A board game fit for the Bard

QUESTION Who invented the strategy game Othello? Why was it so named?

OthellO is a classic strategy game for two players. It is played on a board divided into 64 squares (pictured) on which the players place discs that are black on one side and white on the other.

Players take it in turns to play their colour, black or white. If you surround a row of your opponent’s discs with two of your own, their discs are flipped to match yours.

the game ends when neither can make a move; the winner is the player with the more discs in his colour.

the game originated in 1870 and was called Reversi. It had been forgotten until 1970, when it was revised by Japanese student Goro hasegawa.

he pitched the idea to toy-maker tsukuda and it was released in 1973 under the name Othello.

the name is thought to have been suggested by hasegawa’s father, Shiro, an english scholar, in honour of Shakespeare’s play of the same name, to reflect the racially charged story of a black general and his white wife and the many reversals of fortune throughout the play. More than 25 million sets have been sold in Japan alone. A. Corbett, Edinburgh.

QUESTION Labour claim that they coined the word Youthquake. Is this true?

FuRtheR to the earlier answer, the word ‘youthquake’ had a second wind in the eighties as the title of an album released in May 1985 by Dead Or Alive, who were famous for their androgynous frontman Pete Burns.

It reached No 9 in the uK charts and featured the No 1 single You Spin Me Round (like A Record).

Jonathan White, Harrogate, N. Yorks.