I taught myself backgammon about 20 years ago by playing it on an Amiga. Forgotten all but the basics now, but it's pretty easy to pick up.

I started playing chess again a few months ago, mainly through Facebook, and am totally hooked on that these days...

Thanks, Count Mocha. Yeah, there obviously is an element of skill to it, albeit with a 'competency plateau' that's different from, as you mention, chess. Either way, backgammon does strike me as being a rather civillised game.

Kind of funny learning how the game works and relating it to LOST and what's going on there.

Yeah, chess is the daddy. You can dedicate your entire life to improving at it. Did you see the recent BBC4 documentary about how to get better at it? Really interesting. Loads of different tactics I wasn't aware of. It actually got me back into playing it and actually was probably responsible for me thinking about learning backgammon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-VODzrDiGI

i haven't played backgammon in many years, i used to be pretty good when i was 12. i've forgotten the rules but i bet it would come back to me if i sawit again

it's not so much online though haha, especially if you roll plenty of doubles. It's all about the doubling block imo, it adds a sick twist to money games.

They do this with cricket. Cricket! For fuck's sake. If there was ever a decent rationale of nuking the whole of North America, fiddling about with the rules of fucking cricket would be it.

you're just sour because baseball is so much better. the world wears New York Yankee caps, not whatever your cricket teams are called caps.