Reversi

How to Play

1. Black moves first.
2. Place a disc on an empty square only if it traps one or more opponent discs in a straight horizontal, vertical or diagonal line between the new disc and one of your existing discs.
3. Every trapped opponent disc flips to your color.
4. If you have no legal move, your turn is skipped automatically.
5. The game ends when neither player can move. The player with more discs wins.

Why Disc Count Can Mislead

Having more discs early is not necessarily an advantage. Many discs can create a large frontier that gives the opponent extra legal moves. Corners, by contrast, can never be flipped and often provide access to stable edge structures. Position and mobility are therefore more important than immediate material count.

Strategy Tips

• Prioritize corners whenever they are safely available.
• Avoid giving the opponent easy access to squares next to an empty corner.
• Try to maximize your future legal moves while reducing the opponent's mobility.
• Near the endgame, exact disc count becomes more important because fewer future reversals remain.

Game-Theory Connection

Reversi is a perfect-information, deterministic, zero-sum game with strong positional effects. It demonstrates adversarial search, delayed reward, mobility, stable states and why a locally profitable move can be strategically harmful several turns later.