I wanna be your end game. Roll the dice, pick your teams, and pull up a chair, because this week is all about games (decidedly not sports). Taylor reaches for game metaphors constantly, and once you start looking, you find chess boards, poker hands, and team rosters all over her catalog. Jenn kicks things off with the big thinkers of play, from Johan Huizinga’s magic circle to Roger Caillois’s four types of play to game theory, the field that treats every board game as a tiny model of human decision making. Then Jodi takes us inside the chess game of “Dear John,” where somebody else keeps changing the rules. Jenn lays her cards on the table with “Foolish One” and explains why showing your hand first is a classic game theory mistake (hello, sucker’s payoff). Maansi closes with “End Game,” tracing “end game,” “first string,” and “A-Team” back to chess, medieval archery, and the US Army, and landing on a very different kind of game where both players finally sit on the same side of the board. Along the way we detour through Jumanji, Lord of the Flies, Alice in Wonderland, The Queen’s Gambit, a Garry Kasparov masterclass, and the ancient Indian roots of chess. Grab your game pieces and play along! Episode Highlights [01:27] Jenn sets the stage with games as a core part of being human [09:44] Jodi on “Dear John” [22:46] Jenn on “Foolish One” [37:28] Maansi on “End Game” [52:57] Honorable mentions lightning round Mentioned in This Episode Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg Lord of the Flies by William Golding Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks The Mahabharata Browse all our picks at bookshop.org/shop/apts Film and TV The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix) Jumanji (1995) The A-Team (1983) Follow Along Website aptaylorswift.com Instagram @APTaylorSwift TikTok @APTaylorSwift YouTube @APTaylorSwift Linktree @APTaylorSwift Email aptaylorswift@gmail.com Rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen, and tell us your favorite game reference in the comments! Extra Credit on Substack We barely scratched the surface on games (we didn’t even get to video games). Find more extra credit on our Substack at aptaylorswift.substack.com, and join After School, our paid tier, for bonus content from all three of us. Intro music by Scott Zadig aka Scotty Z. AP Taylor Swift is an independent podcast and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Taylor Swift, her team, or her record labels.
