Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they’re everywhere. And 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: How Games Make Us Human," tabletop game aficionado Tim Clare 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.
Tim Clare is an author, poet and presenter of the podcast for writers, Death Of 1000 Cuts. He has written two Fantasy novels, "The Honours" and "The Ice House," published by Canongate. His nonfiction book about failed writers, "We Can't All Be Astronauts," won Best Biography/Memoir at the East Anglian Book Awards.
