Around the World in Eighty Games

A Book Review

Amazon poses an existential question to brick-and-mortar stores. In this era of cheap on-demand online delivery, why would someone shop at an in-person store? Some stores cling to exclusivity and idiosyncrasy, like vintage stores. Others rely on in-person assessment of products, like trying on clothing or squeezing fruit. But stores hawking standardized products struggle the most. Video games, board games, and bookstores all fall into this category. Without differentiators, price becomes a key point of competition.

I’m usually willing to pay a little bit more in an in-person board game or bookstore. First is for convenience; I’d like to have it immediately and not deal with delivery delays and packaging garbage. Second is for curation; by displaying quality games on the shelves that are grouped by similarity, it allows browsers to discover something they didn’t know they wanted. However, this curation service is provided before payment. I could easily find a game I like in a physical store, and then opt to buy it cheaper online. So this curation premium is more like a donation or tip than actual priced-in value. It’s a slim margin, and board game stores are really struggling. Our local board game store at the big shopping mall shut down recently (though a quick map search shows that they relocated to a small strip mall nearby).

“Curated” discovery doesn’t always require curation. Sometimes random happenstance in the high-surface-area physical world is enough. I recently found a book that feels like it was written specifically for me, purely by coincidence. I was browsing children’s non-fiction at the library for my daughter (she’s really into hurricanes, magic tricks, and “I Spy” at the moment) when its title caught my eye.

“Around the World in Eighty Games” is a mathematician’s catalog of various historical games and their cultural significance. I recognized the author’s name, Marcus du Sautoy, from a pop maths audiobook I had listened to (he says “maths”, I say “math”). Admittedly, I bailed a few chapters in; math formulas and diagrams don’t translate well to an audio format. But this book perfectly intersected my interests of games, math, history, and philosophy.

The book explores the history of games: the lineage of Backgammon to the Babylonian “Royal Game of Ur”, the origin of dice as knucklebones from sheeps’ feet, and the various forms of Chess. The book also touches on the religious roots of games: as fortune-telling devices, as a teaching tool for karmic fatalism, and amusingly, how the Buddha forbade playing hopscotch. The book also explores the evolutionary origin of games and various philosophers’ attempts to define what is or is not a game. It’s also very light and readable, broken up into eighty brief sections. If you’re reading this blog, I’m sure you would enjoy this book.

You can buy the book on Amazon — I won’t hold it against you. But you can find it cheaper on AbeBooks, or probably for free at your local library.