Puzzle & Board Game Calculators
Analysers for positions you are already stuck in. Set up the board as it stands, and these tools tell you the best move available, what the alternatives are worth, and who is actually winning — with the reasoning shown, not just an answer.
Checkers Best Move Calculator
Set up any checkers or draughts position and get the best move in standard notation, the ranked alternatives with scores, and a readout of who stands better. Handles forced captures, multi-jump chains and crowning.
Reversi / Othello Best Move Calculator
Enter any Othello position and get the best move plus the thing disc count hides: a breakdown into corners, mobility and frontier discs. Flags X-squares and C-squares that would give a corner away.
Nine Men’s Morris Best Move Calculator
Set up any Morris position — placing, moving or flying — and get the best move plus a breakdown of mills, potential mills and mobility. Spots double mills and wins by blocking.
4 in a Row Best Move Calculator
Drop pieces into columns to build any position, then get the best column, all seven ranked, and a warning for the columns that hand your opponent the win directly above.
Gomoku Best Move Calculator
Build any five-in-a-row position on the full 15×15 board and get the best move — plus every open three, four and double threat named for both players.
Nim Calculator
The only solver here that proves rather than searches. Enter any heaps and it settles the position exactly, lists every winning move, and shows the binary Nim-sum working. Normal and misère play.
What these calculators are for
A game you can play is not the same thing as a position you can analyse. Most puzzle sites give you the first and nothing like the second, so when you are halfway through a game on a real board — or stuck on a puzzle from a newspaper — there is nowhere to type it in.
That is the gap these fill. Each tool takes a position rather than a game, runs the same engine that powers the playable version on this site, and shows its working: the ranked list of every legal move, what each one is worth, and where the number comes from.
What they will not do
None of these are perfect oracles, and each tool says plainly where its own limits are. In general they search a fixed amount of time and report the depth they reached, they use a hand-written scoring table rather than a solved database, and they judge only the position in front of them — they have no record of how you got there, so they cannot spot a repetition or a draw claim.
Where a tool is guessing, it says so. That is more useful than a confident answer that happens to be wrong.
More calculators on the way
The plan is to cover the games on this site that people most often want a second opinion on:
- Shikaku
- Sudoku
- Kakuro
In the meantime, everything on the site is playable for free at Online Puzzle Games, and there are strategy guides beneath every game.