Beyond game theory

A board game with a small human illustrates how much emotions influence our decisions

The other day, Jenny and I played a game of Ludo with Luka. Its rules are simple enough to make it quite suitable for a five-year-old, even though some more strategic aspects are a bit beyond him. What I didn’t expect was the way in which it would capture some essential aspects of how we make decisions — and I am not thinking of game theory (which is outside my expertise anyway).

In case you are not familiar with Ludo (the name of which signifies “I play” in Latin), it goes as follows. Two, three or four players each have four tokens which they need to race around the board, along a game track consisting of squares, to their “home”. The tokens start off outside the game in the player’s “yard”. They progress according to the outcome of a roll of a single dice: to enter a token on the game track, a player must throw a 6, and subsequently, with each turn, tokens advance the number of squares equalling the value the player rolled. A 6 may be used to enter additional tokens into the game (if there are any left), or to move a token six squares. Rolling a 6 gets a player a bonus roll. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if a player’s token lands on a square that is already occupied by another player’s token, the latter is returned to the owner’s…