Tim Clare
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Board games have never been doing better in terms of sales. They are doing phenomenally well at the moment.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
It depends who you ask and where you date it from. The game Chaturanga, which was an Indian game, has been around for at least a millennium. But the current rules of chess... would probably only solidified in the past 500 years, I think. The last thing that chess decided upon was the movement of the queen. The queen could only move one square at a time.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
And then they created this variant called Mad Queen's Chess, where the queen could move as far as you wanted, what we have now. And universally, everyone went, this is brilliant. And that's where the final rules of chess that we have today solidified. So probably about 500 years.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
There was no difference except that you could lose the queen without losing the game.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Absolutely. I think chess is this completely magical game that, through tiny rule changes, became the version it is today, became the game it is today. It wasn't designed so much as discovered, really. And it's an incredible game in terms of the complexity that can come out of a relatively few number of rules.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
The answer is that we don't. At some point, it disappears into the ether and we're not sure. Checkers or drafts, as it's sometimes known in the UK, goes back about as long as chess. And there's The thing that has happened with checkers that hasn't happened with chess is we've never decided. The world has not decided on the definitive version of checkers, right?
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
You go to any country, it has its own version of the rules. It's like Canadian drafts, which has like a much bigger board. There's Frisian drafts where you can jump backwards. There's versions, Turkish drafts, where you move forwards and backwards instead of diagonally. How related is it to chess?
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Well, checkered boards go all the way back to the time of the Buddha, which is one of our earliest lists of board games. He gives this list of games that monks aren't allowed to play, and he talks about checkered boards.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
so did it make sense to a lot of people that drafts came and checkers came before chess because it appears to be the simpler game we don't have any evidence for that um but it seems like it's still a game that's in flux um so do they have any relationship as far as we know one didn't come out of the other but they may have used the same boards but that checkerboard has existed for at least five millennium
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Yeah, Backgammon went through this renaissance where it became really cool, where, like, the Rolling Stones were playing. People were going to Monaco and playing these high-stakes games of Backgammon. So certainly...
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
It did go through a renaissance, but then you go to somewhere like Syria or Iraq or Turkey, any of these countries, and this is a game that has never gone away and can probably trace its lineage back at least 4,500 years. It is an old, old game in various forms.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
you could imagine backgammon all it would take is a couple of celebrities to become i think backgammon fans it's a game that is has some skill has some chance you know you roll dice you move but there's a great deal of strategy that that you can develop by playing the game but you could there's still some luck right it's a game i think that could easily have a revival at any point.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
I think you're absolutely right because it's very accessible. Like I could teach it to my eight-year-old daughter and I think she'd enjoy it. But the skill ceiling of getting really good at it is actually quite high.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
I think that's true of some of the lesser-known games, at least in the US and the UK, like the Mancala games that are so popular across Africa, like on Hueso and Wari, games like that, these games that you play with stones or pebbles, where you capture each other's pieces, you pick them up and drop them in these different... houses, they're called, these little divots in a board.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Those games, you can teach them to a five-year-old and they can learn the rules, but the skill of high-level Amwayso players is breathtaking.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
So the classic one that's spoken about that's just had it having its 25th anniversary this year is Catan or Settlers of Catan. It has sold over 40 million copies, which puts it, you know, that is it's sold more than, say, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or any of the Beatles albums. And that's a game where you are.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
settling on an empty island and you're building farms and roads and things like this that game has done phenomenally well and continues to sell like hotcakes in the last couple of years a game like wingspan where you are collecting different wild birds and putting them into this sanctuary has sold millions of copies so there is there is a revolution in tabletop games that has passed a lot of people by you know
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
It's certainly true that... Snakes and Ladders is going nowhere, and fair enough. I happen to think Snakes and Ladders has a brilliant design. I remember playing it with my daughter when she was four, and I was like, hey, we're equals around this table, right? I can't bring any skill to this. The dice don't care that I'm older than her. And so we got to play as equals.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
I think that's a terrific piece of game design. But yeah, sure. Classics are always going to be classics. I don't think there's anything that's going to topple chess from its pedestal soon because it's a terrific game. But a lot of the new games, a lot of the new party games, a lot of the new kind of deep strategy games are so, so well designed.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
I think there's a great deal of stuff to reward people. I don't think there's been a better time in human history to be a board gamer.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Yeah, thank you. Take care. Have a lovely day.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Hi, thank you for having me.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
There is something incredible about how games incompletely disconnected civilizations pop up, sometimes around the same time, and look remarkably similar, and there was no contact. So you take something like knuckle bones, right? Rolling dice made out of sheep's ankle bones or goat's ankle bones. That appears like up in Skara Brae, sort of an island north of Scotland.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
And it appears right down in Egypt, in ancient Turkey. It appears across, say, The Pacific Islands, you see knuckle bone games appearing, played maybe with shells. These games, we have this idea, we're going to roll some oddly shaped things and we're going to mark some sides and depending on what side lands on it, you're going to score points or you won't score points.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
You see that idea is created by humans again and again and again all over the world independently. And it doesn't feel like an obvious idea to me to do that. Well, it does now because we take it for granted. But every civilization at some point has invented the technology of dice and often completely independently of one another.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Well, you've hit upon something really key there, which is that evolutionary psychologists often look at something like play and they go, this presents a problem. Because what is it for? You know, this is a technology that keeps appearing, but it doesn't increase our chances of survival on the face of it. It doesn't increase people's chances of winning a war. So what's going on?
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
And we've studied... animals because we see play in animals right and we've studied say kittens that play and evolutionary psychologists looked at them and went hey come on there must be this must be training them to hunt but when we've done studies there have been expansive studies on preventing kittens from chasing bulls, chasing, doing these kind of pretend hunting behaviours.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
And does it affect their ability to hunt when they grow into adulthood? Not at all. Not at all. So this presents us with a huge conundrum. Why do we play? Now, there are plenty of archaeologists who look at things like chess
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
any game that involves some kind of strategy and say well this must be teaching us lots of lessons about war this must be training our generals but the fact is that being a great chess player doesn't make you particularly good at commanding an army the skills aren't hugely transferable so I don't know. I do think that games for me are like politics you can touch.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Yeah, Backgammon went through this renaissance where it became really cool, where like the Rolling Stones were playing. But then you go to somewhere like Syria or Iraq or Turkey, and this is a game that has never gone away.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
To be able to play a game, to be able to sit around a board and say this piece represents this, this piece represents that, to come up with rules, it requires the ability to negotiate and for abstract thought. And I think those things are definitively huge components of any successful civilization.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Not at all. And the problem is that when you see human beings who haven't had the chance to play growing up, There is evidence that those humans have various emotional and cognitive challenges when they grow into adults. But the key thing there is you can't experimentally randomize that, you know, you can't have a
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
an experimenter saying we're going to stop these kids from playing so it can only be children who for whatever reason haven't had the opportunity to do that and they've often been deprived of other things in their life and what they did find when they've studied kittens is kittens who've been deprived of the chance of lots of bonding time with their mothers
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
do become worse hunters so this is the thing is game playing games are tied up with all sorts of other things uh including just hanging around and socializing and all the other wonderful things that human beings do so we don't know whether playing games actually teaches us key life skills or whether
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Games are what they would call an epiphenomenon of happiness and normal development, which is that games are something that spontaneously happens when human beings and indeed members of the animal kingdom are thriving.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Okay, so I want to admit a bias here, which is that sometimes people will talk about games teach children the ability to negotiate, they teach you numeracy skills, they help good cognitive development, right? All of that may be somewhat true, but there are probably activities that they could be doing that would do that more efficiently, right?
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
Like, certainly if you play a lot of games that involve counting, your maths skills will get better. But... There are other things you could be doing that would do that better.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
And there's always this niggling worry that I have in the back of my mind that when we start doing that, part of it is the guilt that we have to justify play on the grounds of achieving something important, rather than being an end in itself, that they create joy, that they're a wonderful way to spend our time.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
So if I sound a little bit resistant to that, if I keep landing on this side of, well, we don't know for certain,
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
I have to admit a bias, which is that part of me resists that with my heart, which is to say games don't need to earn their keep, in my opinion, based on optimizing us to be productive adults who thrive in the workplace because they have their own wonderful, wonderful ability, which is to make us enjoy our life and enjoy time with others.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
One of the key things about Monopoly is that it was never originally designed to be fun. It was designed to teach an economics lesson and a lesson about how monopolies can destroy a healthy economic system. So the game was meant to feel unfair. It was meant to end with one person
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
slowly accruing all the real estate and money and you were meant to get to the end of it and think that was incredibly unfair and the game was meant to be a teaching tool it was not meant to be fun so when people say i i feel like that was frustrating and drawn out more than anything else they're getting at something fundamental about the game design
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
You hit upon something that is so compelling to human beings. It's one of these magical formulas. The archaeologist Dr Irving Finkel at the British Museum said that they're called roll and move games. in academic literature.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
And he said that there's something fundamental about that, that wherever in any society, a game where you roll some dice and race around a board first past the post games appears, it spreads like wildfire. It always comes to dominate the culture that it's in. Why is that exciting? Well, I suppose what those games do is they take simple dice rolling and maybe you make tally marks and get a score.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
They turn that into like a horse race. And human beings love a race. And even something like the game Pooh Sticks, right, where come from Winnie the Pooh, where you throw sticks over one side of the bridge and then you run to the other side of the bridge and there's a river underneath and you see whose stick comes out first.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
I think there's something fundamental in the human spirit, something irreducible about racing.
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The Surprising History and Psychology of Board Games & Cracking the Fitness Code
My first thought when video games came out is that board games are doomed. That has not been the case at all. I think, if anything, the ubiquity of video games has fueled this desire to get away from screens and get away from digital experiences. Not that I don't love them, but I think that People really crave that physical experience around the table with other people.