Modern Living: Japanese Othello

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When Japanese Salesman Goro Hasegawa, 44, invented his simple board game in 1971, his father, a Shakespearean scholar, duly noted that the appeal of the game was based on a series of "dramatic reversals." Perhaps, he suggested, it should be called Othello. Today Othello is a national pastime played by some 25 million Japanese—and a full-blown fad replete with towels, tie clasps, and key chains, all emblazoned with the distinctive Othello emblem. Spearheaded by Fumio Fujita, 27, a barber from outside Tokyo and the game's reigning champion, Othello has invaded England and the U.S.

In England, Fujita played a match on closed-circuit television against Tony Miles, 20, the first British chess grand master, winning two games out of three. In Pasadena, Calif., students at Caltech programmed a computer, named lago, to play against Fujita, who easily beat the machine. In Washington, B.C., however, the Japanese barber took a beating at the hands of Mark Weinberg, 30, a Government lawyer. "I took him apart," boasts Weinberg, adding: "I'm a lifelong chess player. When I saw this game, I said, 'Wow, this is great!' It is sort of addictive."

That fact has already been confirmed at Washington's Woodward & Lothrop department store, where a test lot of 3,000 sets (price: $9 each) quickly sold out, and at Manhattan's F.A.O. Schwarz, where Othello is the No. 1 seller in the game department. Othello fans at 50 colleges are already signing up for the Eastern Regional Othello Tournament scheduled for February, and addicts at Caltech and M.I.T. will face off against each other in a match this week.

One of Othello's greatest attractions is that the game is easy to learn. Two players alternate putting reversible plastic disks—white side up for one player, black side up for his opponent—on a board with 64 squares. As the game progresses, each player tries to build up horizontal, vertical or diagonal rows of disks in his designated color—at the same time trying to capture the opponent's rows. A capture is accomplished by outflanking a row, maneuvering to place white disks, for example, at both ends of a row of black disks. When this happens, the row is flipped to the color of the captor, whose next challenge is to protect his own disks from being flipped by his opponent. When the board is full, the player with the most disks in his color is the winner. Compared with chess, for example, it all sounds quite simple and takes only 15 to 30 minutes a game. But the possible combinations and permutations make it more complex than it first appears, hence the motto: "A minute to learn . . . a lifetime to master."

Lawyer Weinberg looks on Othello as "a cleansing experience." Says he: "It doesn't wear your mind out as chess does. When I finish a game, I feel very good. I'm refreshed."