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The Bibliophile

When you’re stuck indoors this winter, exercise your mind. Find a new board game to enjoy or hone your skills mastering your favorite game.

Seven Games: A Human History, by Oliver Roeder, 306 pages, W.W. Norton & Company paperback, 2023

Read an engaging account of these seven games: checkers, chess, Go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble and bridge.

Learn their historic origins, how they rose in popularity, the current state of play, and the extent to which computer programs have gained mastery over top-rated humans. Consider the degree to which logic, chance and mental agility are important components in mastering each of these games.

Take a seat alongside author Oliver Roeder as he enters championship tournaments. Meet quirky individuals and their quests for fame and championships. Explore how great players and their insights have taken the games to greater heights and, in many cases, greater popularity.

Seven Games will teach you how to improve your game. Casual players will learn new tactics and approaches that are well-known among the pros and serious competitors. Become intrigued with or take up a new pastime.

Examine the current availability of online programs — free and subscription-based — that help players hone their skills and achieve the next level. Read about the world of artificial intelligence and the race of machines and their developers to beat humans.

Roeder is a writer and puzzle editor for FiveThirtyEight, the website that uses statistical analysis to cover politics, sports and science.

Everybody Wins: Four Decades of the Greatest Board Games Ever Made, by James Wallis, 223 pages, Aconyte hardcover, 2023

Spiel des Jahr is a prestigious award for family-style board and card games selected by a jury of German game critics. Criteria include originality, playability and comprehensibility.

Everybody Wins is a large-format coffee table book that reviews the winners of the award from 1979’s Hare and Tortoise to 2022’s Cascadia.

A chapter is devoted to each year’s winner. The game is described succinctly: the number of players, playing time, recommended minimum age and its current availability, whether new, secondhand or out of print. Games include roll-and-move, race, set-making and legacy. (The latter means games played over several sessions.)

Author James Wallis opines whether the game is worth playing. He lauds games for their family appeal and their reliance on strategy, and categorizes them as cooperative or antagonistic. Wallis also explores the importance of randomness versus strategy.

More than 100 color photographs illustrate the game board, the box and its contents. The book includes Micromacro, Carcassonne, Codenames, CATAN, Qwirkle, Dominion and Bluff.

At the end of each chapter, you’ll find the nominees for each year’s award with a short summary of the game. A final chapter discusses notable games that should have won and why.

Wallis is a British game designer, publisher and consultant who lives in London. Wallis created the Diana Jones Award, known as the Nobel Prize of gaming. It is awarded annually at Gen Con, the largest tabletop games convention in North America.

Wheel of Fortune® 2024 Day-to-Day Calendar, Andrews McMeel Publishing; Trivial Pursuit® 2024 Day-to-Day Calendar: 2000s Edition, Andrews McMeel Publishing; Trivia Night Full-Color Daily Calendar 2024, Willow Creek Press

Play a game each time you turn the pages of these 2024 daily calendars. Wheel of Fortune has been broadcast since 1975. Each page of the 2024 Day-to-Day Calendar presents a partially completed game board, category clue and several used letters. The answer is revealed on the back.

The Trivial Pursuit® 2000 Edition features 300 trivia cards with questions from six color-coded categories relating to this century: places, science, sports, arts, entertainment and events.

Trivia Night has a similar format. The categories, however, are more wide-ranging and the historic time span much broader in scope. Each page is printed on a rainbow of solid-color pages with blank lines for note-taking at the bottom.

All three calendars can be mounted for ease of display and are printed with soy-based ink on recycled paper.