A salesman, a reversi lineage and a Shakespearean name.

Othello is a two-player strategy game played with reversible discs, dark on one face and light on the other, on a green board of eight by eight squares. A player places a disc so that it brackets a line of the opponent’s discs, and those discs are turned over to the player’s colour; when the board is full or neither side can move, the player with more discs showing wins. Time magazine, describing the game for American readers on 22 November 1976, credited it to Goro Hasegawa, a Japanese salesman, and dated it to 1971.

The game belongs to an older family. English Wikipedia traces reversi, which uses the same flipping move, to England in the 1880s, with a reliable mention in The Saturday Review of 21 August 1886. In a December 1973 article in the Japanese magazine Gendai, cited by both English and Japanese Wikipedia, Hasegawa described Othello as an improvement on reversi, known in Japan as genpei-go. MegaHouse, which sells Othello in Japan today, gives its own account on the game’s official site: it dates the origin to September 1945 in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, when Hasegawa, then a junior-high student, came up with a quick game played with go stones, and says he later made a prototype with discs cut from milk-bottle caps and took it to a toy maker.

The name has two attributed origins. Time reported in 1976 that Hasegawa’s father, a Shakespearean scholar, noted that the game’s appeal lay in “dramatic reversals” and suggested calling it Othello. Japanese Wikipedia names the father as Shiro Hasegawa, a professor of English literature at the old Mito High School, and MegaHouse also credits him, saying the name evokes Shakespeare’s play, in which loyalties shift around the black general Othello and his white wife Desdemona. English Wikipedia, citing a December 1974 article in the magazine Ushio, says Hasegawa selected the name himself, and that the green of the board was inspired by the image of the general leading his army across a green field.

Tsukuda, PalBox, MegaHouse and the overseas licensees.

The commercial history begins with the Tokyo toy maker Tsukuda. Japanese Wikipedia, citing a 2007 interview in Toy Journal with Takeshi Wakui, who handled Othello’s product planning at Tsukuda, says Hasegawa brought the game to the company in October 1972 and that it was accepted for production. English Wikipedia, citing the Nihon Keizai Shimbun of 20 March 1973, says Hasegawa set up the Japan Othello Association in March 1973 and that a national championship was held in early April, before the game reached the shops.

The launch date is given two ways. Japanese Wikipedia says Hasegawa, in a column published by the Japan Othello Association, put the start of sales at 25 April 1973 at the Mitsukoshi and Isetan flagship department stores in Tokyo. MegaHouse dates the official debut to 29 April 1973, when the game went on sale under the registered trademark Othello, and says that original edition is still sold as “Official Othello”, the set used in official tournaments.

Ownership then followed Tsukuda’s own reorganisations. Japanese Wikipedia says Tsukuda’s toy-making arm became independent as Tsukuda Original in 1974, became a subsidiary of Bandai in 2002 and merged with Wakui Corporation in March 2003 to form PalBox. A Bandai press release dated 21 February 2005 announced that its group company MegaHouse would take over part of PalBox’s business, with the new arrangement starting on 1 April; the release described PalBox as the toy company behind long-selling products including Othello and the Rubik’s Cube. MegaHouse’s official site now says Othello is released by MegaHouse. English Wikipedia says the trademark OTHELLO was registered for board games in Japan by Kabushiki Kaisha Othello, a company owned by Hasegawa, and by Tsukuda Original in the rest of the world, and that MegaHouse now holds the game’s intellectual property outside Japan.

Abroad, the game went out under licence. English Wikipedia says Gabriel Industries launched Othello in the United States in 1975, and Time reported in November 1976 that college players in America were signing up for regional tournaments. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Wakui, says the American rights passed through several companies after Gabriel and that Mattel held the sales rights for Europe and the United States as of 2007.

Design and documentation.

A board game reaches its players as a box before it is ever a set of rules, and the box lid usually does more of the identity work than any single piece inside. The lid carries the name, the logo and often a photograph or illustration chosen to show who the game is for, and that image can be redrawn many times over the years while the name stays the same.

Inside the box, the identity continues in physical form. Moulded plastic pegs, discs, frames and trays, printed boards, cards and rule sheets each carry colours and shapes that players come to recognise, and a change of supplier, licence holder or market can quietly change all of them at once.

Each guide in this group looks at a game brand through those layers: who devised the game and when, which companies have made and sold it, how its name and box art have been handled, and what its components look like. It separates what independent, dated sources record from what a publisher says about its own history, and treats the palette shown here as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

A protected design, a milk-bottle-cap disc and a slogan.

Othello’s identity is carried by its components as much as by its name. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Wakui’s 2007 Toy Journal interview, says that at launch Tsukuda registered the name Othello as a trademark and the black-and-white discs and green board as designs. The design rights expired at the end of their twenty-year term, the article says, while the trademark remained in force, so other companies that sell games of the same design in Japan use the name reversi instead.

The disc itself has a documented size. MegaHouse says the discs of Official Othello have kept the same size since the game’s launch, matching Hasegawa’s prototype, which he made by gluing three milk-bottle caps together and covering them with black paper so that each disc had the right weight and feel in the hand. The company’s range today adds variants such as Magnet Othello, with magnetic discs and a folding board, and a version whose discs are built into the board and turned with a fingertip so that none can be lost.

A slogan has travelled with the game for decades. Time quoted it in 1976 as “A minute to learn . . . a lifetime to master,” and MegaHouse still prints the English line on its official site alongside a Japanese version. The same Time article described towels, tie clasps and key chains in Japan carrying what it called “the distinctive Othello emblem”.

For a design guide, Othello shows how a game can make its rules and its colours the same thing: black and white for the two players, green for the field they fight over, and a name chosen to describe the reversals between them. Compare it with Mastermind, another two-player game of coloured pieces from the early 1970s, and Catan, a later strategy game built around a board of its own. For this guide we use board green, disc black and disc white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Othello’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.