Songfacts®:

• Adele starts her 30 album with a series of songs highlighting her guilt-ridden heartache following her divorce from Simon Konecki. Later on, we see her tentatively dipping her toes into the dating scene. After finding love again on "All Night Parking," she grows frustrated with her boyfriend's shortcomings on "Woman Like Me." She finishes the record with this Motown-influenced opus where she concludes that "love is a game for fools to play."
• Throughout the song, Adele talks about how love is "such a cruel thing," causing her self-inflicted pain. But she admits in the outro that despite all the heartache, she'd do it all again.
• Adele wrote the jazzy, string-spinning song with producer Inflo (The Kooks, Michael Kiwanuka, Sault). When they recorded the track, Breakfast At Tiffany's was playing on mute on the studio's TV. As the film finished, the two were trying to work out how to end "Love Is a Game." Adele had an idea: "We should write it as if we were writing the soundtrack," she recalled saying in an interview with British Vogue. "You know, at the end of the movie, where it pans out."