SEVEN GAMES

It’s often man vs. machine in this beguiling foray into games and why we play them.

New York City–based journalist Roeder, a former senior writer for FiveThirtyEight, traverses the globe and centuries in his lively quest to understand the appeal of a handful of sophisticated games that “offer simplified models of a dauntingly complicated world, with dynamics that we can grasp and master”—checkers, chess, Go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble, and bridge. An entertaining storyteller, the author provides numerous profiles of those who were especially proficient at these games as he explores the appeal, strategies, and intricacies of each—beginning with checkers, “whose reputation as a child’s game belies its haunting depth.” Over 40 years and more than 1,000 competitive matches, Marion Tinsley, “the Ernest Shackleton of the game,” only lost three games. In 1963, blind Robert Nealey was the first to compete against an early computer, never losing. The “program itself was an achievement and a watershed,” proving computers could learn via artificial intelligence. Chess was a skill every good knight should possess. From chess hustlers in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park to the baffling Mechanical Turk, Alan Turing, chess-playing computer programs, and some of the great chess masters, Roeder describes what makes the game so complex, mesmerizing, and addictive. Go, which originated in China more than 2,000 years ago, is “often touted as the most complex board game played by humans.” Played with simple black and white stones, its rules “are stark and elegant, as if they were discovered rather than invented.” Backgammon, Roeder suggests, balances luck and skill, placing it somewhere between chess and poker, a “game of imperfectinformation,” while bridge “requires memory and wisdom, prudence and risk, and empathy—for both friend and foe.” Poker, meanwhile, is “the world’s most popular card game in our capitalistic age.” And then there’s Scrabble, “turning a heap of letters into a beautiful spider web of words on the board.”

A smartly informative book that should inspire readers to try a new game.