How to Play Reversi (Othello) — Complete Strategy Guide
Reversi (also called Othello when sold by Pressman) is a 19th-century English game that became popular worldwide after a 1971 Japanese rebrand. It’s an 8×8 board, 64 black-and-white discs, and one rule: place a disc to sandwich the opponent’s discs in a line, and all sandwiched discs flip to your colour. Sounds simple. Is actually deep. Here’s how to play and how to win.
The basic rules
Board starts with 4 discs in the centre: two white, two black, arranged in an X pattern. Black moves first. On your turn, you must place a disc so that at least one straight line of opponent discs is sandwiched between your new disc and an existing disc of your colour.
Every disc in those sandwiched lines flips to your colour. If you can’t make a legal move, you pass. Game ends when neither player can move. Player with the most discs wins.
Strategy 1: Don’t be greedy
The biggest beginner mistake: flipping the most discs each turn. This is almost always wrong.
Why? Because the more discs you have early, the more frontier you create — empty squares adjacent to your discs. Frontier squares are where your opponent plays to flip you. Minimising your disc count in the opening is actually correct.
Strategy 2: Corners are king
Discs in the four corners can never be flipped — there’s no opposite side to sandwich them from. Every disc you place adjacent to a corner gives your opponent a route to the corner.
Avoid placing on the C-squares (squares diagonally adjacent to corners — a2, b1, g1, h2, etc.) and especially the X-squares (the four squares directly diagonal to corners — b2, g2, b7, g7). These are tactical traps. Most beginners lose by playing these too early.
Strategy 3: Mobility wins
Mobility = the number of legal moves available to you. In Reversi, the player with more options usually wins. Force your opponent into positions where they have only 1-2 legal moves; your CPU choice should be the move that minimises THEIR mobility while preserving yours.
This is why greedy disc-flipping loses: each big flip you make often forces you to give up mobility for the next 3-5 turns.
Strategy 4: Edge stability
Edge squares are valuable because they’re harder to flip than central squares. A row of your discs along an edge with a corner anchor is essentially permanent.
Don’t break your own edge structure by placing in the centre when you have a clean edge. Solid edges + corner anchors = permanent discs = wins.
Strategy 5: Endgame counting
In the last 10-15 moves, exact counting matters. Calculate every move’s exact disc gain and loss for the next 2-3 plies. Use a known table of “opening moves to avoid” — there are roughly 20 named openings (Diagonal, Perpendicular, Parallel, Tiger, etc.).
Practice
Play our Reversi on Medium and Hard. Medium uses depth-4 minimax with positional weights; Hard uses depth-6. Beat Hard consistently and you’re playing at roughly 1,400 Elo Reversi — strong amateur.
More
Reversi has a smaller variant: 6×6. Try Reversi 6×6 for faster games with deeper search. See our how to win at chess for related abstract-strategy depth.
