How to Win Games and Beat People

December 1, 2015

Science editor at The Times (UK) and admitted bad loser Whipple isn't interested in helping you win friends and influence people, but rather in helping you defeat and demolish your family and friends. While games may enhance a get together or holiday, for serious gamers they are the definers and formulators of not just gatherings and memories but our ideas of gamesmanship, diplomacy, and ethics. Games test both alliances and friendships, and lead to double-crossing and in-your-face celebration. The 30 games compiled by Whipple--including Tic-Tac-Toe, Risk, Connect Four, 20 Questions, Battleship, Scrabble, and Trivial Pursuit--are distilled down to their gloat-emboldening essence and cheat-sheet stratagems, both humble and highbrow. A surgeon is consulted for Operation, Jenga is principled by a structural engineer, and one of the world's top card-counters measures Blackjack and teaches how to deduce a running count. In addition to board game classics, nontraditional games such as Competitive Eating, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Apple Bobbing, Drinking Games, and Sand Castles are pleasingly described. VERDICT While the concepts of beat, defeat, and demolish will draw readers in, this highly recommended book also provides compelling deduction, illuminating analysis, and fun. (For example, readers learn why jail is the most landed on square in Monopoly.) The descriptions of each game are nimbly broken down and wittily delivered.--Benjamin Malczewski, Toledo-Lucas Cty. P.L., MI

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