Reversi Battles

Reversi is a strategy board game for two players, played on an 8×8 uncheckered board. There are 64 identical game pieces called disks (often spelled "discs"), which are light on one side and dark on the other. Players take turns placing discs on the board with their assigned color facing up. During a play, any discs of the opponent's color that are in a straight line and bounded by the disc just placed and another disc of the current player's color are turned over to the current player's color. The object of the game is to have the majority of discs turned to display your color when the last playable empty square is filled. Reversi is marketed by Pressman under the trade name Othello.

Each of the two sides corresponds to one player; they are referred to here as light and dark after the sides of Othello pieces, but "heads" and "tails" would identify them equally well, so long as each marker has sufficiently distinctive sides. The player's color will also here be that player's identifier.

True Reversi starts with an empty board, and the first two moves by each player are in the four central squares of the board. The players place their disks alternately with their color facing up and no captures are made. If either the second player chooses to move to the square diagonal to the first player or the first player's second move is not to this square given the choice, then a starting position before flipping moves commence that differs from the standard Othello position arises. It is also possible to play variants of Reversi and Othello wherein the second player's second move may or must flip one of the opposite-colored disks (as variants closest to the normal games).

For the specific game of Othello (as technically differing from Reversi), the rules state that the game begins with four disks placed in a square in the middle of the grid, two facing light-up, two pieces with the dark side up, with same-colored disks on a diagonal with each other. Convention has initial board position such that the disks with dark side up are to the northeast and southwest (from both players' perspectives), though this is only marginally meaningful to play (Where opening memorization is an issue, some players may benefit from consistency on this). The dark player moves first.