Othello
By Saugi (zuramai) · MIT license. Source · All credits
About Othello
Othello is the classic two-color board game, also known as Reversi, where you flip your opponent's pieces by boxing them in between two of your own. Whoever controls the most squares when the board fills up wins. Simple rules, but the strategy runs deep the longer you play.
How to play
Click an empty square to place your disc and flip any enemy discs it traps.
Rules of Othello
- The board is 8x8 and starts with four discs in the middle, two dark and two light, placed diagonally.
- Dark moves first. A legal move must outflank at least one enemy disc.
- Outflanking means placing a disc so that one or more of the opponent's discs sit in an unbroken line between your new disc and another of your discs, in any of the eight directions.
- Every disc you outflank flips to your colour. Flipped discs can cause no further flips of their own.
- If you have no legal move you must pass. If neither player can move, the game ends.
- The game ends when the board is full or neither side can move. Whoever has more discs showing wins.
- Corners can never be flipped, which is why they decide most games.
Controls
- Choose black or white to start
- Tap a highlighted square to place a disc
What makes it worth playing
- Play against the computer
- Legal moves are highlighted, so the rules teach themselves
- Discs flip along every line your move closes
- Live disc count for both sides
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-08-26.
Tips from playing it
- Corners can never be flipped. Take them and hold them.
- Having the most discs in the middle of the game usually means you are losing. Fewer, better-placed discs win.
- Avoid the squares next to a corner early. They hand the corner to your opponent.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
Chosen because it is genuinely good and its licence (MIT) allows us to host and modify it, which we verified in the project's own files. We host it on our own servers, so it loads straight into the game with no third-party ad code and no pre-roll video. It arrived using a gameplay screenshot as its icon, which looks poor at tile size, so we drew it a proper one. We played it through on a real phone-sized screen on 2026-08-26 before publishing this page, and the screenshots above are from that session rather than from the original project.
More on how we pick and fix these: what we changed in the open-source games and how we test a game.
- Category
- Board
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Players
- One player against the computer.
- Difficulty
- Simple rules, deep strategy
- Typical session
- 5 to 10 minutes a game
- Last tested by us
- 2026-08-26
- Created by
- Saugi (zuramai) (MIT)
