Stretch your mind with MacIago, an Othello/Reversi game for Mac OS X
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Games, Review, Software Friday May 16, 2008The weekend is upon us again, and with the record high price of car-go-zoom juice, a lot of folks here in the CrabApple Forest are looking for ways to keep ourselves amused without driving too far. There are games that just pass the time, and then there are games that make you think. Reversi, also known as Othello, definitely falls into the latter category. It’s an easy game to learn, but you’re not going to master it in a single weekend!
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the game:
Reversi and Othello are names for an abstract strategy board game which involves play by two parties on an eight-by-eight square grid with pieces that have two distinct sides. Pieces typically appear coin-like, but with a light and a dark face, each side representing one player. The object of the game is to make your pieces constitute a majority of the pieces on the board at the end of the game, by turning over as many of your opponent’s pieces as possible.
For more information on the game, including the rules of play, see the Wikipedia article on Reversi.
If you’ve never played Othello as a board game, it’s probably because all that manual chip-flipping can get pretty tedious, and few people have the patience for it. Of course, when computers came along, it became possible to let the computer do the chip-flipping, so the players could concentrate on the game, and that brought about a revival of interest. And, as it turns out, a computer can make a pretty good Othello opponent, in case you’re stuck at home alone and feel like playing something a bit more challenging than solitaire.
That’s where MacIago comes in. MacIago is a freeware Othello/Reversi style board game for Mac OS X.
The MacIago options are shown here:
And if you don’t like the appearance of the board, there are a handful of plugins that can be downloaded to change it.
How good a game does MacIago play? Well, it could beat BigCrab, but then that’s not sayin’ much. We think that unless you are some sort of Othello master, you’ll find it a worthwhile opponent. And we like the fact that the difficulty level can be changed, so that if you’re teaching the game to the kids they won’t become frustrated because they always lose.
The only option that we think the game is missing is to flip the chips individually, in slow motion, so you can see exactly what’s being turned. Right now it just flips all the chips at once, so you are often left with that “What just happened?” feeling. Another nice option might be the ability to go back a turn or two - not only would that be helpful when you are learning the game, so you can see the relative effects of various possible moves, but also it would give you an opportunity to see exactly what changed in the last move. Even if you could simply click a button or hold down a key and have it highlight the chips that were flipped on the last turn, that would be helpful.
Even so, we think that MacIago is a great way to stretch your mind, and you can’t beat the price. So, what’s your favorite Mac OS X freeware game? Tell us in the comments and maybe we’ll review it in an upcoming post.
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