Backgammon
My first attempted match with my friend the backgammon buff never actually happened - he got wrapped up in explaining the history of the doubling cube to me - but he took a raincheck. Meanwhile, I had realized, in listening to him talk about backgammon, how miserably I was going to fail. I didn't expect to win by any means, but I didn't want to look like a complete fool in front of him. So I had about a week to improve my backgammon technique.
I started playing online backgammon with more frequency, but I wasn't really getting any better. The next step, I figured, was to read up on backgammon strategy. Here are some things that I found:
Backgammon is in some senses a hybrid game. It has a lot in common with "war games," like chess, but it's usually classified as a "race game" (and that's the category that Senet, one of the ancient cousins of backgammon, falls under). Games in the latter category tend to rely on the generation of random numbers - in backgammon, the random number generators are dice, of course - and, therefore, rely also relatively heavily on chance. Damn it, I thought. I'm not very good at games of chance.
But I also discovered that war games, too, often rely on dice, even though those games tend be thought of as more strategic than race games. Rolling the die brings in an element of chance to those war games, too, but it's more localized; the dice don't dictate where a player moves, but rather the outcome of a certain move the player might make, and that sort of thing. So in backgammon, which kind of chance is it? Localized, or overall?
Unfortunately, I don't think it's as straightforward as that - or at least, I wasn't really able to find an answer. Backgammon strategy doesn't seem to be as clearly defined as chess. The game has an extremely interesting history - apparently a lot of avid backgammon players in Great Britain hid their predilection for the game for a very long time, constructing game boards disguised as books and things of that nature, because the game was often outlawed and looked down on. In fact, I found precious little to help me with my game strategy. So I had to face my opponent, in the end, with essentially no technique. Needless to say, I was soundly beaten.