Checkers and Dice

The warmth of a real wooden board, the sharpness of a self-taught opponent. Play Turkish tavla or international backgammon in stunning 3D, offline and with no ads. Checkers and Dice was written from scratch in Swift and Metal for the Mac and iPad; buy it once and play on both. The board, checkers, dice, leather dice cup, room, wood and mother-of-pearl textures, sound effects and oud music are all generated in code; not a single ready-made image, model or audio file. TWO RULE SETS • Turkish tavla: no doubling cube, and a gammon counts two points; the winner of the previous game opens the next. Switch on the traditional rules if you like: No hit-and-run and Must bear off. • International rules: doubling cube, backgammons and the Crawford rule, with optional Jacoby, beaver, raccoon and automatic doubles. • Matches from 1 to 15 points. With international rules, play an open-ended Session and stop whenever you like. A STRONG OPPONENT • Four levels: Easy, Medium, Hard and Master. Easy and Medium make human-like mistakes; Hard and Master rarely forgive yours. • A neural network trained on six million games of self-play, plus an exact 54,264-position bear-off database. • Master looks two moves ahead, weighing every roll of its opponent and then its own best replies. • Checker play, cube and resignation decisions all take the match score into account, and the computer knows when a race is lost. ANALYSIS AND HINTS • After every game and match, each of your moves is analyzed; a game grade and an approximate PR show where you lost ground. • Hint marks the suggested move on the board and, with international rules, tells you when to double, take or pass. • Move history, replays of finished games, and export to .mat or .sgf. A STUNNING LOOK • Physically based lighting, soft shadows cast by a hanging lamp, reflections, HDR and temporal anti-aliasing. • A room built in code, with a table, walls and a window. The dice pour out of a leather cup and tumble with rigid-body physics. • Three boards: Classic Walnut, Mother-of-Pearl and Maple, plus three styles each for checkers, dice and felt, from boxwood and ebony to marble, ivory and amber. • A cinematic camera in the menu, and dynamic resolution that keeps every Mac and iPad running smoothly. SOUND AND MUSIC • Checker, dice and cup sounds synthesized by physical modeling: marble rings, ebony sounds deep, and the reverb is computed from the size of the room. • An endless oud taqsim that starts in the Nihavend maqam and wanders through Hicaz, Rast, Uşşak and Hüseyni. • Optional rain on the window. EFFORTLESS PLAY • On the Mac: click-click or drag and drop; double-click plays the higher die, right-click the lower one. • On the iPad: tap-tap or drag and drop; double-tap plays the higher die, and tapping the dice swaps their order. Hold it landscape or portrait; keyboard and trackpad work too. • Undo, move confirmation, movable-checker highlights, automatic rolling and keyboard shortcuts. • Keep several matches going at once; they save automatically, and finished matches go to the archive. • Statistics: matches and games won, gammons, best winning streak, results by level and dice distribution. SEVEN LANGUAGES, BUILT FOR EVERYONE • English, Turkish, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian; switch instantly in Settings. • Three text sizes, and support for the Increase contrast and Reduce motion settings of macOS and iPadOS. PRIVACY No internet connection, no account, no ads, no tracking and no analytics. All your data stays on your device. Requirements: macOS 26 or later and a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later), or iPadOS 26 or later.