Is this a new variant?

For want of a better name, I call it "Triversi", as it's basically reversi, but there's a third neutral colour. Neutral pieces get flipped to your colour, and opponent's pieces get flipped to the neutral colour. Neutral pieces do not count towards the final score.

I've stuck a very quick AI up here:

http://87.119.183.129/perl/Preversi/PreversiCgi.pl

It's pretty dumb, but can beat me occasionally.

What kind of physical playing pieces do you use? Thicker disks that can stand on edge?

Ugh. Like swimming in syrup. ;-)

@MarleysGhost - what is this "physical" nonsense you talk about? We left the 20th century over a decade ago!

@Tas - if that's a comment on the speed of the engine, don't blame me, I didn't write it - it's twice as quick as it was originally. Oh, and the server it's running on dates back to the 20th century...

No, it's the feel of the game. You flip discs but those discs do not give you new moves to choose from because they just turned neutral.

Certainly, the feel of the game is very different from normal reversi. If anything one of my complaints about reversi is that things can change too wildly. Then again, were it to be too similar, it would hardly be worth inventing.

First of all, thanks for the link.

The proposal is very interesting but it’s not the first Reversi variant I’ve seen using neutral discs. For example, I remember some variants using the Zillions of Games system, "Yin-Yang Reversi", I think it was the name. About the physics, you have more than enough with dices, and we could think in other possibilities : )

The link won't be there for ever (not least as that's a DHCP IP address, but tends to stay stable for months at a time). I need to re-do my website configuration, and it will eventually sit somewhere under http://fatphil.org/

From the look of the board at http://www.oocities.org/jjjlll_77/var3.html, yin-yang was indeed similar. It seems that yin-yang can act as either colour. (Mine's more like an actual neutral piece, which as Tas says slows the game down.)

Some years ago I made a site with many Othello boards and variations.
Here there is Rolit, a Othello board able to play with more than two colors:
ROLIT
There are also many other variations and programs for you to have fun :)