammon boards. If you want to play today, now, you should go elsewhere.
Maybe with the time, all those critical problems will be solved and then, the BGroom's board will be one of the biggest competitors on the online backgammon scene, for now, I will continue with