Why ladybugs?

In reversi, the pieces spend the whole game flipping over. We wanted something small and round that could change color, and ladybugs fit. The 7-spot ladybird, one of the most common in Britain, has red wing cases with seven black spots. The 22-spot ladybird is bright yellow with black spots. So our pieces are red and yellow ladybugs, and a trapped one flips its shell.

Ladybugs live on leaves, so the board is a leaf. The four corners became flowers. A piece in a corner can never be flipped, so the corners matter more than any other square, and we wanted them easy to spot. The computer players are garden animals, from a snail at the bottom of the ladder to a fox at the top.

A bit of real reversi history

Reversi comes from England. Two Englishmen, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett, both claimed to have invented it in 1883, and each called the other a fraud. Mollett said he had made a similar game, Annexation, on a cross-shaped board in 1870. Sources still disagree about who came first. The first reliable mention of reversi in print is an 1886 article in the Saturday Review. In 1893 the German publisher Ravensburger began making the game.

The early rules were a little different from today’s. The board started empty, each player had 32 pieces of their own, and the first moves went into the four middle squares.

The version most people know now is Othello. Goro Hasegawa, a salesman in Japan, patented it there in 1971, and the toy company Tsukuda launched it in 1973. He named it after Shakespeare’s play. It starts with four pieces in the middle, matching colors on the diagonals, and dark moves first. The name Othello is a trademark, held outside Japan by the toy company MegaHouse, so we use the older name, reversi. In 2023, computer scientist Hiroki Takizawa posted a paper showing that on the 8 by 8 board, perfect play by both sides ends in a draw.

The five garden friends

• Snail: moves almost at random and stays away from the flower corners.
• Frog: always takes the move that flips the most ladybugs right now.
• Hedgehog: knows which squares are good, like corners and edges, and which are risky.
• Owl: looks 4 moves ahead.
• Fox: looks 6 moves ahead, goes for corners, and tries to leave you with as few moves as possible.

How to play

• You play red and go first. Tap or click a square to place a ladybug.
• Your ladybug has to trap a straight line of yellow ladybugs between it and another red one: across, up and down, or on a slant. Every trapped ladybug flips to red.
• Squares where you can play are marked with a dot. The 💡 button turns the dots off.
• If you have no move, you pass. When neither side can move, the color with more ladybugs wins.
• Beat a garden friend to meet the next one. Stars for a win: 1 for any win, 2 for winning by 10 or more, 3 for winning by 20 or more. Using undo takes one star off.
• Pick 2 players to take turns on one device. On a keyboard, use the arrow keys and Enter.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips

Go for the flowers. A ladybug on a corner can never be flipped, and it helps protect the edges beside it.

Keep away from an empty flower. A ladybug on the square diagonally next to an empty corner often hands that corner to the other side.

Flipping less can be better. Early on, a move that flips lots of ladybugs usually gives the other side more places to play. Keep your choices open and theirs few. That is how the Fox plays.

Count before the end. The last few moves can swing the score by 20 or more, so near the end, check how many ladybugs each move flips.

Your turn

The leaf at the top of this page has four ladybugs on it already. Start with the Snail, work your way up to the Fox, and play.