Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, Vol. 3

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable discussion of many interesting games
Review: Starting with Hackenbush (thanks to Groucho Marx) this book describes and analyzes a great many interesting games. While the authors are mathematicians, and there is mathematics involved, much of the discussion can be followed by the lay reader.

Rating:
Summary: Great reference for one person puzzles and games
Review: The new edition of these classic volumes has been completely reorganized, and this volume now contains mostly one person games or puzzles, such as peg solitaire, Soma, Rubik's Cube, mechanical wire and string puzzles, sliding block puzzles, magic squares, and life. The book is very readable and requires no mathematical background. However, this is no lightweight watered-down book and some sections of the books could take you months to understand completely (try the SOMA map or century puzzle map that appears in the Extras). Fortunately you can just skip over these parts if you don't want to dig down to this level of detail.

I have only looked briefly at the other volumes, but I believe this volume "stands on it's own" more so than volumes 2 & 3. Be warned, however, that there are several concepts (such as "nim addition" that you will need the previous volumes to understand).

Conway's game of Life is the subject of the last chapter, perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book, and that which has probably been most changed since the last edition. Still, they could easily have expanded this chapter into a whole volume, and looking at the internet it is already out of date.

Beware that the figures on the covers of these volumes DO NOT necessarily correspond to what is inside. For example, Volume 3 shows peg solitaire on the cover but the subject itself is all in Volume 4!