Games

Reversi

Also Known As Othello Othello is the standardized, trademarked ruleset of the same game, codified in Japan in 1973 with a fixed starting position not required by the original Reversi patents.

Citation Formats

General Reference

Sport and Games Atlas. "Reversi." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-sport.interactiveatlas.org/games/reversi.

APA Style

Sport and Games Atlas. (n.d.). Reversi. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-sport.interactiveatlas.org/games/reversi

BibTeX

@misc{sportandgamesatlas-reversi,
  author = {Sport and Games Atlas},
  title = {Reversi},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-sport.interactiveatlas.org/games/reversi},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Reversi is a two player abstract strategy board game played on an eight by eight board in which players flip the opponent's disks by trapping them between their own, aiming to hold the majority of disks when the board fills. The ancestral English game emerged in the 1880s amid a priority dispute between two claimed inventors, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett, each of whom patented a version. The fixed diagonal starting position and standardized ruleset played worldwide today were codified and trademarked as Othello by Goro Hasegawa in Japan in 1973, and it is under that name that the game reached its largest modern audience.

Facts

Disputed

Origin Year

1883

1883 falls within the decade the ancestral English game Reversi emerged amid a patent priority dispute between Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett; the standardized Othello ruleset played worldwide today was codified and trademarked in Japan in 1973.

Originating Region

England 1

Game Type

Board game, abstract strategy 1

Governing Body

World Othello Federation 2

Learn More

Two Inventors, One Board: The Reversi Patent Dispute

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Reversi arrived in England in the 1880s attached to a genuine dispute over who actually invented it. Two men, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett, each claimed the idea and each secured a patent for a version of the game within a short span of years, and the historical record does not cleanly resolve which of them, if either, deserves sole credit. Board game history from this period is full of such tangles, since a simple enough idea, flipping an opponent's disks by trapping them, could plausibly occur to more than one person working in the same commercial toy market at the same time.

What the original patents did not settle, and what later Japanese codification would, was the starting position. Victorian Reversi allowed players to place their first four pieces anywhere they liked before flipping began, an open setup that produces a noticeably different, less analyzed game than the fixed diagonal starting square that every modern Othello game begins from.

From Reversi to Othello: How a Trademark Standardized a Game

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Goro Hasegawa did not invent the flipping disk mechanic when he introduced Othello in Japan in 1973; he standardized it. Where Victorian Reversi let each player place their first four pieces freely, Hasegawa fixed every game to begin from the same diagonal four square arrangement, removing an entire category of opening decisions and turning attention toward the corner and edge control strategy that competitive Othello is now known for. He trademarked the name and the fixed ruleset together, which meant that a game manufacturer could not simply sell Reversi under the old open rules and call it Othello.

The trademark strategy worked. Othello became the dominant global name and ruleset for the game within a generation, to the point that many players who grew up with the fixed starting square have never encountered the older open Reversi rules at all. The World Othello Federation, founded in 2005, governs competition under Hasegawa's standardized rules, not the Victorian original, which is why this atlas records Othello as an alias of Reversi rather than as a wholly separate game.

Cross-Tradition Connections