RECOMMENDED READING

I have a special bookcase set aside for my books about games. It's not a very big bookcase--three shelves, although I could do with a fourth. Most of them are about Chess or Go, some about the mathematics of games, some about the history of games, and some defy easy categorization. A few of them--which we're about to see in a list below--are ones I feel are the most essential, and anyone who takes games seriously should take a look at them.

These aren't all the game books I own, of course--but neither are they the only ones I like, the only ones that have been important to me, or the only ones I'd recommend. All my game books have something going for them. If I "forgot" one on this list...let me know! I'm always on the lookout for good game books.

Games in General. There are three books I'm spotlighting that don't deal with any particular game. The one I've read over (and over) the most has been RC Bell's classic Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations. This book provides descriptions, pictures, and often the full rules to umpteen different games from around the world, and throughout history. It traces the development of various "families" of board games--for instance, he deliniates a "Backgammon Group" that stretches back to the Royal Game of Ur and makes its slow way to modern Backgammon via various Roman and medieval European games. He's careful to note that the development within these groups isn't necessarily linear, and we should remember not to take these "groupings" as branches in an evolutionary tree. I also love this book for its reproductions of old, old books and manuscripts about games; the package is really wonderful. Back in the seventies (I think) he produced a glorious coffee-table book called "The Board Game Book," which contained fully-playable (once you cut the pieces out) historic and "foreign" games (from a western perspective). If you find that, grab it...

No list would be complete without Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games, which unaccountably seems to be out of print. Most of these games will probably seem fairly primitive to those of us grown used to offerings from Days of Wonder and Alea, but in a sense, reading this book is like being present at the moment of creation. In all these relatively simple games, many using nothing more exotic than pencil, paper, dice, and ordinary playing cards, we see the likes of Sid Sackson and Alex Randolph--and others passionate about games and able to see just a bit farther than where games were in 1969 and 1982--moving games in a new direction, which would eventually bring them here. And the games are still fun (at least many of them)--people still play Lines of Action, Focus, and much else in here. You also get to learn about how some of these games came to be, who these "new designers" were, and basically a wonderful tour through the world of "designer games" ca. 35 years ago.

From a little more recently comes New Rules for Classic Games by R. Wayne Schmittberger. This also dates from the years B.S. (Before Settlers), when those hungering for new and better games in the US took to tinkering with the games ready to hand (or easily made), rather than hitting the FLGS and buying whatever came in that Wednesday. It's great, for me, to see so much originality on display, with the malleability of so many games. I think that nowadays, we're looking for "gems" of games--perfectly contained games that require (and invite) no tinkering--tinkering, in fact, being evidence of some major flaw in the game that needs fixing. Sure, that's some of it--New Rules has a whole chapter on how to fix certain "breaks" in games--but I think we'd do well to rediscover the joys of making new games out of old, even when the old games are perfectly fine.

The Mathematics of Games. So many books in this category are either long out of print, hard to find, or fairly esoteric and not something I'd recommend to just anyone. The best book I've found for someone new to game math is Luck, Logic and White Lies by Jörg Bewersdorff. It introduces the reader to a vast mathematical literature, and does so in an enormously clear manner, which never takes one very far away from either the math or the games behind them. I love Winning Ways and On Numbers and Games, but they're definitely not for the faint of heart. LL&WL is the perfect book for gamers who are interested in the mathematics that underlie the choices they face and decisions they make. Just great stuff.

Chess. I'm really interested in the social and historical aspects of games, and Chess is far and away the most accessible and deeply researched game in the West, so it's easy (and fun!) to read about it. I'm a sub-miserable Chess player, but I'm endlessly fascinated by the history of the game, the personalities behind it, and how it's developed as a game and cultural phenomenon. My preferred starting point is Hooper and Whyld's Oxford Companion to Chess, which seems to be slipping under the waves, as well. I hope there's a third edition coming--with all that's changed since 1996, the "scorecard" one uses to keep track of the political games in Chess needs updating. This book is a reference work that covers virtually everything in the game--players, administrators, writers, variants, openings, moves...it's all here, in glorious historical detail. This book is almost certainly not going to make you any better, but it's a good way to learn about the game in general.

Another book with even less of a chance of being instructional is The Even More Complete Chess Addict, which has been OOP for some time but is easily located. Again, no instruction at all. This book is a compendium of trivia, minutiae, and spurious-sounding stories. It's been compiled by two British Chess/trivia addicts, Mike Fox and Richard James, and covers virtually anything. I especially like the "teams" they made up, of the great chess players in the fields of music, politics, math, and so on. There aren't a lot of literature citations and I have no trouble believing that a good percentage of the stories in here aren't true (not made up by the authors, just old chess-players' tales repeated here), but it's glorious bedtime reading and gives a vivid picture of how fully Chess permeates culture.

Chess reached its apex of importance in the Soviet Union (even if the Fischer-Spassky match's importance to Brezhnev has been overstated), and the best account I've seen of the game's history there is the well-titled Soviet Chess by Andrew Soltis. Soltis is a journalist and a Chess grandmaster, not an historian, and the book's tone reflects that. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily. The prose bounces along, interspersed with annotated Chess games of particular historical import or interest, from the Russian Civil War (with major events being played in stairwells by candlelight, without a sliver of government support), to the heyday of Soviet support of, and intereference in, Chess under Stalin, to the gradual decline of both the USSR and Soviet Chess. I've probably read this one through about three times; as one interested in both games and the Soviet Union, it's great reading.

Finally, the best look at a "personality" of Chess comes from Mikhail Tal's autobiography, Life and Games of Mikhail Tal. Too many Chess autobiographies are full of axe-grinding, conspiracy-mongering, and other political games--merited or unmerited, as the case may be. What you get from Tal's autobiography is a wave of optimism and good cheer radiating from him, through the pages. He didn't live an easy life--through his own fault and not--but he seems to have loved pretty much every minute of it--or, I suppose, just forgot the rest of it as soon as it passed. (I've known people like that. I envy them greatly...) He seems to have made no enemies, at least in the Chess world, and played a lot of great games and won a world championship (but held it only briefly) for his trouble. Fun writer, too. Again, you're not going to learn anything from this, probably, other than what it was like to be a grandmaster from the USSR during the fifties, sixties, and seventies. (It seems like most of the Chess books I've read do nothing for one's game. Well, none for mine, anyway--even the instructional ones!)

Go. Every gamer should learn Go. Maybe not play it well, or often, but you should know it, and have dipped your toe into it. It's ancient, simple, and bottomless. (The bits are also pretty bland, there's no theme, and it's difficult to play well, but some deal with these shortcomings better than others.) The trouble with reading about it--from my perspective--is that there seems to be little interest, in the West, anyway, for books on the history and culture of Go. The closest anything comes is the Go Player's Almanac 2001, edited by Richard Bozulich, one of the most tireless English Go editors. This book covers the history and players of the game, the various differences in rules around the world, how the boards and stones are made, Go in art, and so on. It's not a book you read right through, but most of the essays are quite good and reward anyone interested in Go beyond the moves.

Another great book is Invincible: the Games of Shusaku. The games, and commentary, are quite substantially above my head, of course, but it's still great. I love watching a player dominate his environment so thoroughly, and while the historical and biographical notes are a shade on the sparse side, what remains is excellent. And one can, of course, play through the games and hope for some of the greatness to rub off (that's what I tell myself, anyway.)

(The bookmark I'm using for this one is a shopping list I made years ago--I actually remember making it; it was while I was spending the winter break from school over at Tim's apartment. Below the list is the score from some sort of game, where I was brutally stomped by Tim. 30-3. I only scored four times, once getting negative points. No idea what game this could have been--the scores are too low for Scrabble, which is our usual game.)

Finally, for the kind of instruction we all need, I love the Graded Go Problems for Beginners books. Volume One most people don't need--it covers the very, very basics, which most people graduate from in half an hour. Two through four are the real deal, and every so often I work my way back through them. They cover life and death, opening and endgame problems, the works. Plowing through these will gradually bring the player to the "generally competent" level, which is where I am on a good day--I can appreciate good games and good play, even if I don't do it so often myself.

So that's the cream of my shelf...