I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I love board games and I find the history of them fascinating. There is just one problem – my brain really struggles to read fact books. I feel like I should be making notes, preparing to answer a specific question or worse still preparing for an exam with only a loose idea of what kind of question I might be asked. Thankfully, this was not my experience of reading The Game Changers at all. Tim Clare writes in a style that reminds me of the best of my history teachers at school. It is factual but it’s also just a series of stories that focus on the human experience.
The Game Changers takes you on a journey from considering what a game is, tales of 18th Century peasants, of Counts, Queens, Kings, Presidents and dynasties. We learn of archeologist’s discoveries and we roam around the world visiting – amongst others -Egypt, Ukraine, India, Alaska and Ireland. Games and people remain firmly at the centre of all the stories he shares. Shares rather than tells. The poetic nature of his writing is rich and evocative, transporting you into these lives and places. What better way to remind us that ‘We’re all connected‘ and that games connect us. And, importantly his descriptions make me smile and sometimes laugh but always make me feel seen.
He describes preparing to play one game where he is trying to ‘create the outward impression of focused competence while inside my brain emitted a sort of throttled whimper’. This puts words to a feeling I have experienced all too often.
The strapline reads How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too. A grandiose claim but one I was already on board with. There are times when his descriptions are reverential and awe struck at the role games play in people’s lives. We meet a whole range of fascinating people divided by time, distance, experience and Yet even in their different games they still have common ground. I particularly enjoyed that some games which sprang up in different parts of the world were so similar and yet were completely separate in their origins. Just humans on opposite sides of the world on the same creative journey. We see this with all sorts of inventions but I suppose it’s more surprising with games because they can seem trivial – like an unnecessary thing – when, in fact they are ‘inevitable’.
Games mean a lot to me and reading The Game Changers crystalised a lot of my feelings towards games and the ways in which they can unite people and create a space for us to just be. If you love games, history or humans this is definitely a book you’ll want to read. It’s gone straight back on to my pile of books to read.
You might also want to check out Coward (why we get anxious and what we can do about it) by Tim Clare – I really enjoyed that too.
