ON THE NIGHTSTAND
I've mostly been reading antebellum history books, but not exclusively.
Today, my nose has mostly been in books about games. I was inspired a while back by one of Mikko's posts, and went to the AK Peters website to check out their books on board games. They had two extremely interesting-looking ones, so I ordered them through the Store (where I get a discount!), and have been reading them whenever work was slow (and I wasn't looking for info about WWI aces).
The first, the one that started this quest, is Connection Games, by Cameron Browne, longtime game player and occasional designer of a few games himself.
There's very little math in the book; what little there is can be understood with the aid of the appendices in the back. This book is really an attempt to describe and categorize all the various games that involve connections in one form or another. The book is in three parts.
The first part, "Defining Connection," discusses what we even mean by a "connection game." What brings games like Go, Hex, Twixt, and TransAmerica together into one book? This section also is the most math-y, with some light discussion of the topology of game boards (what would it be like to play Hex on a Klein bottle?) and games as graphs. No heavy lifting. Finally there's a discussion of the kinds of moves and strategies that often come into play in connection games--building forks (situations where your pieces can't be split) and blockades (building perpendicular to your "natural" direction in order to maximize the forks you can make), for example. This part serves mostly to ensure that everyone's using the same terminology for the rest of the book.
Part II is the meat of the book, as it gives reasonably lengthy discussions of virtually every game with connection elements anyone can think of. It divides this huge game kingdom into four phyla, as it were. "Pure Connection Games," like Hex, have "both strictly connective play and strictly connective goals." "Connective Goal" games differ by generally by having pieces move around, rather than being placed into a static connective system. "Connective Play" games put pieces into connected networks, but your goal is something other than purely connecting one side to another. Ta Yü is an example--how you connect your sides is what's important, rather than merely doing so. "Connection Related" games are a murky lot indeed, and connection between pieces is important but not all-consuming like Hex--Go is an example.
Personally, I find some of the taxonomy obscure, and I'm not sure if I could give the details that ensure a difference between "Connective Goal" and "Connective Play" games 100% of the time. What I love, though, is looking at all the scabrillion games that have connection and path-making elements. That, and it's cool to see a book by an academic publisher discussing Ta Yü, TransAmerica, Blokus, Dos Rios, and a bunch of other "Euro" games.
Part III is an odd grab-bag. It starts off with a discussion of how one goes about designing a connection game--with some examples of "failed" connection games. There's also a chapter on the cognitive aspects of playing connection games, and then an appendix that contains some more mathy material.
It's a fascinating book. I'd have liked a little more math, and I'm not entirely sold on the taxonomy system, but it provides a ton of interesting reading for boardgamers, and lots of food for thought.
The other book I got was Luck, Logic & White Lies, a very different book, but also excellent.
To cut to the chase for those interested in combinatorial game theory: This book made thermographs make sense. I did not think it was possible, but here it is.
This book serves as an introduction to the mathematics of games. It seeks to show to the reader how it is that games have their power--how they manipulate chance, hidden information, and combinatorics (or, more often, a combination of the three) to create uncertainty and tension in play. It devotes a long section to each of these three sources of uncertainty.
This is kind of an obscure reference, but the book reminds me of "Master Go in Ten Days," the grandiosely-titled Go book that starts with the basic rules of the game and ends with some really pretty advanced concepts. This book is the same way with game math. In the first chapter, we are informed that there is a 1/2 chance of rolling an even number on a fair six-sided die. Three hundred pages later, we're doing combinatorial thermographs.
I'm a fairly mathy person. My parents, an engineer and a mathematician/computer scientist, could not have raised me to be otherwise, even though I'm becoming an historian anyway. As long as it's not a differential equation, I can handle pretty much all the math I ever happen to get myself in front of--some number theory here, graphs and topology there; I get by. I love the mathematics of games, naturally enough, as the intersection of two lifelong interests.
I've been trying to get all the books on combinatorial games that I can. I've long wanted something that could be an introduction to the subject--giving me some of the bacground I've missed--as well as being an accessible reference and something I can use to explain the subject to someone else. I really need to give this book some closer scrutiny, but I think this could be That Book. As I said, it assumes very little in its readership other than basic mathematical ability; it brings one along. It also does a good job of citing more specialist literature and giving one pointers about how to apply its concepts to all the games one plays. I'd have been curious to see him approach Settlers of Catan or some "modern classic."
These are both very, very interesting books. Luck, Logic is far more mathy than Connection Games, but I think both books have a lot to offer gamers of all stripes.
