Othello Reviews

Issue: This game used to work fine, but the past few days it has lost connection multiple times, whether on WiFi or LTE, both with strong connections. Half of the time this manifests in the other players piece appearing on top of mine before failing, otherwise just a brief pause after clicking my piece and a “you lost” message saying I lost connection.
Another thing: you really should implement a better platform for competition. If you showed relative skills in game (% of games won, # of wins) and had more obvious messages about how the player compares, this would drive people to play your game more and increase profit significantly. You’re welcome.

Don’t waste your time. The level of cheating in This game is so rigged with “elite” players…it’s nothing more than hard level computer programming when you are supposed to be playing online players or online players using cheats to calculate moves, telling them the perfect square to play. There is no way that many human players can come up with constantly strategically made moves to completely flip a game I don’t care how “elite” of a player you are. Edited to add players are flat out using cheating apps to know EXACTLY where to play…sorry there is NOT that many elite players on Othello.

Othello is incredibly unstable on iOS. You cannot exit the application, tap on any notifications or hop on or off WiFi mid game without triggering an automatic loss - it says you’ve lost by disconnecting. Something. As simple as swiping down from the top right corner to lower the volume of the music playing off the phone on a Bluetooth speaker, then swiping back up to resume the game results is a loss by disconnection. This has probably happened to me about 30 times in the 3 days I’ve had Othello and it’s unbelievably frustrating. Oh, and if you get a phone call mid-game that you decline to answer, yup - lost game due to a disconnection.

Another issue - the invite to game feature doesn’t work, at all. I’ve had players I’ve wanted to re-play, added as buddies and invited to play but it simply doesn’t work.

Also, the rating/score system makes no sense at all: 3 points for a win against anyone and no points lost for a loss? There’s no way to target play against people at a similar skill level since you can’t actually peruse the high score list and select people to play.

As much as i love this game, these issues have made me want to delete Othello altogether because I can’t enjoy the game with all of the stability and disconnect issues.

How’d the developers allow Othello to hit the market with such glaring issues? It’s mind-boggling to me that these haven’t been addressed.

Enjoyed the game, especially the ability to play others, but found the incredible number of lost connections and the obnoxious ads that continually launch Othello Store without permission (and interrupt the game or cause lost connections) very frustrating. It happened extensively on WiFi and seemed to be linked to the ads. So I began playing exclusively on cell service. That helped, but lost connections and rogue ads were still a problem. It got so bad that to play, I would restrict my phone to prevent Othello Store from launching. This helped, but same issues persisted. After months of this, I’ve grow tired of having these issues and the company is not addressing this so I am deleting Othello for good.

I like the game, but it seems that in between games, these annoying ads for other games pop up and there is no way to close them out other than completely closing out the game and reopening it! There’s no count down until you can close, nothing! It just stays there until you close out the game! Who needs it. I am seriously considering just deleting Othello because of this! Annoying me with an ad that won’t go away will in no way make me want anything to do with the advertised game that’s for sure!

The game crashes frequently, I’ve had to reinstall it once because both online and offline games would freeze any time I tried to play. Online games are a nightmare - anything and everything disconnects the game and counts as a loss. You can’t see your battery percentage while in a game and if you try to swipe to momentarily check - you lose. If any system notifications come up, low battery for example, you lose. If you try to pause any audio you’re playing, you lose. I’ll be finding a different app to play this game.

Not only is the game been super buggy of late, it has now started making moves that I didn’t make and is not showing the correct places for me to move. The last few months the game will crash every few games right after I make my first move when playing against the computer. It also does the same thing when playing against a live opponent. But today I was playing a live opponent and it started making moves that I didn’t not make. Frankly this is poor given that this is the “Official” game. You’d think you guys had enough resources to make this game work consistently. Perhaps not. In any case, would be nice if it was addressed and resolved.

Good version of this app for on the go, however, the full screen ads are too common and long. I would gladly pay a one time fee of $5 or possibly even more to stop seeing them, however, the publisher opted to offer a greedy and unnecessary subscription model instead.

The actual game is well made, but making players pay recurring fees to hide obnoxious adverts is super lame.

The game crashes or fails to start frequently. But you can still randomly get credited with a loss, win, or tie, even on games that lasted 0 sec. That’s annoying and messes with your statistics. Wish I could reset stats.
When trying to play real people, you often get paired with a computer that presents itself as a real person. It plays stupidly and is an easy win, but it’s a waste of time.

Good game, but appeares there are people that has a way for cheating- in particular, when they are loosing, that don’t move for much longer then the timer cut off - sometimes even for 5 min, and then, all of a sudden you loose because you run out of time…extremely frustrating. One of those players is “you will wait no matter what’” and others. Please fix those glitches and eliminate the option for people to cheat

I used to play this app with my mother when I was very young, and grew to love the game years and years later. I finally found an app that looked aestheticaly how I remembered, and worked properly. I love this game with all my heart, and consider myself a skilled player. However, even with the "Even Easier" difficulty for Offline play options (as I prefer the Offline option), it seems as though the computer is set to win much too easily. I find myself frustrated with how hard it is to hone my skills against different levels of the computer, because even the easiest level seems a bit too unfair. I originally started with the Hard option, and found it difficult to win no matter what approaches I made. I even made friends who have never played try this, and they said they simply couldn't keep up. If the skill levels could be adjusted to be a little kinder to people who prefer to practice their skills, it would be much appreciated. It is frustrating having to play against the "Even Easier" option, and even then only winning half the time, seems a bit unfair to those just starting out

This is about the best online re-creation of this app I have seen. Stable, plays well, and works well. The only real problem is the high percentage of players who start games and quickly quit. As an elite player who always wins I understand my opponents usually see they are outclassed 10 or 20 moves into a game and simply quit instead of futilely trying to come back and win. However this makes it hard for me to test different strategies and it is somewhat unsatisfying to get half my wins by forfeit. I would suggest that people who quit mid-game be blocked from starting a new game for a period of time. Maybe 1 minute for the first offense, 5 minutes for the second, an hour for the third, and so on. Ridding Othello of these losers/quitters would improve quality of play and the overall experience for all.

Design is mostly good, plenty of opponents to play online. I'm a good player and would prefer to play against good players. Please implement Elo ratings like Dr. Reversi and other apps have.

Also it’s started crashing (maybe ios13?) right after the first game starts, causing me to lose. Tried closing it and opening it, still happens.

Ah well the trademark holder drove iReversi out of business so I guess I’m stuck.

I REALLY love this game. The GUI is great but there have been several games where I am in a position to take most of the board and magically it says game over and the opponent wins without finishing the game. I haven’t timed out either it’s usually their turn when this happens. Are there people cheating the system out there??

I played a lot on coolmathgames but I wanted to get better and explore the game. I played on the hardest difficulty and won them I just played my first online match and it was harder than playing the cpu. But I won, whoever that Japanese played was definitely did their best and I enjoyed the game thoroughly. I can’t wait to buy my own board and teach my girlfriend so we can always play it together forever.

I am totally addicted to this game and have been playing Othello for years now. Every night. Suddenly, it is not working. When you go to play an online game, it says “internal error”. I seem to remember this happened once before, but passed quickly. It’s been a couple of days now. Would love to hear from the developers.

I love this game and I play a lot everyday. Thank you for working hard to make this possible. That been said point system is not working properly I think. I feel some people have figure out the way to stay in top without playing the game. Please get rid of people getting points from games that are less than 5secs. Even 30secs. Most people who actually “Play” this game would probably like that. Everyone need to play the game to earn points. I know this app is not about getting the points but one of the aspect of why I like this game is the point system.

If there are some other point systems you can put into the game so better player who can’t play as often can stay in the top some people might like that also.

I learned to play this app as a child. I truly love this game.
The one improvement I wish Othello would implement is if a player “quits” or leaves a game before it is completed (they quit mid-game because they realize they made a poor move and they are going to lose) that that player be penalized some way.
Maybe put in a “time out” where they can not play for 1 hour or 1 day or whatever, just so that they are given an incentive to not quit early just because they are losing.
Or maybe give them a special BADGE by their name that says “I quit when I see I’m not going to win” so that those of us who DO PLAY UNTIL THE VERY END can see the badge and DECLINE to play the game with them!
I know players can be BLOCKED, and that helps a little but there are still plenty of sore losers out there that just leave, and it’s annoying.
However, the game itself is addictive and fun and overall this is a good app.

I’ve experienced many of the same issues that others have had with connections, ads, timeouts, etc. But the most annoying one to me is that buddies doesn’t work anymore, which forces me to play against random players. This makes it almost impossible to seek strong players for fun matches. The great majority of my games against random players are either no challenge, or end early because they quit. Good luck maintaining or increasing your number of players, while neglecting your apps! There are plenty of others to choose from!

Just recently starting learning, and I really enjoy playing in my spare time and have been trying hard to improve. It’s very useful that I can practice against the cpu at multiple difficulty levels and then try out what I’ve learned with random players online. However, I am having some issues with Othello freezing/crashing randomly in the middle of games. Most often during online games but even sometimes against the cpu. At first it was just once in a while, maybe 1 in 20 games but now it’s more like 1 in 4...

I’m not sure why this is happening but I hope it gets fixed at some point as it is very frustrating and is pulling down my win-lose ratio. It’s already low enough as it is, heh.