Rolit
- Board's Eye View
- 17 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Since its appearance in 1997, Rolit (Goliath) has proved to be a popular game in continental Europe, particularly in Germany, but it is less well known in the UK and USA. That's surprising given the ubiquity of its black & white equivalent Othello, which has been published by scores of companies and is now considered to be in the public domain.
Othello was itself a variant of the game Reversi, which was originally published in 1883. Both games looked superficially like the traditional Chinese game of Go but they are actually both lighter abstract strategy games. Both Othello and Reversi are two-player games played with discs that are black on one side and white on the other. When you place a disc so that one of yours is on both ends of a line with your opponent's disc(s) in between, your captured opponent's discs are flipped to your side.
Adi Golad's Rolit is very similar except that it takes up to four players and, in place of two-sided discs it's played with 'balls' with four different coloured edges. As in Othello/Reversi, when you place one of your coloured balls so that there is one of your colours at both ends of a line, all the balls in between are rolled over to your colour. Ultimately, the winner is the player with the most balls of their colour when the 8 x 8 board is full.
Like its black & white precursors, there are some strategies that become obvious as you play the game. You quickly learn that it's advantageous to be able to place a piece on the edge of the board and, even moreso, in a corner where they are immune from conversion. It's less immediately obvious on your initial plays that it is often better not to surround and convert as many of your opponents' pieces as possible early on in the game, vying instead for commanding positions that ease you to greater control in the mid- to end-game.
Tho' the gameplay and mechanics of Rolit will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Othello or Reversi, the switch from two- to four-sided pieces changes the dynamics, especially when played with three or four players instead of just two. As you increase the player count so you are less able to predict where your opponents will go on their next turn... Four-player Rolit is more chaotic as well as more colourful than two-player Othello, but it's none the worse for that. And because the game ends when the board is full, player count doesn't materially affect game length: whether you play with two, three or four players you can expect to finish a game in 20-30 minutes.
