At the Joint Meetings, I have been able to meet many interesting people, including freelance author, Dana Mackenzie. If you look at his webpage, you can see that he has written lots of math related articles and books. One particularly interesting thing he has worked on is a mathematical card game called the Stern-Mackenzie One Round War. The rules of the game and a simulation of it can be found at http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/category/Numberplay/
On Tuesday, Mackenzie will be posting an explanation of strategies to use to win the game. Check it out and post comments below of strategies you come up with.