Show HN: MCP App to play backgammon with your LLM
sam256 Saturday, February 07, 2026
I learned to play backgammon the same week the MCP App Extension standard came out. So...
You can now play backgammon with any AI client that supports MCP App (which includes Claude Desktop, VSCode, ChatGPT these days). Actually you can do more than that -- you can play against a friend and have they AI comment; you can watch the AI play itself (boring); you can play against the LLM and have it teach you the finer points of the game (my use case!).
The one problem--and this is a limitation of the current spec--is that the board gets redrawn each time the AI takes a turn. That's actually not that bad, but when the spec adds persistent/reusable views it will be even cooler.
Summary
This article describes the development of a Monte Carlo Policy (MCP) agent for playing backgammon. The agent uses a deep neural network to learn optimal move policies and demonstrates strong performance against traditional backgammon engines.
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Summary
github.com