Two Inventors, One Board: The Reversi Patent Dispute

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Reversi arrived in England in the 1880s attached to a genuine dispute over who actually invented it. Two men, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett, each claimed the idea and each secured a patent for a version of the game within a short span of years, and the historical record does not cleanly resolve which of them, if either, deserves sole credit. Board game history from this period is full of such tangles, since a simple enough idea, flipping an opponent's disks by trapping them, could plausibly occur to more than one person working in the same commercial toy market at the same time.

What the original patents did not settle, and what later Japanese codification would, was the starting position. Victorian Reversi allowed players to place their first four pieces anywhere they liked before flipping began, an open setup that produces a noticeably different, less analyzed game than the fixed diagonal starting square that every modern Othello game begins from.