Reddit mentions of Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish

Playing at the World (A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, From Chess to Role-Playing Games) by Jon Peterson. The history of Dungeons & Dragons, mostly written from the perspective of obscure 1960's fanzines and letters. Goes back to the 17th century and explores the roots of D&D, both game mechanics and culture.

War Games and Their History by Christopher George Lewin. What the title says. The author has an impressive collection of really old wargames, and the book is full of nice photos and descriptions. Mostly 19th century and first decades of 20th century. Really interesting. It is interesting to see how ideas slowly develop and inspire new games until games we know now like Risk or Stratego (or modern wargames) evolved (and of course if you read up about RPG history, eg the book I mentioned above, you know how this closely ties in with RPGs and most genres of modern board and computer games).

Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort. A history of interactive fiction (text adventures) from the early Adventure/Zork games of the 1970's (and the paper-based games/books before that) through the big commercial games of the 1980's and the hobby scene after that. (Anyone remotely interested in this subject also ought to watch the Got Lamp documentary btw.)

On Game Design by Chris Crawford. About 50 % good recommendations on how to design games, 50 % stories about the good old days when he worked on making Atari games and other primitive platforms around 1980 that contains many fun little anecdotes and I found all of it very inspiring. Have read and reread several times.

Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish by Lewis Pulsipher. Book on game design that is practical not just theoretical. Can really recommend it. Many tips for new designers that I wish someone told me long before I read this book. Not as deep into academic theories as other books, but interesting as word-definitions and arguing about "what is a game?" can be it is difficult to see how any of that will help anyone design better games in reality.

Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan. A short but very interesting objective look at different ways to introduce uncertainty in games and why it is important to make interesting games. By objective I mean that the author do not for subjective reasons claim that some types of uncertainty are somehow always bad.

The Wargaming Pioneers Including Little Wars by H.G. Wells, The War Game for Boy Scouts and The War Game by Captain Sachs 1898-1940 by John Curry. Just one of many good books from the History of Wargames project. Of course you can get free copies of Little Wars elsewhere (a must-read!) but I liked this book. Basically a collection of old miniature games rulebooks and some articles, from late 19th century and early 20th century. Gives you some perspective on for how long some mechanics have been around and how little new there is in Turn Based Strategy. I have probably read a dozen of the History of Wargames books, but I think this is the one I would recommend any game designer to pick up. Most of the other ones are mostly if you are very much into designing war/strategy games.

Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games by Phil Sabin. The author has taught war history by designing simple wargames for years, and this book contains some examples of games he has designed himself, and also a lot of discussion on how to design games. It's all about simulating some aspect of history/wars by designing tiny boardgames and how to abstract complex things into simple rules. If you look up some of his games eg on bgg you will see how unbelievably small and simple they are.

EDIT to add links:

Playing At The World book

Playing At The World blog

War Games and Their History

Little Twisty Passages

Chris Crawford on Game Design

Uncartainty in Games

Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games

Wargaming Pioneers

Little Wars download on Project Gutenberg

Simulating War