Across the Board

How Games Make Us Human

By: Tim Clare

Narrated by: Richard Trinder

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.

©2025 Tim Clare (P)2025 Tantor Media

Good book, didn’t love the voice actor

Normally I like British accents but this one kept putting me to sleep so I increased the speed but even then it was hard to get through the book. Honestly, I was tempted to purchase the hard copy but I bought this with one of my credits and didn’t want to pay $30 for the book. Good book though!

Thought I knew tabletop game history

Loved the loose, irreverent style. The obligatory “Monopoly” chapter even pulled off a fascinating (though carefully addressed) THIRD Scooby Doo reveal.