Playing games is one of the things that makes us human, and goes back thousands of thousands of years into the blurry depths of prehistory; games resembling chess and checkers and Go or “Chinese checkers” have been found in the ruins of vanished civilizations from Egypt to China to Sumer, and crude dice made from animal bones have been found in caves lived in by Ice Age hunters. Who knows what games were played that left no trace behind in the archeological record? My guess is that some sort of chase-and-catch games, the ancestors of soccer and football, were played wherever there were the combination of good summer weather, an empty meadow, and restless hunters still charged up from the hunt, and those long nights huddled around an Ice Age fire had to be filled somehow, if not with dice, then with cards (which probably would leave no trace behind, but which likely have a heritage almost as old as dice), or word-games, or the kinds of finger-games such as “Paper, Scissors, Stone” or “Thumb War” that may well go back to a time before there were such things as paper or scissors (“Mammoth, Spear, Stone,” perhaps?).

All games are competitions, though, which implies a winner and a loser. And the best games are those that have an element of risk involved in them. The more dangerous they are, in fact, the more the loser has at stake, the better we like them. And the ultimate stake is life itself.