Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond

You gain a deeper insight into the essential building blocks of players, strategies, and payoffs-most of them more complex and subtle than they might appear-along with two new concepts, rationality and common sense.

The 5,000 artifacts discovered in the tomb of Egyptian King Tutankhamun included magnificent gold statues, iron blades, and four boards for the game senet-a game played by royalty and commoners alike during the entire 3,000-year lifespan of the Egyptian civilization. Discover what historians have learned from the game boards' hieroglyphs and why senet disappeared so abruptly.

In seeking the optimal strategies for games in which players take turns and where the full history of the game is known to all, you learn how to construct a "game tree" and are introduced to one of game theory's key concepts: the Nash equilibrium.

In the waning years of the Indian Gupta Empire, 6th century CE, a board game was developed called chaturanga. This game of tabletop warfare starred the soldiers, elephants, horse riders, and chariots that had helped the Gupta rajas create their kingdom. Discover how this ancient game of strategy wound its way westward to eventually become the enduringly popular game we know as chess.

While the westward development of chaturanga into chess is fairly well documented, its eastward route is somewhat murky. Explore a Chinese game called xiangqi, and a Japanese game called shogi. Are these two games of tabletop warfare closer to each other in play than they are to chess? Or do they both have a definite lineage from chaturanga?