Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us about Life

by Jonathan Kay

Board games are among our most ancient and beloved art forms. During the rise of digital media, they fell from prominence for a decade or two but today they are in a new golden age. They’re ingeniously designed, beautiful to look at, and exhilarating to play. Games are reclaiming their place in our culture, as entertainment, social activity, and intellectual workout equipment. Alone among all art forms, games require their audience (called “players”) to participate. If nobody’s playing, there is no game.

As a result, games can tell far more about us than our TV shows, movies or music ever could. How does The Game of Life illustrate our changing attitudes about virtue? How does a World War II conflict simulation game explain the shortcomings of a failed novelist? Each chapter of Your Move examines one game, and what it reveals about our culture, history, society, and relationships.

Genres: Nonfiction, Games, Philosophy, Adult, Psychology, Essays, Science

180 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 11, 2019

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I was expecting more rigour from this book. It builds itself up as a deep-dive into gaming and the real-life lessons we can learn therefrom, and its frequent self-references enhance that impression that you're going to get something really in-depth (or, in fact, that you've gotten something really in-depth, based on the authors' reminiscences about past chapters toward the end). However, it never seemed to get much deeper than "these two people's super casual blog posts about their own feelings about various games". It wasn't a bad read, just a lot less engaging than I was hoping for.

I was also put off by myriad broad-stroke assertions that didn't apply to me at all. At one point, one of the authors states as fact that everyone loves to belittle Political Correctness. At another point, one of the authors states that all game players take their victories as a very personal vindication of their efforts but their losses as the vagaries of chance. (I am very much the opposite, broadly in life as well as in gaming, and it's something I need to work on.) And there's a theme, inimical to the authors' stated ideas about gaming in some ways, that crops up frequently about players essentially playing in bad faith -- being willing to ruin other people's enjoyment and in fact personal lives and relationships in order to bring their gameplay (even at casual games) to the "next level". That doesn't ring true of any of the gaming groups I've played in at all.

On the subject of one of the authors' derision for political correctness above, the treatment of cultural appropriation rubbed me the wrong way in this book. I'm glad it came up as a topic, but the author of that section essentially sweeps it away trivially by softly asserting that because board gamers are more intellectually evolved people than the general public, it doesn't really matter. That was almost a "time to put this book down" moment for me.

What carried me through, ultimately, was a combination of having previously met one of the authors and found them really intelligent and engaging and having a deep enjoyment of games journalism. However, if I had to recommend a work on the subject, I'm not sure this would come to the top of the stack.

[AcademicEditor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty niche topic, but the two authors find interesting ways to explore human society and psychology through the lens of board games. I realized that I am guilty of several of the issues mentioned--trying so hard not to look foolish that all playfulness or fun is lost, and being reluctant to try new games rather than old favorites because of steep learning curves. The authors' takes on various famous games like Monopoly and Scrabble often diverge, so the book overall is more thought-provoking than definitive on many topics.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Your Move is a series of essays about boardgaming by Joan Moriarty, game sommelier at Toronto game cafe Snakes and Lattes, and Jonathan Kay, an avid hobbyist gamer, journalist, and currently editor at Quillette*. The essays are pretty populist and surface level. Table top games are fun because we can step inside a magic circle of play and commit fully without having to live with the consequences. They give us something to go with our friends, and offer levels of involvement from the minimally interactive Apples to Apples, to the elegant decision spaces of eurogames, to the grand strategies of complex supergames. Tabletop gaming experienced a massive renaissance in the 2010s, with the whole field growing several times over. Today, there are games for almost any taste!

The essays are best when they get away from the bland generalities. Kay likes Monopoly as an example of an unstable equilibrium, while Moriarty holds to the conventional wisdom that it's one of the worst games you'll ever play. Moriarty's deconstruction of Scattergories as a relationship killer which is actually about political skill in playing the table is brilliant analysis. Similarly, while Kay is not a fan of Scrabble, he has affection for the unique skills required at high level play. Nigel Richards won the French national Scrabble tournament by memorizing dictionaries, and still cannot speak French.

Where this book gets weird is when Kay starts inveigling against political correctness, even as Moriarty calls for a more diverse gaming community. I didn't discover the association with Quillette until after I had finished the book, but Quillette is a publication which spends a lot of time promoting discredited racist theories, employs Proud Boys information operative Andy Ngo, and generally is trying to make fascism an acceptable political viewpoint. So when Kay argues playing Phil Eklund's Greenland (and Eklund has his own issues), is a better way to gain respect for Indigenous people than the media growing out of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools, I roll to disbelieve.

So hey, its a decent set of introductory essays, except half the proceeds go to a guy who's making a career out of destroying Western democracy. I'm not one of those people who requires that every book I read match my politics: I gave five stars to Freedom's Forge, and the author is an American Enterprise Institute arch-conservative. It's just that even by culture war standards, Quillette fucking sucks. And to Libertarians and Conservatives out there, happy to have a discussion about regulatory overreach or anti-competitive tax policy or whatever it is, once you deal with all the racists and actual Nazis you call buddies. Show some actual integrity, and stop making everything about 'triggering the libs'.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really great book to read just in general. The short stories and essays as well as the illustrations/art make it easy to equate to every day life. Turn talking and giving people time to make decisions as you do in a game, is intrinsic to just being a good person and allowing others to be who they are as well. I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would and I am better for reading it!

Danny

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard about this book and read an excerpt on the internet and was hooked. I probably fall somewhere in between casual and avid table top gamer. For example, I had heard of most of the games mentioned in this book, and have played or own some of them. I enjoy board/table top games (I will use the two interchangeably since some "board" games do not have boards) and so am probably an ideal audience.

The book is a series of essays by the two authors Jonathan Kay and Joan Moriarity, who provide two different viewpoints on the world of table top gaming. Each essay is self-contained and covers topics from the "magic circle of gaming", to cultural appropriation, to un/stable equilibria with Monopoly, to what can happen in Scattergories games gone wrong. The book is a nice fast and easy read since each chapter has a new facet of gaming to compare to real life or explore some aspect of being human. The examples are grounded since they relate to board game episodes, but there are connections to the mathematical richness and playful aspects of table top games. I was especially impressed by the even-handedness of the essays, as they thoughtfully explored some culturally controversial points, and even the "rants" against certain games included trying to look at it from the view of those who enjoy the games (Scrabble and Monopoly are targeted here).

If you're looking for table top game recommendations, you will probably be disappointed, as games are mentioned and their main aspects are described, but not enough to give you a good handle on whether you'd necessarily like them. If you are familiar with the surrounding games being discussed, you can probably make some educated guesses about whether you'll like the new entries. This book is more about exploring the philosophy of games and how that connects with the so-called "real" world. The authors do an excellent job and express themselves clearly (with a few editing errors, which may be due to the Kindle edition). I was entertained and provoked to think a little more on what games teach us.

[Bex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this book: it's interesting, quick and entertaining, and I would recommend it to tabletop gamer veterans as well as to people new to the hobby. In their series of quick-fire essays, the authors consider various games through sociological and economic lenses - linking them to topics such as the Prisoner's Dilemma, Edward Said's 'Orientalism' and cultural appropriation - to name just a few.

I expected to prefer the chapters about games that I have myself played, but as each part of the book takes a fresh and different approach this was not actually the case, and instead I now have a list of new games that I need to seek out and play. Another worry I had on starting out with the book was that it would mainly focus on the old 'classics' like Monopoly and Scrabble, but this was totally unfounded: whilst the authors look at the more conventional titles, they consider them alongside a much more diverse selection including Dungeons and Dragons, Catan, Greenland, Chinatown, Pandemic etc...

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love board games/card games just as much as I love books. I firmly believe just with books, there is a game for everyone. I wanted to love this book more, but it was just so ho-hum for me over all. Got a little tired of the authors referring to what was going to happen in a future chapter or what happened in the last chapter - book wasn't that long to justify that.
Over all they had some interesting insight.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a series of essays from two people (one a blooming writer and professional board game guru at Snakes and Lattes in Toronto, and the other a professional writer and semi-recent hobby board game enthusiast). Together they look at various socio-political and cultural
topics through the lease of modern board games. Definitely an interesting and worthwhile read.

[orangerful · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this personal look at board games through the eyes of these two people. I would say I wish the epilogue had been the introduction as they touch upon what the book ended up being versus what the introduction stated it would be.

I preferred Joan's chapters to Jonathan's - I think her style was more accessible and her point of view more relatable as she played games similar to myself. Jonathan's penchant for heavy war games made a few of his essays a bit harder to read since I had no frame of reference. I really enjoyed his entry on Chinatown and Scrabble since those both shows a bit more of his personal side than some of the other essays where I think he was trying to sound objective in his critiques but came off as distant.

At a brief 166 pages, this was a quick read and a fun read for anyone that plays board games. I would love to see a similar collection, perhaps each essay written by different people in the games industry - from designers to journalists to online influencers.

[Nikki]

A fun and surprising book of essays about games, gaming culture, and how our gaming selves interact within the culture itself. It's a fascinating look at the history of boardgames and RPGs, and has a little bit for everyone, covering classics through to new-wave Kickstarter games and beyond. As noted in the intro, it's a dip-in kinda book, too -- the reader can pick and choose which essays to read. Still, a nice narrative flow remains. The essays made me want to go out and explore the history of games and gaming even further. Its brightly-coloured and eye-catching front cover fits well on the Pop Culture shelf.

[Bhaskar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book delves into the correlation between the decisions we make in life and board games. It’s a fairly small book ~160 pages, comprising short essays written by the authors where they talk about the history of various board games and how it has had an impact on our decision making. I thought the book was well written and structured, but I found some of the information presented in a few chapters to be quite mundane. It didn’t excite me as I thought it would, but that’s because I expected something more psychological out of this book. As mentioned in some of the other reviews, it’s a good general book to read but don’t expect to take away anything major from this book.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do you love reading? Do you love board games? Do you love reading about board games?? I have the book for you. Well… not really. I unfortunately cannot recommend Your Move as a good read.

In Your Move, Moriarity and Kay attempt to analyze the impact of board games on societies and relationships and how different cultures approach board games. Expressed in only 166 pages, it is a quick read and the authors focus the majority of their time on some of the most well known board games throughout history. You’ll learn about their perspectives on Monopoly, Scattergories, Catan, Scrabble and many more. Let me emphasize the word “perspectives”. Your Move is a rather opinionated, glass-half-empty book that shares little about the history of board games and contains more of their personal views and biases.

If you’re looking for a high level view into the history of board games or if you’re looking for objective research about how board games impact societies and relationships, don’t read this book. I was let down by Your Move. The authors come across as two melodramatic complainers whining about mainstream and entry-level games. In the first couple chapters, they set up the book as if they are going to dive into detail about what board games can tell us about people and personalities… it was more about how gamers don’t approach games correctly, how mainstream games are disliked by true gamers, and how some board games inaccurately depict and disrespect historical moments, cultures, and populations. They completely lost me by the time they reached Scattergories and said that it shatters relationships, is morally corrupt, and instills hatred and violence. I suppose I could be living in my safe bubble of happy board game experiences… but I strongly doubt that their negative observations of gaming experiences are as common as they suggest.

I hold out hope that there are better board game books out there waiting for me to discover them. As for Your Move, I don’t think I can honestly recommend it as a good book. The negative points of view and melodramatic explanations are hard to ignore and there’s enough negativity in the world that I prefer not to read about it as it pertains to one of my most treasured hobbies.

[Craig Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, Joan Moriarity & Jonathan Kay spend as much time writing about tabletop games as they do about the personalities and psychological makeup of their players, and how game theory can affect the world at large. I was more attracted to the chapters by Moriarity, who interacts daily with players at a Toronto gaming café and witnesses the behaviours exhibited by a wide range of customers. By her own admission, she surprises herself by what reactions game players exhibit versus what she believes they should be exhibiting. Case in point: the most politically incorrect game around today, Cards Against Humanity:

“Another curious thing about Cards Against Humanity is the people who choose to play it. I have spent years observing people selecting and playing games so I think I have a better sense than most about which games reach which target audiences. For a long time, I assumed it must be straight, white, cisgender dudes driving the game’s massive success. As the years went by, I began to notice something about the people at the café who came to me looking for help finding a copy of it: roughly nine in ten were women, and about half of those were women of color. Obviously, I do not know and cannot know the exact reasons why people choose to play any particular game but I thought my experience had provided me with ample basis for making educated guesses. What I saw went against who I supposed this game was for and how it was meant to be enjoyed. I wondered who these women could be punching down at. Their queer friends? Their trans friends? That did not seem likely.”

I have played this game many times and only within a group of other gay men. As one of the targeted groups within this nasty deck of cards, we can’t help laughing at the obvious antigay slant some of the cards display. I have attended comedy shows put on by gay and lesbian comedians, and their jokes are full of queer stereotypes that a straight comedian would lose his or her career over. We can laugh at the homophobic biases because we know that they are so totally not true or are surreal exaggerations. On a related note, there are some Jewish comedians who can tell anti-Semitic jokes that gentile comedians could never do (and Joan Rivers had been the bane of the Anti-Defamation League on more than one occasion). So I do not agree with the theory that Cards Against Humanity allows its players to be “horrible people” by being openly racist, sexist, homophobic and so on. The game is not unleashing the closet anti-Semite in all of us. We are not laughing at others, but ridiculing ourselves instead when we play it.

I enjoyed Moriarity’s teaching style and her insight into gamer personalities and I believe that under her tutelage I might become a convert to fantasy or empire-building games. My gaming preference has always been the wordy types: Scrabble, Probe, Balderdash, Hangman or any of the other Scrabble-inspired or -derived tile games like Anagrams and Fry Your Brain. I do play other games, such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, but of all the games Moriarity and Kay talked about in this book, Greenland (a survival game) has piqued my interest the most to want to play it and now I am looking on-line to find out where I might buy it.

Irony alert as chapter five was entitled “Cures for Pandemics and Alpha Players”, where Moriarity dealt with the game called Pandemic (this book was published in September 2019, which leads me to wonder if COVID-19 will inspire anyone to develop a game based on its worldwide spread) as well as how to deal with know-it-all players who ruin everyone’s experience by dominating the game table.

The authors referred to their own essays as well as each other’s, both ones already encountered and ones yet to come, and this must have required a massive editing collaboration to ensure that what they said was later covered, or had been dealt with earlier. Thus although the authors stated at the beginning that each of the game essays could be read independently and that jumping around the book skipping chapters was perfectly all right, there was nonetheless a tight sense of cohesion where chapters flowed well together. I would recommend reading the book from cover to cover.

By far the best chapter was Moriarity’s Scattergories and Sacrilege, where she pummelled the card game as a friendship breaker and family un-maker:

“It is often labeled a ‘party game’ but that implies a party-like atmosphere. Gregarious fun, rollicking hijinks, that sort of thing. Scattergories is more like being stuck in detention with nothing to do but your homework. Players sit quietly with their papers and pens, writing without talking to each other, without interacting or even looking at each other. They might as well be doing their taxes. This part of Scattergories is a silent, joyless chore.”

Kay wrote one of the most poignant lines that introverted social misfits like me can identify with:

“Board gaming in general…is the only thing I do in life that allows me to fuse fully my desire for intellectual stimulation with the inborn human appetite for some form of social connection.”

Some style notes I must comment on: I abhor the lazy suffix -wise, which my local weather forecaster uses excessively with the sentences always beginning “Temperaturewise…” I admit that the beauty of the English language allows its speakers to understand what neologisms like this mean without the excesses of circuitous prepositional phrases. A word like this might go over better in an oral context, but on the printed page, I would prefer to see “As for the temperature…” Kay was guilty of two such -wise monstrosities. I let the first one go without putting it in my notes, but by the time I encountered the second occurrence:

“Hobby-wise, board gaming is more properly described as a confederation of sub-communities…”

I had to note it. The -wise suffix is inelegant on the printed page and should be avoided in neologisms.

Unfortunately the end of the book disappointed me with two errors within its last two paragraphs. These mistakes ruined an otherwise pleasant read with a bang-bang effect of successive erroneous words:

“…those same people are have already shown their willingness to actually get together…”

and:

“So maybe it’s good that there are all those various communities are there, playing among various kinds of people.”

This kind of error, where it seems more likely that the author changed tense or verb placement while the original wording or part thereof was left in, was found elsewhere in the book, but I did not note it. The editor in me felt that I could let those instances pass, but not twice in the final two paragraphs.

[Sascha · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short essays on a few games and the insights gained from them. A quick fun little read, that neatly fit between my level of knowledge of games and my enjoyment of their hot takes.

[Verity Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

It isn't fun to play when you feel that people will be judging you...

Although this book brings a lot of interesting ideas to the table (for which I would have given it 5 stars), it wallows too much in its own political correctness (which tempts me to give it less than 3). I find it depressingly ironic that the author who expresses so much concern and dismay about people being afraid to play games for fear of being judged is also the same author who constantly judges other people throughout these essays. I (and my whole family) love all sorts of tabletop games, but I would hesitate to play any game with someone so likely to be judging everyone else at the table.

Unfortunately, that aura of judginess permeated this book to the extent that it spoiled what would otherwise have been an excellent reading experience. Considering the overall theme of the book, that's a strangely meta result.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was not expecting much from this book - but as soon as the writers started talking about their experiences as a board game teacher at a games cafe, I could relate. This book is a series of short essays and musings on board games, why we play the ones we do, and what we can learn from that.

And that's basically the book - if you love board games and also think about what makes the whole hobby interesting and connected, this is a good book. If your interested in game design or game theory; not so much.

[Bonnie Hanks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the chapters were enjoyable, and some were less so. There was only one where I was bored enough to skip the second half. More a collection of life lessons/societal themes using board games as a lens, there were some I agreed with and others I didn’t, but I can appreciate their views. Sadly though, I don’t think this helped me add any games to my wish list :(

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed Joan Moriarty’s essays much more than Jonathan Kay’s, mostly owing to the bad politics and ill-founded arguments that kept unexpectedly creeping into his. I appreciated how well she articulated the social importance of play and how good gaming’s “magic circle” facilitates this. Would love to read more of her work on this topic in the future — just ditch the co-author!

[Adelyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars.

I generally really enjoy reading books about psychology, and I've read quite many of these now. My all-time favourite is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, nothing has come even remotely close for me but I thought this one was fantastic in that it didn't try to better the more "traditional" run-of-the-mill books on the topic but rather explored it from a totally different angle. Said angle was board games, another one of my hobbies.

I was immediately drawn into the concept, and I did like how the book was executed. It is formated as a collection of essays, which in the introduction Moriarity explains can be read independently of one another, but I found that there are some references to earlier chapters so would think that it is better read front-to-back. The concepts stand alone though, many of the references seem more like banter between the co-authors than actual factual or conceptual references, so it can also work.

Very early on, there is already a discussion about the paradox of a successful board game: Requiring a sweet spot of players needing to be sufficiently invested / want to win vs. not taking things too seriously. I'd never really thought of it this way, and indeed I think I now understand why I like certain games but not others, and I do like it when books get me thinking differently independently of what they are about.

There was a good variety of games covered, from the ones that everyone would have heard of to the more obscure ones, and along with an understanding of the concepts I also came across several games that I'd like to try out. The book doesn't go into a lot of depth, instead it more than compensates in its breadth, and I thought it made for a fun and quick read.

Judging from other reviews, I think how much one likes this book really depends on what they had hoped to get out of it - there isn't much analysis into the games themselves (several have commented on the lack of historical context), but that didn't bother me at all. In fact, I quite preferred the way it was done - explain how the game is played and then get on with the psychological analysis - and for that it was snappily written and to-the-point. Equal shares of getting me thinking and making me feel entertained, and I think it might be one of my top NF bookks of the year. I'd love a sequel that goes into more depth into some of the discussions though!

[Gwen Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book of thoughtful and insightful descriptions and analysis of board games. I have always liked board games but not played one for years. I admit that Monopoly was one we played often - highly capitalist which somehow in those days long ago I just accepted. Yes it did weaken a friendship or two. Joan Moriarity's review of the game and its dangers is most enlightening. Ive; also learned that there is such a genre as cooperative games - such as Pandemic - very timely. Jonathan Kay has a different perspective and is intensely interested in history based games , specifically Advanced Squad Commander - an absorbing and demanding game of replaying battles in WWII. It's eye-opening to see the varieties of games and their followings as described by these two authors - in engaging and often amusing style. Intriguing also to consider using games to build group morale and shape the game to a company for development of its leaders - though I hope that would be the cooperative type of game.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, rounded up. Some enjoyable musings and arguments about games by co-authors Joan Moriarity and Jonathan Kay. I can't endorse Jonathan Kay's version of facts and theories about "progressives" and their causes. Most problematic was Kay's argument around cultural appropriation --a subject about which he is not the most qualified person to speak. He seems to be an intelligent person who has put in some research, but he significantly misses the point and the nuances of many contemporary discussions of cultural appropriation. This sullied several later chapters in the book, and reduced the rating I gave it. However, both authors are knowledgeable and passionate about games in particular ways, and there are many enjoyable nuggets of insight to be had, if you are willing and able to stomach the aforementioned flaws.

[Brittany Ayres · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book would take a deeper dive into the life lessons board games can teach us. That was not the case, as many of the lessons seemed like common sense, or at least surface-level lessons. It was an okay book for what it was, it just was not what I was expecting.

I appreciated that they wrote about a wide selection of board games to appeal to wider audiences. Also, having two authors from different viewpoints (one was an experienced board game player, who had just dipped their toes into writing, while the other had been a writer for a long time and only recently became an avid board game player) was great.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It's a combination of anecdotes and personal opinion of the 2 authors. One who works at a local game cafe. There was some interesting insights on what motivates people to choose the games they play and what they are willing to try. I cannot get the comparison out of my head of the mix of people at a gaming convention to a collection of various music genres. As someone who played ASL, , Diplomacy, D&D and other games as a youth, this book also spoke to me as nostalgic trip down memory lane. It makes me want to pick up a forgotten game to introduce to the family in these COVID times.

[Rubens Altimari · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can we learn from board games?

That’s the theme of the book - a close examination of many aspects related to that act of playing a board game: the motivations, the personalities, the emotions. In alternating chapters, the two authors of the book (a game guru that works for a game store/cafe and a writer that happens to love games) go over a selection of games that allow them to cover a number of those topics, with an emphasis on the social take. It’s not a book about games, but about gamers. I enjoyed all chapters, which have a strong personal take, and a number of interesting insights, specially if you are a board game enthusiast.

[Damon O'Hanlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can games teach us about ourselves, about one another, and about the world? It’s a simple premise, gently explored here with honesty, insight, and a bit of good playfulness here and there. The writing style can be a touch academic at times — long sentences, words with needlessly many syllables, a slightly detached tone. Not too much and not too often, but still, for that reason this book may not be for everyone. Even so, and even when it does veer a little academic, it remains plain old good writing. By that I mean thoughtful, curious, and affectionate. If you can mirror those qualities, or allow yourself to be taken in by them, then you’ll have a warm-hearted good time with this book.

[Dan Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't played a board game since I was a kid, and chose this book only because I'm familiar with one of the authors. Fortunately, the book doesn't assume that you know, or are even interested in, board games. It consists mostly of anecdotes, and some observations about the types of games that different personalities are drawn to. It's a short book, and not as deep or analytical as the subtitle would suggest. It's also completely unconnected to Jonathan Kay's other work as an author, editor and columnist.

[Jonathan Farrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

The two authors find interesting ways to explore human society and psychology through the lens of board games. Overall, it is pretty thought-provoking. The first couple chapters were set up as if they are going to dive into detail about what board games can teach us about people and personalities. But the tone turned quite negative as the authors do quite a bit of complaining about mainstream games. It started to feel very personal and elitist. However, it's still interesting, quick and entertaining. I would recommend this to any tabletop gamer or armchair psycologist.

[Emilee (emileereadsbooks) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks for the Gifted Book NetGalley and Sutherland House Books.

As a big fan of tabletop gaming, I was very interested in this book, but the poignant reflection on what games symbolize in our culture and mean to us as a people, surprised me. I really enjoyed each author's take on different elements of table top culture, even when I had not played or maybe even heard of some of the games. If you are a board game fan, I think you will find this an interesting read.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been involved in modern hobby gaming for about 20 years now. I was excited to give this a read, expecting new perspectives on changes I've seen unfold within the hobby, many of which are contentious.

Instead, it's a collection of short opinionated essays with few new ideas and little substance. That's it.

No lessons learned about life here, just a number of assertions that don't seem particularly well connected to the subject matter.

[Tripp]

Two writers deliver alternating essays, well-written and thoughtful, that treat board games as an overlooked art form and dig into both what our games say about us and our society, and what separates good board game concepts and designs from poor ones: looking at you, Monopoly, in the latter category!