Around the world in eighty games: from tarot to tic-tac-toe, catan to snakes and ladders, a mathematician unlocks the secrets of the world's greatest games

"Do you know where you should always move first in Tic Tac Toe? Understand the betting cube in backgammon? Want to know the best property in Monopoly?

Did you know that the African game Mancala might have led one of its players to make an early approximation of the number pi? Or that the nigh-magical Golden Ratio can help you win at Rock Paper Scissors? Around the World in Eighty Games is a gleeful exploration of games and math, spanning centuries and millennia, oceans and continents, countries and cultures.

Renowned mathematician Marcus du Sautoy shows how mathematics and games have always been deeply intertwined: how games provided some of the first opportunities for deep mathematical insight into the universe; how understanding math can help us play games better; and how the knowledge and enjoyment of both math and games are integral to human psychology and cultures. But du Sautoy doesn't just look at the games we play; he asks why we play them. For as long as there has been human culture, there have been games.

If you look, you can find 12,000-year-old dice, game boards carved in church pews and chiseled into the stones of temples, monuments, and tombs. And for nearly as long, humans have been exploring and discovering mathematics. Taken together, math and games tell us the story of ourselves"--