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Flip
Board · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
Trap a line of his discs between two of yours and the whole line turns over. There are no pieces of your own — every disc on the board belongs to whoever flipped it last — and that is why being ahead in the middle of the game usually means you are losing.
Where it comes from
Reversi has one of the pettiest origin stories in board games. Two Englishmen, Lewis Waterman and John Mollett, each claimed to have invented it in 1883, and each publicly called the other a fraud. Mollett had an earlier game, Annexation, from 1870, played on a cross-shaped board; Waterman’s version used an ordinary chessboard, which is the one that survived. The quarrel was never settled, and the first solid printed mention of the game is from 1886.
Then it vanished for most of a century and came back from the other side of the world. In 1971 a Japanese salesman, Goro Hasegawa, patented a version under the name Othello — after the play, with the green board for the field and the black and white discs for the two sides. It is essentially Reversi with a fixed opening position, and it is the name under which almost everybody now knows the game.
It also became, quietly, one of the games where computers passed humans first and most completely. By the late nineties the best programs were beating world champions badly, and for a game this small the reason is simple: humans are bad at counting how a board will look eight moves from now when every disc on it can change colour.
How to play
| Placing | Put a disc so that one or more lines of enemy discs are trapped between it and another of yours. |
|---|---|
| Flipping | Every trapped disc turns to your colour — in every direction at once. |
| Legality | A move that flips nothing is not allowed. If you have no legal move you pass. |
| The end | Board full, or neither side can move. Most discs wins. |
Why the middle is a trap
The instinct of every new player is to flip as many discs as possible every turn, and it is almost exactly wrong. Discs you own in the middle of the board are discs your opponent can flip back. What you actually want is few discs and many options, so that your opponent runs out of safe moves and is forced to open an edge for you.
The corners are the exception that decides games: a disc in a corner can never be flipped, because there is no square beyond it to trap it from. Everything else follows. The four squares diagonally next to the corners are the worst on the board, because playing one hands your opponent the corner.
Three things that help
Take fewer discs, not more. Through the middlegame, the player with fewer discs usually has more moves available, and running out of moves is how games are lost.
Never touch the squares next to a corner until you have to. They are the usual way an even game is thrown away in one move.
The last twelve moves are a different game. Once the board is nearly full, stop thinking about shape and start counting discs, because now the count is the result.