Homemade game board detecting different player pieces

[MrTEAP]

I am creating an electronic game board for PowerGrid and I want the board to detect which player the piece is related to. i.e. when a player places a piece on the board it adds a plus 1 to their count of cities powered. I was going to use a simple LDR to detect when a piece was placed but need the pieces to be player specific. 

I was wondering if this was possible with some kind of simple switch system? I am happy to make changes to the wooden playing pieces but bear in mind the playing pieces are approx 1x1x1.5cm (LxWxH).

Open to any ideas!

 

[admin2]

Is there one specific place where the pieces are placed? or distributed across the board? If't it's one you could use RFID technology but again the constrain is your pieces as they are small. The smaller RFID tag i found is 25mm in diameter.

 

[MrTEAP]

There are specific places the pieces are placed. Are you suggesting placing the tags in/on the pieces and have the reader in the board? If the pieces were placed within close proximity with each other would that affect it or not as they'd all be coded slightly differently?

 

[admin2]

I am suggesting to have a reader in place where the pieces will be placed and each piece will have an RFID tag attached. So when the piece come close to the reader it will register itself. Each RFID has it's own ID and will not interfere with each other piece and will interact with the reader only. The only issue i see is if one piece is placed in the range of the reader and another piece is coming in. In this case maybe the reader maybe gets confused, but this is something to be tried.