Lessons in Play: An Introduction to Combinatorial Game Theory

by Michael H. Albert, David Wolfe

Combinatorial games are games of pure strategy involving two players, with perfect information and no element of chance. Starting from the very basics of gameplay and strategy, the authors cover a wide range of topics, from game algebra to special classes of games. Classic techniques are introduced and applied in novel ways to analyze both old and new games, several appearing for the first time in this book.

Genres: Mathematics, Games

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2007

Reviews

[Andrew]

I bought the book after reading the first couple of chapters for free on Google Books. It's an extremely readable introduction to the field of Combinatorial Game Theory, the mathematics that seeks to explain luckless 2 player games like Chess and Go.

This is a textbook, so you'll need to be comfortable with mathematics and interested in the concepts - while you might gain minor insights into playing games and a better understanding of concepts you've encountered (eg sente and gote moves in Go), don't expect deep strategic or tactical Go revelations. Except dots-and-boxes (which I know as Paddocks) - the book discusses some serious dots-and-boxes strategy as an illustration of concepts.

I was amazed by how well diagrams and symbols were incorporated into the text: all the shapes used by the made-up games were printed right where they were needed in the middle of discursive paragraphs.