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Popular Board Games. No.2- Othello

Also called Reversi, Othello is a strategic board game which I have thoroughly enjoyed since childhood. I had an old collapsible set with magnetic pieces, most of which have gone missing by now. After a game, my uncles or aunts and I would pile up our coin-like pieces into towers to find out who won. It was the stuff of childhood memories, of many summers spent at our house in the mountains.

Othello is a game played by two people. It consists of a green, eight-by-eight square grid board and two-sided pieces, black and white. Players take turns, placing a piece (starting on the center of the board) in each of the grids until they can anchor their pieces, thereby “eating” or reversing the opponents pieces in between. When the board is full, the player who has “reversed” the most pieces wins the game.

According to Wikipedia, Othello’s origins came from two sources:

“Reversi was originally invented around 1880 by two Englishmen, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett, and gained considerable popularity in England at the end of the 19th century. In 1898, the well-known German games publisher Ravensburger started producing the game as one of its first titles.

The modern rule set, now universally accepted (except by those who know only the still-produced Ravensburger edition), originated in Mito, Ibaraki, Japan as Othello in the 1970s.

Mattel produces Reversi equipment under the name Othello. Anjar Co licenses the registered trademark Othello from Tsukuda Original.

Goro Hasegawa, who wrote How to win at Othello, popularised the game in Japan in 1975.

It took its name from the Shakespearean play Othello, the Moor of Venice.”

The strategy of Othello is not disimilar to that of Chess, although obviously a much more simplistic game. You want to plan ahead at least two or three moves and try to “box” your opponent into leaving you the best spots. Generally, the player who controls the four corner spots on the board will win the game- as this will meaan that the end of each line with be that player’s color and thus everything in between- both vertically, diagonally and horizontally. Before securing these four corner spots, you should initially try to get your pieces on the edges- and build towards that goal.