Othello (Official Othello)

The Official Othello is a board game set for two players. Its board is a square tray of dark plastic, about 40 centimetres across, holding a green playing field ruled into sixty-four squares, with four small dots marking the inner corners and the name moulded into the frame. Sixty-four flat discs, each black on one face and white on the other and about 35 millimetres across, are kept in two lidded trays beside it. Play begins with four discs set crosswise in the centre.

The rules are simple. Each player places a disc so as to trap a line of the opponent's discs between two of his own, and turns the trapped discs over to his colour; at the end the player with more discs wins. A game of the same kind, reversi, had been played in England since the 1880s. Goro Hasegawa, a salesman from Mito, developed his version in Tokyo around 1970, at first with milk-bottle caps, and his father named it after Shakespeare's Othello, in which the Moor and Desdemona, black and white, are turned against each other on a green field.

The toy maker Tsukuda launched it in April 1973 at 2,200 yen. The box, aimed at adults, showed a game played among cigarettes and a lighter. After a television campaign it sold 380,000 sets in three months and more than a million the next year, and it reached the United States through Gabriel in the mid-1970s. A national championship preceded the launch; a world championship followed in 1977.

Tsukuda's successors merged into MegaHouse in 2005, which now makes the game. Alongside magnetic, folding, travel and character versions, it still sells the first set as the Official Othello, the board used in official tournaments. The discs keep the size of Hasegawa's bottle caps, and the green field the colour of the play.