Excerpt from Around the World in Eighty Games by Marcus du Sautoy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Yet I am not a historian, anthropologist, or psychologist, but a mathematician, and I think one of the reasons that games so resonate with how I see the world is that a good game shares much in common with the great mathematics that I have fallen in love over the years. The rules of the game are like the axioms of mathematics. Playing a game is like exploring the consequences of those axioms. Games for me are a way of playing mathematics. Time and again a game works because it embodies an abstract mathematical idea. A matching game like Dobble is successful because it exploits strange geometries in highdimensional space. A board game like Ticket to Ride works because of the scoring system that balances risk versus reward.

The best games are those with simple rules that give rise to complex, rich, and varied outcomes. In the ancient game of Go, black and white stones are placed alternately on a 19 × 19 grid. The setup is simple, and yet the variety and complexity of the games that have emerged are extraordinary. For me this has much in common with the most beautiful mathematics. Prime numbers are simple to define: they are the indivisible numbers. Yet we have been playing with these numbers for two thousand years, and they continue to surprise us.

But there is another reason that I believe a mathematician is an ideal tour guide to the games humans play: because having a few mathematical tricks up your sleeve can often give the player an edge. Because games are defined by a set of rules that constrain the way you play the game, mathematics is a very natural language to explore the logical implications of these rules and to find the optimal path to get to your destination.

Excerpted from Around the World in Eighty Games: From Tarot to Tic-Tac-Toe, Catan to Chutes and Ladders, a Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the World's Greatest Games by Marcus du Sautoy. Copyright © 2023. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.