This week’s thrilling games (feedback by 8/11 gratefully appreciated!):
- Paper Boxing, a classic by Sid Sackson, with a few rule twists.
- 33 to 99, a timeless game of arithmetic combinations.
Past games, with feedback summaries:
- Arpeggios, a dice game of ascending and descending sequences
- Teeko, a forgotten classic intended to rival chess and checkers
- Order & Chaos, an asymmetric variant of tic-tac-toe
- Mirror, Mirror, an adversarial 15-puzzle
- Dandelions, a game of wind vs. flowers
- Humility (a.k.a. Outrangeous), a trivia game with no knowledge required
- Domineering, a domino-placing game.
- Sequencium, a chain-building game.
Past games, with feedback summaries to come:
- Splatter, a game of carefully chosen paint explosions.
- Corners, a game of squares hidden in plain sight.
- Sim, a game of six dots and unexpected headaches.
- Prophecies, a game of self-fulfilling (and self-defeating) predictions.
- Footsteps, in which you vie for a donkey’s affections.
And while I’m at it, here are some FAQs:
What will the book tell us about the games?
I plan to treat each game as a window into mathematical thinking. There’ll be some discussion of strategy and “the underlying math,” but my main interest is more psychological. So far I’ve written chapters dealing with:
- Our susceptibility to framing effects
- The combinatorial nature of creativity
- The tradeoff between confidence and precision
- The staggering complexity of social networks
How do you pick what pronouns to use in the rules?
Where a singular pronoun is needed, I default to “they.” But if a sentence is complex enough (e.g., referring to both players in different capacities) that it becomes ambiguous as to whom “they” refers, I distinguish with “he” and “she.”