Review: Othello – A minute to learn, a lifetime to master!
For the purpose of this review I was gifted Othello. All views and opinions are 100% my own.
My girls and I absolutely playing games. Just last week I was teaching them both how to play Chinese checkers, and before I knew it they were beating me time and time again!
Drafts, backgammon and chess are other favourites of ours, and I think that’s why we love Othello just as much!
As per the title of this review, Othello really does take just one minute to learn, but it takes a lifetime to master. The object of the game is to trap and capture your opponent by placing your disks on the board. The lead can change with the flip of a disk in this classic fast-paced strategy game.
Our twins are seven years old and they quickly got the hang of what they needed to do and where to place their disks in order to maximise the number of their opponents disks they could trap in one go!
This is a two player game and it is so much fun! The winner is the person to have the most disks of their colour face up on the board at the end of the game.
Each player starts with two disks placed on the board as pictured below.
Black goes first, so they could place their next disk as pictured below.
As you can see they’ve sandwiched the white disk which means it’s trapped so the player can now turn the disk over from white to black as pictured below.
The game continues like this until all disks have been played. The winner is the one with the most disks of their colour face up.
It’s pretty addictive and a real test of strategies! Throughout the game I was trying to think up different ways to trap the most disks, and by the looks of my girls faces when I played them both, so were they!
Othello is so much fun and a great way to get kids thinking. They could even be the next UK Othello Junior Champion! Would’t that be something! You too could be an Othello Junior Champion!
The UK Junior Othello Champs are for children under the age of 15 and will be held in Cambridge on 21st September 2019. The overall winner of the UK event will receive an all-expenses paid trip to the World Championships in Hong Kong in October! If you fancy entering the UK Champs then you can download the info and entry form here!
We really enjoyed playing Othello and I know that we’ll continue to play it for years to come. I’d really like to see a travel edition released so that we could take it with us on the go. It’d be a great game to play when camping or on a train, car or plane!
Othello is available to buy from all good toy stores. For stockist information, visit www.johnadams.co.uk.
