Turn (Mind Loft)

Turn is an Othello puzzle on Mind Loft, a free site of daily browser games. Most people have played Othello, often as children and often by grabbing as many discs as possible. Turn is about the last ten or so squares, where the game is really decided and luck stops mattering.

Each board is a real position reached in a real game, solved to the last disc and checked so that exactly one square still wins. On the day we looked, there were 10 empty squares and the disc count stood at 13 to 41 against you, yet the position was a win. You are winning; the engine you play against knows the position perfectly, and a wrong move hands it the game for good.

The lesson the game keeps teaching is that disc count in the middle of a game means little, because any disc can flip back. What matters is squares: how many you can still play into and how few you leave your opponent. That is why flipping fewer discs is usually right. But Turn does not reward one habit every day: on about a third of boards the greedy square, the one that flips the whole row, is the only winning move.

A new endgame goes up at midnight US Eastern Time. It sits with Mind Loft's other endgame dailies, Chain (dots and boxes), Four (Connect Four), Mate (chess) and Check (checkers).