Games

Is this a great country or what? You can bet on the turn of the card, a roll of the dice—but also the NFL, the NCAA, and which Olson twin marries first. We bet $80 million a year, the amount growing wildly as more and more people gain access to this huge American wheel of fortune. No longer quarantined in Las Vegas, gambling has become as local as our neighborhood cineplex. It's no wonder that we spend more money gambling than we do on movies, music, sports, video games, and theme parks combined! If there's not a casino around the corner, there's one on your laptop computer. In Jackpot Nation , acclaimed Sports Illustrated writer Richard Hoffer takes us on a headlong tour, alternately horrifying and hilarious, across our landscape of luck, discovering just how ridiculously determined we are to gamble. Whether he's trying to win a side of bacon in a Minnesota bar, hustling a paper sack filled with $100,000 cash across Las Vegas parking lots, poring over expansion plans with a tribal chief in California, or visiting a retired bus salesman with a poor understanding of three-game parlays in his New York prison cell, Hoffer finds a national inclination—a cultural predisposition, even—to take a chance. Hoffer shows us how Americans—adventurers at heart—have embraced this ability to take recreational risks with a surprising gusto. But as he pokes into this country's far corners, traveling coast to coast with odds as his copilot, he uncovers more than just the playful exercise of that age-old fantasy—something for nothing. He discovers that the very institutions that used to regulate this workout are now its biggest cheerleaders. Whereas government, religion, and business once restricted our ability to gamble, making it taboo even, they have now taken ownership of the pastime. Yesterday's numbers racket is today's state lottery; yesterday's mobbed-up casino is now part of a Fortune 500 company. It's one thing to recognize the house edge, more...

Price: $19.95

If you think a gang of real-life geeks can’t take on the world and win big . . . think again. And whatever you do, don’t sit down across a gaming table from Jon Finkel, better known as Jonny Magic. Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids is his amazing true story: the jaw-dropping, zero-to-hero chronicle of a fat, friendless boy from New Jersey who found his edge in a game of cards–and turned it into a fortune. more...

Price: $17.95

This is an activity book for kids ages 8-12 that describes how to make hands-on projects and play games from different lands. The different cultures represented span the globe, including China, Mexico, Korea, India, Russia, and South Africa. more...

Price: $12.95

An award-winning sportswriter takes you inside a year with the nation’s top high school chess team. With strict admission standards and a progressive curriculum, Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School has long been one of New York’s public-education success stories, serving a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranking among the nation’s best high schools. At Murrow, there are no sports teams, and the closest thing to jocks are found on the school’s powerhouse chess team, which annually competes for the national championship. In The Kings of New York sportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season, from cash games in Washington Square Park to city and state tournaments to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where this eclectic bunch competes against private schoolers and suburbanites. Along the way, Weinreb brings to life a number of colorful characters: the Yale-educated calculus teacher (and former semipro hockey player) who guides the savants while struggling to find funding for his team; an aspiring rapper and tournament hustler who plays with cutthroat instinct; the team’s lone girl, a shy Ukrainian immigrant; the Puerto Rican teen from the rough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who plays an ingenious opening gambit named the Orangutan; and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status. In the bestselling tradition of such books as Word Freak and Friday Night Lights, The Kings of New York is a riveting look inside the world of competitive chess and an inspiring profile of young genius. more...

Price: $26.00

A sorcerous cataclysm has remade the ancient and magical world of Sosaria, where a misguided plan to bring ultimate order to the land has altered its destiny forever. Now past, present, and future are one...a unity that sets in motion an astonishing age of discovery and conþict for this strange new world. more...

Price: $6.50