Across the Board by Tim Clare

ACROSS THE BOARD by Tim Clare is a non-fiction work about “How Games Make Us Human.” Clare has received awards and nominations for both his fiction and non-fiction works and he adopts a conversational, friendly tone in his latest, dividing the book into fourteen chapters covering dice, Monopoly, card games, and more. I loved his “pocket definition” (borrowed from Bernard Shaw) of playing a game: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” It seems appropriate to write about this book on the weekend of the annual Geekway Conference  since Clare writes about historian Johan Huizinga’s views that playing as a group “could create the feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms.” ACROSS THE BOARD is a fun, informative look at the surprising history and common themes between games. Bonus: for tons of game ideas and ratings, consult the Geekway Library based on BoardGameGeek.com (filled with videos, news, and crowdsourcing opportunities), which even Clare references.