Talk:Reversi

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Contents 1 Weblink 2 Reversi v. Go 3 Othello v. Reversi 4 Othello, black starts 5 Position visualisations 6 Ultra-thick border 7 Row numbers 8 Differences between Othello and Go 9 Size of board 10 reversi history 11 Ehrgeiz 12 Corners

[edit] Weblink

The site: http://www.usothello.com/Downloads/beginner.pdf which hosted "Othello: From Beginner to Master, Randy Fang, 2003" (mentioned in the literature catergory) seems to be dead to me. If it doesn't resurface in the next few days, we should probably remove the link.

[edit] Reversi v. Go

"In both appearance and in overall theme, the game resembles Go."

Well, both are two-player board games played on a square grid, and in each one player is associated with the color black and the other white. There ends the resemblance. Salsa Shark 07:46, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Although I'm absolutely fine with the line being removed as it was, I don't know if that's really true. The point of both games is to have as much "territory" on the board as possible. Each turn consists of placing a gamepiece down. You can conquer the other person's spaces. Granted, the implementation is different in each game, but they're certianly members of the same genre. It might be similar to comparing Checkers to Chess, although I'm not actually too well informed on Go. UserGoogol 07:04, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Salsa Shark is right. Go is played on a 19x19 (?) board, pieces are placed at the intersections, not on the squares. Reversi is played on an 8x8 board, pieces are placed on the squares. The rules are completely different. Tactics and strategy are completely different. The game complexity of Go is orders of magnitude higher than that of Reversi. Lupo 09:46, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Othello v. Reversi

I'm posting this in the hopes that somebody has it on their watchlist and can fill me in on some of the logic that went into the article.

At the beginning there's a reference to a "family" of games, giving the idea that Othello and Reversi might be two members of this family. But the article then can't make up its mind whether it's discussing Othello or Reversi, and never actually explains the difference between them.

There is also no real discussion of the origin of the game, other than to state Goro Hasegawa's claim and to hint at a controversy. Perhaps a concern for NPOV prevented the authors from describing the issue in more detail.

To my knowledge, the story is: Reversi was invented in the 19th century, and there is ample documentation of this. It was even patented and marketed in the US under that name. In the late 60s or early 70s Martin Gardner described the game (as Reversi) in one of his columns. Around 1974, Hasegawa introduced his game under the name Othello. I see no reason to doubt his contention that he invented the game independently.

When someone mentioned this prior art to Hasegawa, his reaction was defensive, and (if I have the story right) he essentially denied that Reversi and Othello were the same game. But the only difference I was able to discern at the time was that in Reversi, the starting position is an empty board, and the first four moves are confined to the center four cells. Thus, in Reversi, there are essentially two lines of play in the first four moves, only one of which is legal in Othello. Othello's starting position has the first four pieces already placed, in a way that corresponds to one of the two possible openings in Reversi.

I do not know of any other difference between the games, nor do I know what Hasegawa's current opinion is. As far as I am concerned, he gets full credit for reintroducing and popularizing the modern game, but the existence of an almost-identical game for something like 90 years before that is still interesting and should be reported, especially if the primary name of the article is "Reversi".

I'm also not sure what other games the authors of this article would place in the same family.

Anyway, I think it might be a good idea to make more of this history explicit. We could also do the research to find out original patent numbers, and give more detail about who marketed it (Parker Bros, if I recall correctly).

ACW 01:08, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Reversi was produced and marketed by the German company Ravensburger since 1898, see e.g. [1] (search the Ravensburger website, if the link stops working or google for "reversi ravensburger geschichte".

But Reversi as produced by Ravensburger and Othello have some significant rule differences. Besides the two mentioned, the most important one, is that Reversi only allows two flip one enclosed line of enemy pieces, not all.

Pjacobi 07:19, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm surprised to hear of this rule difference; it doesn't match my own memory. Somebody should go to the Gardner column and see what it says. It was in the April, 1960 issue of Scientific American, and was collected in Gardner's New Mathematical Diversions From Scientific American in 1966. My memory is that the game described there already included multiple-row captures. Of course, the Ravensburger version might have only permitted single-row captures, but the point is that the multiple-row rule was already in print as part of Reversi in 1960, more than a decade before Othello was ever heard of. (Or I'm going prematurely senile, which is also very possible.)

ACW 21:48, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

As Ravensburger gave the origin as traditional, it may be the case that only Ravensburger has the single-row flip rule and the traditional rules vary, just as traditional rules for Skat and Doppelkopf. --Pjacobi 22:51, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

06:15, 24, Jan 2006

The one row flip rule is a variant (much like "anti" or reverse reversi - trying to get the least disks is). There are 2 other major differences (other than the starting position as mentioned in other comments). First, in Othello, when you pass the rules state that you give a disk to your opponent (so that they can play again and not run out of disks). In Reversi, each player starts with 32 disks and is only allowed to play 32 moves regardless (a minor distinction most of the time but occasionally would make a big difference in an endgame). Secondly, Othello is trademarked and as such, most online gaming sites refer to it as Reversi in order to avoid having to pay licensing fees. Sadly, all of the online gaming sites I know of have the Othello rules but name it Reversi - which adds to people's confusion.

[edit] Othello, black starts

1. Moste resourceses on the net tell me that black starts in Othello, but her on wikipedia im surprised to find that the opposite is stated; is this a bug? 2. As for the "Othello v. Reversi" discussion, I think Othello and Reversi are two different games, where reversi is based on some old rules and Othello is based on som new ones. So should Othello not have its own article at Othello and Reversi have its article at Reversi?. Quackor 14:20, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The reason to keep it as just one article is that the rules of Othello and Reversi are almost identical. Almost everything you can say about one applies to the other. If we split the article into two, the two would share the majority of their content; that's bad encyclopedia engineering, it seems to me.

That having been said, I can see an argument for splitting the article in the following way: have a brief article at "Othello", in which we place the publication history of that game; under rules, we have a pointer to this article, followed by notes explaining the minor differences. In this article, we would have a sentence saying that in the 1970s a version of Reversi called Othello was produced, and have a link to the other article.

But keeping them together doesn't bother me either. I can't imagine anyone wanting to read one without the other. Keeping them together will inconvenience nobody. ACW 19:06, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Black does start in both Reversi and Othello. --Whiterox 04:24, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)

Noone plays Reversi with the Reversi rules. Many websites give the possibility to play "Reversi" but only by the name. What actually is been played is Othello rules. The article should be about Othello and should include a history part mentioning that Reversi has similiar rules. There are Othello World Championships and the World Othello Association is being founded in 2005-2006. Matthias Berg, 19:15, 26 Nov 2005 (CET)

I'd have no objections to that approach either. I have no particular preference toward Reversi or Othello. It feels to me like the Othello rules merely ironed out a few glitches and resolved a few ambiguities in the Reversi rules. Hasegawa was a careful game engineer of the modern school, so that's just what you'd expect from him. ACW 02:28, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Position visualisations

Arise, ye article writers from your slumbers!
Arise, ye prisoners of having no template,
The reason for rejoice now thunders
And at last ends the age of can't contemplate!
Away, with your funny position denotations
Article writers, rejoice, rejoice!
There is now the ultimate position visualisation
This template do I hoist...

In short, take a look at the examples and demonstrations shown shown at Template:weiqi-image, and I could very very easily adapt it for reversi. What would you think? -- Natalinasmpf 10:17, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

That would be nice. ℚuackor 20:08, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

I created a Reversi board template as a modified version of the Chess board template. I modified the board diagrams to use this template. The template is fairly simple to use: Just copy an existing template and make the changes that you need. Spaces represent empty squares, "X" represents a dark piece, "x" represents a "ghost" dark piece where a piece may be placed, and "O"/"o" represent the same for the light pieces. Val42 21:15, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

This is outstanding work, and enables Othello experts to extend the article with further discussions of strategy with very little effort. I'd like to see game images and discussions from example championship games. Thanks, Val42! ACW 02:31, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be worth to create an animated gif-file, which illustrates about 10 moves in a possible Reversi game? 24.26.178.253 21:04, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ultra-thick border

In "Othello World Championship", we have <table border=100>, creating a rather ugly 100-pixel-thick border. Is this desirable? —DemonThing talk 06:42, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Row numbers

A recent anonymous editor went through the sample opening positions and reversed the row numbers, putting row 8 at the top and row 1 at the bottom. The main illustration has the row numbers increasing downward, so the diagrams are now inconsistent with the illustration. Can the editor please present some motivation for this change? Is it customary to number the rows increasing upward? ACW 22:19, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Row numbers should be increasing downward. That is kind of Othello standard you can find in (almost?) all Othello books and most online representations. Since the editor hasn't posted his motivation (and even if he did) i suggest to replace these "wrong" pictures. To verify my "opinion" check out: http://othellogateway.strategicviewpoints.com/rose/book.pdf (most recent good othello book written by a former Worldchampion) http://radagast.se/othello/wz42.png (most commonly used othello program)

done. ℚuackor 20:23, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Differences between Othello and Go

I removed the following sentence from the end of the second bulleted point.

For this reason, edges are less important in Go, as rather than areas for flipping other pieces, they simply are another territory.

I found the sentence confusing: Edges are important in Go, but the nature of the importance is quite different. It seemed odd to weigh edge-importance between the two games -- they seem incommensurable.

The whole section is a little rough; I tried to clean it a bit. ACW 16:50, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

The whole comparison of Reversi and Go is off the mark, so I removed it. See the discussion on top of this talk page. There are probably more similarities between Go and Amazons, or between Reversi and Dvonn, and so on. User:193.75.49.7 04 October 2006

[edit] Size of board

I have a pocket "Reversi" game, marketed some years ago by a company called Vini-Game. In the rules, a diagram with the usual 8*8 board is shown, with 4 points marked by dots as in the screen dump in the article. But the actual board supplied (a "suitcase" that also holds the pieces) is 10*10, with no marked points. The pieces are slightly too large for the board, so I suspect it's basically a mistake; perhaps the company happened to have loads of these little suitcases left over from some other product... Has anyone else seen Othello / Reversi boards of non-standard sizes?--Niels Ø 13:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] reversi history

thought you might be interested that in

MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV. AND OF THE REGENCY Being the Secret Memoirs of the Mother of the Regent, MADAME ELIZABETH-CHARLOTTE OF BAVARIA, DUCHESSE D'ORLEANS.

She states when talking of louis XIV :-

'Reversi was the only game at which the King played, and which he liked.'

I have only read the translation at the gutenberg.org site but this puts reversi pre 1767?

This refers to an old French card game which has nothing to do with the board game.  29/01

[edit] Ehrgeiz

The videogame Ehrgeiz, for the playstation, has a mini game that is basically a fast past version of Reversi. Should it be noted somewhere? Anyway I'm going to add it to the Console topic. Delete or edit it if you want. (-Kid. 16:47, 2 March 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Corners

Some user with only an ip address removed the bit about corners in strategy. Since they play a vital part in the strategy of the game, I undid the edit. If I was wrong in doing so, please feel welcome to correct me. vanis314 22:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)