'As soon as you can call a society a civilisation, board games appear'

In his new book The Game Changers, Tim Clare argues games are a universal human instinct.

“As soon as you can call a society a civilisation, board games appear, and there's clearly something about them that builds the urge to play.”

Board games are a form of language, he says.

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“Play is a form of language, and they're a way that we as humans can talk with each other without using words, and a way of being around each other and communicating, but maybe communicating something very different than in a conversation.”

Games rely on a kind of shared acceptance, Clare says.

“I think of games as being like politics. In the same way that money only works if we agree that this piece of paper with some words on it means that I can exchange it for goods and services that only works if we all agree on a shared fiction.

“It's one reason that games tend to appear in societies the same time as things like currency and the first forms of hierarchical government and things like that, is because they use, they pull on some of the same skills you have to have, which is agreeing on some abstract rules for mutual benefit.”

One of the earliest form of games is dice which emerged thousands of years ago, he says.

“Approximately 7000 years ago we see knuckle bones, which is an odd term, they're actually sheep's ankle bones. We found them in places like northern Turkey.”

These were polished or marked on one or two sides, he says.

“Which suggests that they wanted them to look different on certain sides, we think some of those early knuckle bones were used as dice.”

They are found in Syria and Turkey, but also Neolithic settlements in north Scotland, he says.

“So simultaneously, people are doing exactly the same thing and inventing the dice on a wet, sea-swept remote island and in the middle of the desert and out on the steppe. So, all these people are inventing dice at the same time.”

Dice in various forms were being invented independently “at least five times around the world,” he says.

“And it's not a technology like irrigation, that allows people to better survive. It's not a special a crop that does better than another crop. It's not a weapon that allows us to win wars.

“And yet this technology spreads like wildfire whenever it appears, and whenever people don't have access to it, they just invent it, which to me is absolutely riveting. There's something about dice that are inevitable.”

Cards spread around the world in a different way, he says.

“Dice pop up all over the place, like mushrooms, and don't have any single origin point, cards bizarrely, and this is very rare in archaeology, do appear to start in one place and then spread from a single origin point.”

Cards, he says, were almost certainly originated in China around the time of the Qing dynasty and from there they next spread through the Islamic world.

“Where you had a sophisticated culture of paper-making, that technology goes into Europe, mainly through like Portugal and Spain. And then from Portugal and Spain just rampages through Europe into the UK.”

Britain was late to the party, he says, but cards took hold quickly.

“By the 17th century, we were producing a million decks of cards each year, which doesn't sound a lot by today's standards, but you've got to remember that in 1680 the population of the entire country was only 4.8 million.

“So, we were producing 11 cards for every man, woman and child in the country, annually, with no factories.”

Whereas dice cropped up everywhere. cards, were more of a cultural transmission, he says.

“And every new culture they go into, they transform. There's this cultural transfer that they're almost like a species that moves into a place and adapts to its new environment.

“And they feel domestic, but they're actually spreading from one origin point.”

The modern board game has undergone a transformation in the last few decades, he says.

“This year is the 25th anniversary of the release of a game a lot of people will have heard of, called Settlers of Catan.”

Catan has sold something in the region of 40 million copies, he says.

“Which means it sold more than any of the Beatles albums, for example.”

After Catan, came games such as Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne, he says.

“These games come out, they're accessible, a little bit more complicated than the games we're used to, but just terrific.

“And it's like this new generation of designers saw those designs, and all game design took a quantum leap.”

And what about that old stalwart Monopoly? Clare “loathes” it, he says, although has no beef with people who enjoy it.

It was designed in the first place as a satire on rentier capitalism, invented by a woman called Lizzie McGee, he says.

“Her version was called the Landlords Game was not supposed to be particularly fun. It was supposed to be a satirical game that showed you how rotten, in her opinion, the economic system was.

“The whole point of the game was to make you outraged. You're meant to play it and go, ‘this is a dreadful system, we need to do something about it’.”