Othello

The Board Games

The Game of Annexation

In 1870, an Englishman named James Mollett published a game he called The Game of Annexation. The rules seem to have already been the same, but the board was cross-shaped.

Reversi

In 1888, Reversi was patented by Lewis Waterman, using Mollett's rules, but a standard 8×8 checkers/chess board. Ravensburger published it since 1898 (according to other sources, 1893). Traditionally, Reversi uses green and red stones, with red always moving first. Ravensburger sometimes used blue and red or yellow and red stones. According to The Board Game Book by R.C. Bell (1979), the original colors were blue and yellow, and the game was played on standard Checkers boards, which in England are always 8×8. Later seperate Reversi boards were printed, which replaced the checkerboard design with a line grid and marked the starting squares and sometimes the corners.

The Rules of Reversi

Red always moves first.
If on your turn you cannot enclose and flip at least one opposing disc, your turn is forfeited and your opponent plays again.
You may not forfeit your turn if a move is available.
A disc may enclose any number of discs in one or more rows at the same time; horizontally, vertically or diagonally.
Discs may only be enclosed as a direct result of a move.
All discs enclosed in any one move must be flipped. (According to the Ravensburger rules, only one row may be flipped. As far as I know, this rule has never been used in any computer implementation.)
If a player flips a disc by mistake, the mistake may be corrected as long as the opponent has not made a subsequent move.
Once a disc is placed on a square, it can never be moved to another square.
If a player runs out of discs and the game is not over, the opponent must provide the player a disc to use in each subsequent turn.
When there are no more legal moves to be made, the game is over. The discs are counted and the player with the majority of discs showing his/her color is the winner.

Originally the game had the following opening protocol:

The board starts empty.
A playing piece is tossed (like a coin toss). The winner of the toss elects to go 1st or 2nd.
The 1st player places a piece (their color up) on ANY of the four central squares.
The 2nd player places another piece (their color up) on any of the 3 remaining central squares.
The 1st player places another piece (their color up) on either of the 2 remaining central squares.
The 2nd player places another piece (their color up) on the last central square.

There are actually only two possibilities to place the first four stones: so that the colors are in parallel rows, or diagonally opposed. The latter is known as the modern opening.

Othello

In 1972, Goro Hasegawa re-created it as Othello, using black and white stones on a green board. Black moves first, just like in Go, and opposite to the chess tradition. Othello became hugely successful in Japan, where it is also sometimes referred to as Genpei-go, and is nowadays better known than chess. There have been world championships since 1977. The champions have nearly always been Japanese (Hideshi Tamenori alone won it six times), occasionally French, lately increasingly from the US.

Computer Implementations

For computer programs, Othello has been more popular as a name than Reversi, while both color schemes are about equally popular, if not completely new ones are used. Below are a number of implementations you can download. There is a complete chronological list as well, and a screenshot gallery.

Othello/Reversi for DOS