Reversi vs Go

People pair these two because both use black and white pieces on a grid and both are about controlling space. The comparison falls apart the moment you look at what a move actually does.

The numbers

Complexity figures are the standard published estimates and vary a little with the counting method. The scale of the gap does not.

The capture rules are opposites

In Go you place a stone and it stays there. It only leaves the board if your opponent surrounds the whole group it belongs to, cutting off every empty point next to it. Capture removes stones permanently.

In Reversi nothing is ever removed. You place a disc so that a straight, unbroken line of your opponent's discs is trapped between the new disc and one you already own, and every trapped disc flips to your colour. The same disc can change hands ten times in a game.

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That difference drives everything else. Because Reversi discs flip, the score swings wildly and means nothing until the last move. Because Go stones stay, a Go position accumulates: what you built on move thirty is often still standing on move two hundred.

The board fills, versus the board fills up

A Reversi game ends when neither player can move, which is usually when all 64 squares are occupied. There is a hard limit of 60 moves after the four starting discs, and every move adds one disc. How a game ends.

Go has no such limit. The game ends by agreement, when both players pass in turn, and large parts of the board are usually left empty on purpose. Empty space that you control is the point of Go; empty space in Reversi is just squares nobody has reached yet.

Passing means different things

In Go, passing is a legal option at any time and it is how the game finishes: two consecutive passes and you count up. In Reversi you are never allowed to pass while you have a legal move, and a forced pass is a bad sign rather than a decision.

How hard each one is

Reversi is easy to start and hard to master. A child learns the rules in a minute, and the difficulty comes from a counter-intuitive fact: owning more discs in the middle of the game is usually bad for you. Mobility and parity take a while to feel.

Go is harder to start and much harder to master. The rules are short but the scoring, life and death, and the concept of a group being alive all take real effort. In exchange you get a game whose depth is effectively bottomless.

The computer story tells you the same thing. Strong Reversi programs beat the best humans from the late 1990s, and in 2023 the whole game was weakly solved: with no mistakes on either side the result is a draw. What that means. Go held out until 2016 and needed a different kind of program to crack, and even now nothing has come close to solving it.

Which should you play?

• You have twenty minutes. Reversi. A full game fits into a coffee break and you can learn while playing. Play now.
• You want a game you can study for a decade. Go. Reversi is deep, but Go is deeper and there is more written about it.
• You like tight, tactical calculation. Reversi. The endgame is a counting problem you can solve exactly, and it feels wonderful when you do. Endgame strategy.
• You like shape and intuition. Go. Much more of it is judgement rather than calculation.
• You want a game your family will actually play. Reversi. Almost everyone has met it, and nobody needs a tutorial.

What they do have in common

• Two players, black and white, and black moves first in both.
• No dice, no cards, nothing hidden. Both are pure skill.
• Both are played competitively worldwide with national federations and a world championship.
• Both reward thinking about the whole board rather than the fight in front of you.
• Both punish greed. Grabbing everything in sight loses in each.

Related pages

• Othello vs chess, a closer comparison than this one.
• Reversi vs Othello, one game, two names.
• Games like Reversi, ten more to try.
• The rules, if you want to start now.