Last updated on December 15th, 2025 at 12:13 pm
Piccolo: Othello – Strategy Game Review
Piccolo: Othello is a Strategy/Education/Board game from Symbolic Software, first launched in 3rd April 2021.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 582+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Piccolo: Othello Stand Out
• #1 Most Downloaded Game (April, May, June, July 2021) — Japan Mac App Store!
• Featured in Apple's "What We're Playing", "Games We Love" and "Best Games Made in France"!
• "Beautiful, minimalistic and highly addictive." — TouchArcade
• "A simple but captivating game." — Mac4Ever
• "From us, this small but fine application therefore receives an absolute recommendation." — Appgefahren
• "Whether you're a fan of the game or not, Piccolo will make you love Othello." — MaxiApple
Piccolo® is the best Othello app for iPhone®, iPad® and Mac®. It features a strong, fast AI on top of a polished user interface, with beautiful themes, advanced features, online play and more. Piccolo is available in 20 languages and comes with no ads or tracking. It's an Othello app made for Othello players by Othello lovers.
• Strong AI: Piccolo features a custom Othello AI engine written in the Rust programming language, designed to be fast, challenging and customizable. The AI's default Level 1 difficulty can be beaten by beginners, while its Level 8 difficulty is likely to challenge even top Othello masters around the world. Designed from scratch, the Piccolo AI engine is sure to give seasoned Othello players a new type of opponent to play against, with often surprising and creative strategies.
• User Experience: Piccolo features a native user experience designed for iOS and macOS. A modern design lets you focus on the game, with helpful move indicators, the ability to undo moves, and automatic game saves between every move in case you close the app by mistake or your phone's battery runs out. Multiplayer play is supported both locally and online.
• Themes: Piccolo features a variety of beautiful themes to customize and breathe fresh life into your Othello experience. Othello veterans might enjoy sticking to the Classic theme, while others might prefer the handsome Seasoned Wood theme, the adorable Sailor Moon theme or even the Persian Spray theme, inspired by traditional Iranian ceramics. Additional themes designed by guest artist Aline Corrêa are also available, giving you access to an Othello game on top of an alligator lake, inside an ancient castle, next to Egyptian pyramids, and more!
• Play Online: Piccolo Online is a free online service that lets you connect with friends via easily exchangeable Game Codes to play friendly Othello games wherever you are around the world. Piccolo Online also supports automatic matchmaking so that you can quickly play games with random opponents worldwide. Piccolo Online features quick, stable connections, and benefits from a strong privacy policy.
• Cute iMessage Stickers: Send cute “chibi”-style iMessage stickers to your friends with Piccolo's bundled iMessage Sticker Pack! Featuring 36 custom illustrations drawn by anime artist Erica Li, the stickers feature Piccolo's adorable mascot in different relatable situations.
• No Ads, No Tracking: Unlike a majority of games on the App Store today, Piccolo has no terms you need to accept before playing. Piccolo will never show you a single ad, and will never track you. The app is entirely a labor of love for the game of Othello, made by players for players.
• Available in 20 Languages: Thanks to contributions from players around the world, Piccolo has been translated from English into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. No matter where you are, Piccolo's interface will be easy to understand.Othello® is a registered trademark of MegaHouse Corporation. Piccolo: Othello is an independent implementation of the underlying game, which is placed in the public domain.
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Piccolo: Othello is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 16th October 2023
Recent improvements include:
This update brings improvements to the AI engine's strategy algorithms, and improved compatibility for macOS Sonoma and iOS 17.
Download & Availability
Piccolo: Othello is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Piccolo: Othello on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Perfectly executed. So much fun.
We absolutely love this game. So much so that Ive renamed Piccolo Brutus. Everyone knows He wants those corner places, all of them. He fights us tooth and nail constantly. We play and play and play., cause hes the trusty player we dont have to wait days to make his turn.
Ive tried many Othello apps over the years, and this one is easily our favorite. The AI is great, and we dont think Ill ever beat the highest levels. No ads, no annoying features, just a simple app to play Othello. Love it.
Most of the ones ive tried are either driving us nuts w ads or too easy. We found an obscure one a while back that was ad free and just had 1 level. It destroyed us like 199/200 games and we deleted it. We were trying to find it again today and found this instead. It has 8 levels and we beat it like 95% at level 4 and 0% at level 5. When we click random online game, we just get for player 2 and its our turn. Not sure what to do there. Maybe we need to have notifications on or use imessage, idk. But overall its plenty good and doesnt bug us. Only thing id want would be like a learning mode where it puts a number in the available squares to let us know where im making mistakes. But im quite happy with it just the way it is. Im gonna cut off our internet and see if it plays offline. We assume it does. Then for some reason, im gonna install wzebra on a computer and see if this beats it:) Ive got a crypto question So we know these 20 word combos for bitcoin wallets make guessing them like hitting a grain of sand if the earth was made of sand but theyre only unique to 4 letters and theres more of them than there are bitcoins. So guessing one if there are billions of grains must be easier. We know it practically impossible but it bugs us that we could buy bitcoin, put it on a hardware wallet in a safe and never touch it and youre saying theres a chance it could disappear without ever opening the door:) and then ya got ibm building cryogenic chandeliers how safe can something based on software, math problems, and humans be? Youd like a guy named steve gibson on the security now podcast.
As you know from our past review, we absolutely love this app, its the best OTHELLO app in existence, and it is so kind of yall to labor in love and make it free we do have a request though; could you add a mode that allows the user to lay out the pieces as they want them laid out, so that users can practice different mid game and end game strategies against themselves (or even the AI). Thanks for your consideration.
We love this app so much and it teaches us to play the game and the design of the game is so simple to pick up and play by yourself or with another opponent.
How wonderful to have a well-designed and well-programmed Othello app that is super customizable, good on battery and contains no ads or tracking. We applaud the developer for doing everything right. And we appreciate that it saves your game if you have to close the app, so you can play in short spurts. We also appreciate that is free but that you can buy themes for a fair price to support the game. We will be buying at least one of the theme packs to give support. We highly recommend this well-done game.
Id never heard of a game like this before but after playing for a little bit we are addicted! It took us a little while to get good at the game and understand some strategies but once we did Ive loved playing.
It is the best game ever The AI is great and very intelligent, it makes the game very entertaining we would recommend this for anyone who likes a challenge.
The game is good and the sound effects are calming, but there are a few things that might need to be improved, such as increasing the randomness of the openings, we found that the ai openings don't change if the chosen ai level doesn't change, but this can be stale if the ai has already been defeated with the same move before, so we hope that the ability to randomize ai openings can be increased.
We wish every app was like this Simple, well designed, and responsive app to practice strategy. Im new to Othello but skilled at other similar games. Just took us about 10 games to beat the level 2 bot, and there are 8 levels to fight, so the challenge should last a while the characters are cute too, and the themes look good.
We find AI level 4 very easy but 5 very hard. Could one or the other be adjusted? Also we accidentally tap the screenshot button semi-regularly when we wanted to Undo / step back. It triggers even if we move our finger before lifting (unlike many apps) so there's no avoiding the hassle of waiting for a screenshot, cancelling, going back to history page, finding the step we wanted and tapping the correct button.
The app has 8 play levels, from dead easy to very difficult. Ive only won once, by a thin margin, on level 8. This would be five stars if there was the ability to take back even one move. Primarily this is important because touch spots arent always right. It can also be useful for investigating alternate play at critical junctions.
This game is pretty good. We like how you can change the difficulty. We dont like how it doesnt let you unlock the different themes freely, without purchasing it onlinegood game though.
First of all, the AI is really good, probably the best one we've come across so far. It looks pretty and there's no fullscreen ads. We would've given this 5 stars, BUT there are a couple of things that makes us so mad that we're uninstalling: 1. The UI buttons are too sensitive, we think the developer tied the tap event to trigger the moment something touches it, so we would keep on accidentally pressing the export or share button when scrolling through the history. It would've been a non issue except for… 2. Many things trigger alert pop ups! It's not those "modal" dialogues that you can dismiss by tapping anywhere on the screen outside the modal, nah these ones you have to tap the exact "ok" to acknowledge that "transcript has been copied". We really don't believe that message is important enough for users to explicitly dismiss? A toast that fades after a couple of seconds would do. 3. Needs quick undo, it's frustrating scrolling through the history when we made a mistake and want to quickly go back, meanwhile the moment we open the history pane, it's like a ours field trying to avoid hitting buttons while trying to scroll is a pain. 4. After the game ends, it's a bit weird that nothing happens? There's a "thank you for playing" alert, but it doesn't tell you explicitly who won (not hard to figure out but still). Then it seems like we have to "abandon the current game" to start a new game? Another alert dialogue! This app is great, it's just a shame that the usability makes playing the game really frustrating. @developers if you could add an option in the settings for people who wants a fast game and don't care for confirmation dialogues, that would be amazing, and we're definitely coming back. If it's not obvious yet, we're a dev ourselves and we understand how annoying demanding users can be, but y'all have done an amazing job with this game, and we really wanted you guys to succeed, not held back by minor UX issues.
This could just be the fact that Im really bad at othello but even on 0 level difficulty its really hard to win. We also wish that we could get some kinda feedback on moves and be able to undo moves in a bot match.
We recently got into othello this year, but its probably one of our favorite little games to just play. We discovered it in a hatsune miku minigame on our 3ds that we played all the time and took everywhere with us! And when we found out it was actually othello and there were apps for it we got so happy. Ive tried other othello apps and this one seems to be our favorite. We do have a request though, could you please add a new mode for single player/where you control both black and white? We saw it in another othello app, its for playing by yourself or with someone else in person. We have an ipad and id love to play othello in person with our friends, but the only game modes on our favorite piccolo are AI and online.
Seems easy then it isnt not so much.
Update: the developer has fixed the online issue very quickly and now it works smoothly – thank u! Its a great othello app that works perfectly when playing solo, however online matchmaking does not work and clicking on the create or enter game code does not do anything. Really wanted to play with a friend so we hope this gets fixed.
Excellent othello experience. Satisfying sounds and UI; very tasteful monetization model.
The higher level AIs are easier to beat, if you try to take as many pieces as possible, you can end the game prematurely. Ive won against Level 8 several times, like the following sequence: E6F6G6D6C3F5D7D3C2E7E8. Cant seem to use this strategy on Level 1 though, no idea why.
This is an absolutely beautiful Othello app. The AI is very well implemented and is beatable even for absolute beginners. The interface is beautiful. However the random matchmaking feature has not worked for us. We cannot tell if this is due to some problem connecting to the server or if there are no players in the pool for online games. The opponent name spot is always and there is no other feedback as to what is going on.
Excellent logic, easy to use. One minor issue, however when you finish a game it doesnt do anything; it just sits there. Would be nice if it went back home and maybe even showed you your score and a running tally of your win/loss record.
Its enjoyable to play against the AI but we would like you see gameplay to practice by watching AI vs AI on all the difficulty levels available. Everything is fine and we enjoy using the app.
Keeps asking us to write a review. So here it is a review. It's othello.
Great app. No ads, no tracking, a pleasure to play. One problem though: the sound is either on or off. Trying to make the clicks more quiet using our iPad +/- buttons does nothing. If the sound is on, the iPad will play them even if the volume is all the way down. UPDATE: The sound problem is fixed. This is now a 5-star app, easily the best Othello in the app store.
This is a great othello app. The other Othello app we used before was pretty lackluster and looked like an app that was stuck in pre-iOS 6 design. This feels modern and has great online support.
The developer of this Othello app has a Doctorate from the best PhD program in mathematics in Europe (ENS Ulm) and it clearly shows. The AI is just superb. It is a pleasure to play at level 1 for beginners (yes, you can win at this level) and you still have 9 more levels to explore. The latest and highest level will be challenging even for Othello champions. It's totally free (but you can contribute by buying goodies if you feel like acknowledging the amazing programming and AI behind this cute game). In short, truly challenging, free, no ads, with 10 levels of difficulty, and you can play with your friends too.
This is a great classic game with a beautiful interface, and for a nominal fee you can add on so many more themes! Well done.
Nice app but cool it with the too frequent updates (both iOS and macOS).
There isnt a restart button , or at least we cant find it. The level one is too easy but the level 2 is too hard.
Good game BUT the ai bots are too good.
Thank you for clearing that up.
Our only complaint is that Im rubbish at Othello.
The AI cheats. It will take 6 turns in a row and win.
Great sounds, animations, simplicity, features, and more. Very glad we found this.
Hi thanks for your good game :)) we enjoyed that for a lot time. But there is 1 bug in this game. After the game the game is not showing who is the winner! Please fix this problem in the new update. Thanks.
Really fun for casual play across devices. Overall, simple and elegant interface easy to get started. One minor issue. When a game is complete and a winner is declared, have the dialog box identify a winner and ask to play again. Instead, it asks if you want to "abandon the game.".
When we press the setting button it doesn't do anything.
Don't ask for reviews this frequently. Othello. Nothing more nothing less. No adds, doesn't ask you to buy a bunch of stuff.
Got this as a new game for our son to learn and play but even at the easiest level he is having trouble learning and winning. The plan was to increase the difficulty as he got older but we'll be deleting this app now. We suggest reversi or something like that.
It's quick,challenging,and fun. It's Othello and its on the Mac. It also looks great.
We appreciate the fact that the AI is difficult: it's what keeps us playing. Highly recommended.
Its great to find a well-made Othello app. Ive been casually playing Othello for 40 years and the challenging AI in this app has us motivated to up our game.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.24
- Size: 60.61 MB
- iOS: 16.0 or later
- Languages: AR, NL, EN, FI, FR, DE, HE, HI, IT, JA, KO, PT, RU, ZH, ES, SV, TH, TR, UK, VI
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Symbolic Software
Last updated: 16th October 2023 | Genre: Strategy, Education | Developer: Symbolic Software