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The book takes in some surprising names. You might expect the Earl of Sandwich (the card game he was playing when he invented his famous snack was whist), but Mozart? The composer’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel (‘Musical Dice Game’) comprises 176 bars, arranged in 16 groups of 11. For each group, you choose one of the 11 bars by rolling two dice, then subtracting one from your score. This gives you a 16-bar waltz. And with 46 million billion combinations, each time it’s performed the audience almost certainly gets a Mozart world première.
The Prussian High Command puts in an appearance as well. In the early 19th century it used a game called Kriegsspiel (‘War Game’) to test the abilities of aspiring officers. The army’s subsequent success against France inspired other countries to follow suit. A modern initiative aiming for the opposite effect is ‘Games for Peace’. Israeli and Palestinian children play games online, working in groups to solve challenges but using avatars to disguise their identity. They then meet in person, often discovering that their team mate comes from the other side of the political divide.
Why do we love to play games? Du Sautoy notes that ‘some cultures favour games of chance over contests of strategy, perhaps reflecting their preference for a fatalistic outlook on life over a belief in agency over one’s destiny’. The Dutch writer Johan Huizinga thought that ‘into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life [game-playing] brings a temporary, a limited perfection’.
Du Sautoy recognises that Huizinga’s theory ‘could just as easily describe my attraction to mathematics’. As you’d expect from his TV programmes, he’s great at explaining the maths into which the games lead him. Some of the explanations are aimed at serious number-geeks, but unless you struggle with two plus two there’ll be at least something you can take away from the book. I’m looking forward to using the Chocolate Chilli Roulette trick. There are 13 chocolates and one chilli. Two of you take it in turns to remove chocolates (you can pick up one, two or three), and whoever removes the last one consigns their opponent to eating the chilli. Du Sautoy shows you how to guarantee a win if you go first, and still have a pretty good chance if you don’t.
We should all embrace the power of games. Certainly Sotheby’s and Christie’s did when they found themselves in a dispute over who had the right to auction a particular collection of paintings: they settled it by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors. The British royal family, however, had to abandon their habit of playing Monopoly. Apparently it always led to arguments. How unlike them.
Because you read about chess
Also by Mark Mason
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