Isn't it grand

 

I mentioned eOthello.com in passing when talking about the live-action othello tournament, but I feel I should advertise it a bit more, and make sure everyone knows just how cool it is. It works differently from other board-game websites, where you play a timed game of ten minutes or so per player - eOthello is more like a postal chess kind of thing, where people play the latest move in their games when they're at their computer with a minute to spare. And they have tournaments every couple of months, with players divided into divisions based on their ratings, and playing eight or so games simultaneously. It works very well!

And the coolest thing about it is the way you can play othello variants as well as the standard game! Random openings have become popular since new-fangled internet games started to take off, but "grand" and "88" (or "octagon") othello go back further than that, to a very early Japanese attempt to sell spin-offs of their 'new' game ('invented' in the early seventies by marketing a 19th-century game that everyone had forgotten). And losing othello is of course something that you can just play on the normal board, and a fun game it is, too.

But the one I find the most fun is the Grand 10x10 game. We had 10x10 othello at the Mind Sports Olympiad back in the earliest days, from 1997 onwards, but after playing a Grand tournament on eOthello and then going back to playing the 8x8 game, I felt like the smaller board makes the whole thing too simple. Perhaps the big board is my particular speciality, and that's my excuse for being a mediocre player of 8x8? That would work better if I hadn't proved exactly as mediocre at 10x10, but I still think there's something in it. I'll have to play more big-board othello!