Reversi

I am the unofficial Scottish Reversi Champion. I say this because I have beaten every other Scottish person I have ever played at Reversi. I do not believe there is an Official Scottish Reversi Champion. If you are the Official Scottish Reversi Champion, please contact me so we can arrange a game.

Reversi is a board game for two players. It's normally played on an 8×8 grid, and the objective is to end up with more stones than your opponent.

Reversi is sometimes known as Othello.

Playing online

Most users of Windows XP will be familiar with Internet Reversi. This is a good way of finding a human opponent for a quick game, but I find it lacking in several ways:

It places too much emphasis on instant responses and snap judgments (not always a bad thing). I prefer taking time to think carefully about my next move.
It's extremely impersonal; you have no idea who you're playing against, and "chat" is limited to a few phrases from a pop-up menu.
There are no rankings, or other ways of building up a persistent rating, so it's hard to tell how good you are compared to others.

The solution to these problems is BrainKing.com. You can sign up for free and play Reversi with me! My username is gborland. Although it's free to sign up and play games, paying members have access to more features. This is one of the very few web sites for which I'm willing to pay a subscription.

Software

Computers tend to be much harder to beat than other people. It's relatively easy for software to work out all possible moves from a given position, and your possible responses, for several moves into the future; it's really hard for people to do this.

The best Reversi software I've come across is WZebra. I find it a lot more challenging than most human opponents.