Across the Board: How Games Make Us Human

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.

About the Author

Tim Clare is an award-winning writer, poet, and creative writing podcaster. He is the author of We Can’t All Be Astronauts and Coward, and the novels The Honours and The Ice House. He has performed his work at festivals and clubs across the world, and on BBC TV and radio. Tim has also written for the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, and Big Issue, and presents the creative writing podcast Death Of 1,000 Cuts. He lives with his family in Norwich in Norfolk, England.