Hello

First post here. Reversi is my favourite board game. I don't know how good I am but I can beat this bot on expert quite often

http://www.spee.nl/othello/applet.htm

Has anyone ever made a real life board that automatically turns the pieces for you? That would be great. I'm thinking of making one. The idea I thought of to turn the pieces is to have the pieces as fixed magnets with the north and south poles on the white and black sides respectively and then use electromagnets in each square of the board to flip the pieces. Reversing the polarity of the electromagnet will hopefully flip it over. There's the problem of detecting where the piece is placed but I'm sure there's a way of doing that. Any thoughts?

Peter

Has anyone ever made a real life board that automatically turns the pieces for you?

I don't think such a thing exists. Personally I would not be too excited about it. I feel that flipping the discs manually is part of the whole OTB experience, and this would just be something between an ordinary board and a computer screen. Others may be less negative. ;-)

There are sets with discs that are easier to flip than ordinary ones; that's a different matter (i.e., I like it). Tournament boards are bigger and easier to play on, and there are also some nice magnet boards (but not those really small ones, they are the worst kind of all). There also exist boards where you don't flip discs at all, you just “toggle” each square between empty, black and white. I am not very familiar with those.

OK, I know it's probably not the kind of board that will be used in tournaments but just fun to see the pieces flipping over by themselves and fun to build.

I just thought though, I might have a problem with my magnets idea with the piece being flipped getting stuck to neighbouring pieces.