The history of Reversi and Othello

A Victorian game with a disputed inventor

Reversi appeared in England in 1883, and immediately produced an argument about who had invented it. Two men — Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett — each claimed the game and each accused the other of copying it, conducting the dispute in the games press of the day. Neither claim was ever settled.

What is clear is that the game was published and sold in London in the 1880s, that the established firm Jaques of London put out an edition, and that it was popular enough to cross the Channel and appear in German editions before the turn of the century.

Victorian Reversi differed from the modern game in one significant way: the first four discs were not fixed. Players placed them in the centre as part of their opening moves, which produced a wider and less balanced set of starts. The modern fixed opening came much later.

Japan, 1971: the game gets a name and a boom

The modern history begins with Goro Hasegawa, who in 1971 presented the game in Japan under the name Othello, with the starting position fixed and the rules tidied. The name is a piece of marketing with a literary excuse: Shakespeare's Othello is a Moor among Venetians, black and white in conflict, and the green board is the field on which they meet.

The Japanese launch was a phenomenon. Millions of sets sold within a few years, a national championship followed, and the World Othello Championship began in 1977 — making Othello one of very few games to go from commercial product to international competition in under a decade.

Competitive Othello has since become genuinely global. Japan remains strong, but world champions have come from the United States, Europe, Thailand, Singapore and elsewhere, and the annual world championship is one of the best-run events in abstract games.

Logistello, and a game solved in 2023

Othello turned out to be very well suited to computers: the board is small, the rules are simple, and the endgame can be searched exhaustively. Programs were strong by the late 1980s and unbeatable soon after.

The decisive match came in 1997, when Michael Buro's program Logistello beat the reigning world champion Takeshi Murakami 6–0. It was a more complete defeat than Deep Blue managed against Kasparov in the same year, and it effectively ended human–computer competition in Othello.

Logistello also changed how humans play. Its evaluation was built on mobility and pattern-based positional features rather than disc count, and its opening book — assembled by automatically playing out and evaluating variations — became a study resource for the human elite.

Solved

In 2023, Hiroki Takizawa published a computational proof that 8×8 Othello is a draw with perfect play from both sides. Othello joined checkers on the short list of classic games whose outcome is known — while remaining, for humans, exactly as difficult as it was before.

Why such a simple game survived

Othello has one rule, one piece type and no hidden information, and it has survived 140 years of competition from games with far more content. Three reasons stand out.

• The board can reverse in one move. No lead feels safe, which keeps casual players engaged and makes spectating genuinely tense.
• The skill ceiling is enormous. The gap between a good club player and a world champion is as wide as in chess, because everything depends on properties — mobility, parity, stability — that are invisible on the board.
• It teaches a counter-intuitive lesson. Wanting fewer pieces than your opponent is a genuinely surprising idea, and games that teach a surprising idea tend to stay around.

Common questions