Game – Guesstimaster ****

Some while ago on our old site I reviewed a game called The Art of Science, which was a science-based quiz. Although I thought the game was great, I have had a lot of troublepersuading a large enough group to play it – those who usually resort to any question but science in Trivial Pursuit (and that’s quite a lot of people) would struggle hugely. The trouble is that unless you are playing in an academic institution, the chances are there will be a proportion of people around the table who just aren’t interested in science.

Now we have another game from the same people where numbers are at the heart of things, but I think (I hope) that it will be more of a general interest. That’s because it (thankfully) isn’t a mathematical general knowledge quiz, but instead a quiz where the aim is to guess closest at the size of a number (how many hairs on a typical human head, for instance), with points for getting in the right order of magnitude and for being closest, plus an optional equivalent of the old Monopoly Chance cards.

Apart from the name, which like The Art of Science is a bit clumsy I think this game has great potential. I love the board which is a logarithmic spiral growing from 1 to vast numbers – it even has little hints along the way to the kind things that are on that scale.

Time will tell if it will be as difficult to get people to play Guesstimaster as its predecessor… but I hope not, because it’s a great idea. It’s not cheap – £39.59 including shipping – but it is something that is different and well worth a look.

Available from the Academic Board Games web shop.

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Search This Blog