Learn to play

Two rival traders work the same Company market. Buy low, sell in bulk, and know when to take the coins instead — the biggest sales earn bonus tokens, and the sharpest trader takes the round. First to two round wins takes the game.

A sowing game on four rows of eight pits. Lift a pit, drop its seeds one by one around your own sixteen, and if the last one lands on a pile you scoop that up and carry on — a single turn can run more than twice round your own board. Stop the relay in an empty pit of your inner row and you take everything sitting straight across from it.

Gin Rummy is a two-player card game of ten-card hands and one question every turn: is this hand close enough to end? Draw and discard to build runs and sets, watch what your opponent takes, and knock when your leftovers are small enough to survive being counted. Knock too early and you get undercut; knock too late and they go gin. A match runs to 100 points.

Backgammon is the oldest game we know of that is still played the same way, and the reason is the dice. Fifteen checkers race home against fifteen going the other way, every roll offers a handful of legal moves and only one good one, and a checker left alone can be sent back to the start. Then there is the cube: at any point you can double what the game is worth, and your opponent must take it or concede.

Hearts is a game about losing. Every heart you take costs a point, the queen of spades costs thirteen, and the winner is whoever has collected the least by the time somebody reaches a hundred. The catch is that you cannot simply duck everything — if one player takes every single penalty card, they shoot the moon and the other three take twenty-six points each. So the player scooping up hearts is either losing badly or about to win.

Spades is a partnership game about promises. Before a card is played, you and your partner each say how many tricks you will take, and the two numbers are added into one contract you both have to make. Take fewer and you lose ten points a trick. Take more and the extras pile up as bags until ten of them cost you a hundred. Spades are always trump, the bidding is the game, and the hardest part is telling your partner what you have using nothing but a number.