Flip Tide
About Flip Tide
Flip Tide is a disc flipping board game for one player against the computer. The board is eight squares by eight, you and the machine take a colour each, and every disc you place traps a line of the other colour and turns the whole line over. Whoever owns more discs when nobody can move any more takes the game. A move that looks generous in the opening often hands the computer a corner ten turns later, and that is where the thinking lives.
How to play
Pick a side, then tap any square with a ring drawn on it. The rings mark every square where your disc would flip something.
Rules of Flip Tide
- Four discs start in the middle of the board, two of each colour, set corner to corner.
- A move is legal only if it traps at least one unbroken line of the other colour between the disc you place and a disc you already own.
- Every trapped disc in every direction flips, diagonals included.
- Dark plays first, whichever side you chose at the start.
- If you have no legal move the turn passes to the computer and the rings disappear until you do.
- The board fills, or both sides run out of moves, and the side with more discs on the board wins.
- A disc sitting in a corner can never be flipped back, which is why corners decide most games.
- The panel counts your discs and the computer's after every flip, and your best result is kept on the device.
Controls
- Tap either side button to choose your colour
- Tap a ringed square to place a disc
- Tick With Sound for move audio
- Replay deals a fresh board
What makes it worth playing
- Legal moves are drawn straight onto the board as outlines, so you never have to guess at one.
- The computer answers inside a second, which keeps a full game under ten minutes.
- A live count of both sides that updates after every flip, so you can watch a swing happen.
- The board scales to the width of the screen and a tap lands on the square you touched.
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-09-14.
Tips from playing it
- Take a corner the moment one is offered. A corner disc anchors two edges for the rest of the game.
- Stay off the three squares next to a corner in the opening. Playing there is usually an invitation.
- Owning fewer discs in the middle game is fine. What matters is how many legal moves you still have.
- Count the flips before you commit. The move that turns the most discs is rarely the strongest one.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
Two builds of this board game landed on our site doing the same job, so we picked the stronger of the two to be our edition of it and gave it our own name and colours. The table went from the usual green to a tide teal on an aubergine page, and the discs are ink and shell rather than flat black and white. We also fixed the tap handling. The board is drawn at six hundred pixels and shown much smaller on a phone, so taps were landing a square or two away from the one you touched. They land correctly now, which we checked by playing a full game on a phone.
More on how we pick and fix these: how we make our own editions of classic games and how we test a game.
We wrote about this one
- How we make our own editions of classic games. A tableau of cards, a sliding tile square, four discs in a row. Nobody owns those rules. Here is what goes into turning one of them into a game that holds up on a phone.
- Category
- Board
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Players
- One player, with the computer taking the other colour.
- Difficulty
- Easy rules, and the computer punishes a greedy opening.
- Typical session
- Five to ten minutes a game.
- Last tested by us
- 2026-09-14
