Back
⚫ ⚪ ⚫ ⚪

Reversi
online with a friend

"A minute to learn, a lifetime to master." Trap your opponent's discs and they flip to your colour — but the board can reverse itself entirely in the final few moves.

▶ Play ReversiFree · no signup · just share a link

How to play
  1. The game starts with four discs in the centre, two of each colour. Black moves first.
  2. Place a disc so that it traps a straight line of your opponent's discs between your new disc and another one of yours. Every trapped disc flips to your colour.
  3. You may only play a move that flips at least one disc. Legal squares are marked for you with a dot.
  4. If you have no legal move, your turn is skipped. When neither player can move, or the board is full, the player with more discs wins.

Strategy & tips
  • Corners are permanent. A disc in a corner can never be flipped, because nothing can trap it. Corners are the most valuable squares on the board and they anchor entire edges.
  • Avoid the squares next to corners. Playing beside an empty corner usually hands that corner to your opponent — the single most common beginner mistake.
  • Having fewer discs is often good. Counter-intuitive but true: what matters in the middle game is mobility, the number of legal moves you have. Fewer discs often means more options.
  • Don't grab discs early. Flipping large numbers in the opening feels great and leaves you with a rigid position and nowhere to go. The score at move 20 tells you almost nothing.

Where it comes from

Reversi dates to 1880s England, but the modern version — fixed starting position, standard 8×8 board — was popularised in Japan in the 1970s under the name Othello, chosen for the play's theme of black and white turning on each other. The famous tagline, "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master", is the honest truth: the rules fit on a napkin and the strategy fills books.