T-Mobile Sidekick Part of Massive Outdoor “Urban Othello” Game   9/20/2005 - 1,232 views,

Taking place in Birmingham, Alabama, Urban Othello uses a grid of Birmingham’s streets and blocks as an enormous outdoor Othello board. Unlike an Othello board’s 8×8 grid, the street grid in Birmingham is 6×6 square blocks.

The way that Urban Othello works is that each teams is told where on the “board” (the grid) they need to go. Once there they will find various props, and are given a challenge which requires certain actions and the use of the props to satisfy. Then, according to the game’s sponsors, “The team will be given a limited time to improvise a scene representing all the provided challenges and capture that scene with the Sidekick’s built-in camera phone. Once a TechWalk judge accepts the digital image as satisfying the challenge, the game piece will be awarded and the opposing team will be given up to four minutes to play their turn. The game will continue until one team dominates the board or until the time limit is exceeded.”

Add the sponsors, “Urban Othello is modeled after past large-scale urban games conducted in other such great cities as London, New York, and San Francisco. The game played in Birmingham borrows heavily on components of two New York-based games, Fiasco and Gridlockd!”