Tic-Tac-Othello

Today I would like to talk about a game myself and a friend invented. This is our second greatest collabaration after wispa bets. Its a version of tic-tac-toe incorporating the game othello(also known as reversi). 

The game is played on a 4x4 grid. Two players take turns placing noughts and crosses respectively. The first person to get 4 in a row either horizontaly, verticaly or diagonaly wins. The added twist that makes this different from normal tic-tac-toe is the addition of captures.

Captures work as in Othello. Il give a couple of examples below:

If the crosses player place a cross in the higlighted square then the nought in between his two crosses will become a cross. Arriving at the following:

Capturing also works for two pieces next to each other. Such as here:

If a cross is placed in the lower hand corner then both of the nought will become crosses. And in this case four crosses would be in a line and so the crosses player would win.

Im not going to go into any of the theory in this post but I am going to go through an example game I just played with Christian from my office.

Christian is crosses and plays first.

I now take the top left corner. This accomplishes two things. Coners are very good things to have in this game and I'm also "attacking" christians cross.

Note that if Christain now plays in the highlighted square then I can play in the bottom left square and win. Limting where your opponent can play is a common strategy. And is demonstrated very well in this game. Christain could play in the bottom left corner to even things up a bit but instead he opts for one of the middle squares:

I respond by playing in the bottom right corner. Christans next move is then foced:

If christan did not play there then I would simply play there and win. I play in the bottom left hand corner once again forcing christians move:

I now play in the top right leaving the following situation:

No matter which square christian picks I will choose the one of the same colour. He goes for top right middle one:

I then take the other red one and win:

At some point this or next week I will have another post about this game. Any games there wont appear in as much detail as todays. I just wanted one game in a lot of detail.

One last thing. Christain made this http://somethingorotherwhatever.com/ttr/. So you can play the game on a computer.

Till next time!

BADGER!