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A review by parkerpng
Around the World in 80 Games by Marcus du Sautoy
adventurous
informative
fast-paced
3.5
Thought I’d love this book as I love games and I enjoyed maths in school. However, I’ve pretty much forgotten most of my math knowledge and this book certainly doesn’t hold back on its mathematical formulas. It’s not required to understand them, but I felt like I was missing out from not being able to understand things like binary from the get go.
The author’s suggested reading method of rolling a die and moving through chapters accordingly is novel, but it’s way too gimmicky and comes at the expense of missing beats from the overall narrative that Sautoy is attempting to weave. I ended up restarting the book at one point so I could read it in the standard order, and it did improve my enjoyment.
However, I do think it’s one of those reads where you could go to chapters at will and still enjoy what it has to offer. I think there are perhaps too many chapters which offer me little enjoyment, either because I didn’t quite understand the maths or the history didn’t interest me.
For what it’s worth, though, many chapters (Chess, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Risk) were really engaging. I think Go was easily my favourite chapter. But things such as language games and infinity games just don’t make sense to me, and why did the Pokémon chapter segway into NFT monkeys??
Well, I hope smarter people than me enjoy it.
The author’s suggested reading method of rolling a die and moving through chapters accordingly is novel, but it’s way too gimmicky and comes at the expense of missing beats from the overall narrative that Sautoy is attempting to weave. I ended up restarting the book at one point so I could read it in the standard order, and it did improve my enjoyment.
However, I do think it’s one of those reads where you could go to chapters at will and still enjoy what it has to offer. I think there are perhaps too many chapters which offer me little enjoyment, either because I didn’t quite understand the maths or the history didn’t interest me.
For what it’s worth, though, many chapters (Chess, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Risk) were really engaging. I think Go was easily my favourite chapter. But things such as language games and infinity games just don’t make sense to me, and why did the Pokémon chapter segway into NFT monkeys??
Well, I hope smarter people than me enjoy it.