Across the Board: How Games Make Us Human

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. (May)