Across the Board
How Games Make Us Human
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Across the Board is a rollicking journey through the history and culture of tabletop games and the unparalleled way that they bring people together
"Rich with enticing origin stories, and a shining treatise on why games are so universal, so important, and so foundational to the human experience. This book beautifully explores their rich and textured legacy as everything from simple play to divine ritual. An exceptional read." —Tom Brewster, Shut Up & Sit Down
"The best book on games I've read in years." —G.T. Karber, bestselling author of Murdle
Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they’re everywhere: played in bars and cafés, churches and casinos, through sunless winters in polar research stations and in the sweltering summer heat of Tanzanian villages and streamed live over Twitch to millions of viewers.
They fill the activity pages of children’s magazines and the halls of senior centers. They appear as smartphone apps and in luxury editions and as game boards scratched into the dirt.
And they’re extraordinary for precisely the same reason: they’re everywhere, in every civilization, everywhere in the world across all recorded human history.
In Across the Board, tabletop game aficionado Tim Clare takes us through that history and across those civilizations. We learn how the same games emerge over and over and how they’ve evolved and spread, as well as about the contemporary culture of gaming.
With rousing enthusiasm, Tim explores games as familiar to us as Monopoly or chess, as niche as Magic: The Gathering, and as unexpected as the Japanese poetry-matching card game karuta. We learn about games as recreation and as ritual, and above all, we see how they can be a way for us to come together—because of all the things that make us human, there’s nothing quite so set up for connection as sharing a round of cards or the roll of a d20.
Told with fantastic wit and great love for the subject, Tim Clare’s Across the Board is a book for all of us, from the tic-tac-toe players to the dungeon masters and back again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tabletop board games are extraordinary for their very ordinariness, according this entertaining survey. Poet and podcaster Clare (Coward) notes that games have a startling similarity to one another across time and space, prompting his "slightly crazed" inquiry into whether tabletop games hold the secret to "what it is to be human." Each chapter tackles a different historical game, and while some of the examples feel out of place—a chapter explaining that 18th-century Swedes accused of group murder had to roll dice to see which of them would get executed does not actually give the impression of a universal human experience—eventually Clare does make an intriguing case for his hypothesis. The earliest, most elemental game in most cultures is the "race around the track," like parcheesi (originally Indian pachisi); this game type originated, in Clare's telling, as a scoreboard for keeping track of dice rolls. Dice were likely a neolithic era invention, an offshoot of "divination bones." Thus, games all evolved semi-independently as a natural way of recording and reckoning with probability, luck, and the divine. This insight leads Clare down some intriguing rabbit holes (including an investigation into why ancient Romans played with lopsided dice). Other attempts at the universalist theme fall a little flat ("Games are politics you can touch," he intones grandiosely in a chapter on Monopoly.) Still, readers will find many fascinating historical tidbits.
