game

In January: writing from prompts, retelling a story, baking bingo.

Long, dark winter evenings are the perfect time for board and card games such as chess, Scrabble and bridge. Anna Hochsieder introduces all the necessary language.

Boer men participate in a cultural event in Majuba, South Africa. The name of the game they're playing — with two teams pulling on opposite ends of a rope — is often used metaphorically to describe a struggle that is not easily decided. What is this word in English?

This is a game of strategy. It requires an ability to think logically, make good decisions and plan ahead. Players must also be prepared to make short-term sacrifices in order to reach long-term goals. What's its English name? Click to find out.

Instead of creating a special database, Watson's creators fed it encyclopedias, dictionaries, and works of literature and let the computer find connections on its own. Using 2,880 processor cores, it's able to answer quiz questions in seconds.

Skill and concentration are useful to have in many areas of life, both at work and at play. Here, a pool player lines up a shot during a game at a pool hall in San Francisco.

As 2010 ends, we look back at unusual words: "Ilanaaq" is the Inuktitut word for friend, and Ilanaaq the Inunnguaq was the mascot of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. We also learned that "Eyja" is island, "Fjalla" is mountain and "Jökull" is glacier.