WELCOME TO ISREVER
by Maria Seghete
and Deanna Laufer
About ISREVER
Welcome to our ISREVER Game !!! Our game is a video game that follows the Othello (or Reversi) game and that can be played on any regular television.
ISREVER is a strategy board game with two different levels of difficulty for beginner and more advanced users and that will challenege your mind to the extreme. Our AI is based on a strategy long thought out by our experieneced ISREVER players and will offer even the more experienced players a real challenge !!!!
This project encompasses various design techniques and the use of different hardware: a SEGA controller, an NTSC television interface, and efficient microcontroller programming.
How to Play
Each ISREVER piece has a black side and a white side. On one players turn, he must place one piece on the board with your color facing up. He must place the piece so that an opponent’s piece, or a row of opponent’s pieces, is flanked by his pieces. All of the opponent’s pieces between your pieces are then turned over to become the current players’ color.
For example, suppose a player is white, and there is a row of black pieces with one white piece on its end. A player can place a white piece on the other end of the black row and capture all the white pieces between his old piece and his new piece.
The object of the game is to own more pieces than the opponent when the game is over. The game is over when neither player has a move. Usually, this means the board is full.
A player can capture vertical, horizontal, and diagonal rows of pieces and more than one row at once. In the picture below, if white places a piece where the red arrow is pointing, then all the black pieces in the three rows indicated by red lines will be captured.
The board starts with two pieces for each player and a player can place a piece only if he can capture at least a piece from the other player. If no such move is available the player has to pass. Below are shown the board at the beginning of a game and then the board during a game. It is white’s turn and in red are shown all white’s options to play and the black pieces it would capture in each of the places he could play.
To allow the players to place a piece, we have a cursor that they can move up and down using a Sega Genesis controller.
High Level Design
ISREVER displays an initial menu on the television where users can chose the level of difficulty they want by pressing either B or C on their sega controller. Once they have chosen an option, the microcontroller AI either plays using the easy algorithm or the hard algorithm. Both take into account the number of pieces of the other players’ to be flipped, but the hard algorithm also assigns weights to squares on the board which are more desirable.
For example, the corners have a very high weight because they are key places and can never be recaptured by the opponent. The boxes right next to the corner have a negative weight because placing a piece there could give the opponent the possibility of capturing a corner. The edge spots have also higher weights because they are harder to recapture by the opponent.
After the user choses their level, the playing board is drawn and they get a message saying what color they are and which button to use to select. At the bottom of the screen there is a count that keeps track of the number of white and black pieces, and at the top of the screen there is also a display that tells the user whether they are playing at the hard or easy level. The user can move around the board by using a + cross, which is controlled by the direction pad on the controller.
To allow the user to follow the moves of the virtual player, we are displaying an X cursor where the microcontroller will move and we are using a small delay after to allow the player to notice the pieces that the computer took. In case one of the players does not have a move, it is the other player’s turn until a possible move becomes available.
For more detail: ISREVER (Reversi) video game
