Feel free to play with any of those,” said the psychologist, gesturing to the games on the table. There were a couple of travel puzzles, a clear plastic pachinko game, a notepad and some pencils. I had a sneaking suspicion this was still part of the test. As she made notes from our session, I picked up a pencil and started sketching Meowth from Pokémon.
Three years ago, at the age of 40, I was diagnosed as autistic. I’d been speaking to autistic board gamers as research for my book on how games connect people and a few people asked if I’d ever considered that I might be autistic. In hindsight, it seems obvious – the psychologist called me “the most fantastically autistic person I’ve ever assessed”, which I suppose is an achievement – but I sat through the two-day test feeling like an impostor. I thought at any moment they would frown and say: “Why are you here? You’re not autistic. You just love games.”
Growing up, board games were my refuge from a baffling, often hostile world. Even when I wasn’t playing, I would spend hours opening the boxes, poring through the components like plunder from a dragon’s horde. I loved Buccaneer’s little wooden barrels of rum – the texture of the incised barrel hoops, the tiny rubies and bars of gold. Each game promised mystery shot through with a deep, reassuring grammar.
Games gave me quiet, structured time with family and friends. If I didn’t know what to say, the game filled the silence. In pickup sticks, I’d watch my grandpa – whose tracheotomy for throat cancer had taken his voice – use two sticks to extract a third from the pile with a surgeon’s grace. A well-played turn was all the conversation we needed.
Why do I love games? I have trouble understanding the question. Part of me wants to respond, incredulous: “Just look at them.”
The first card I fell in love with was an image of the night sky split by a lightning bolt. The lightning was jagged and yellow, the sky midnight blue. Below were the silhouettes of houses, the spire of a church.
It’s from the English card game Speed – eighth edition, first released in 1963 – where you try to get rid of your cards as fast as possible by matching either the suit or the number. It plays a bit like Uno – both belong to a family called “shedding” games – but instead of colours, the suits are British-made aeroplanes, submarines, aircraft carriers, racing cars and steam trains. The art is jingoistic, Boy’s Own stuff. It showcases the feats of an empire that, even at the time of release, was in marked decline. Among all the swaggering triumphalism, the lightning card stood out. Instead of bright, busy progress, it was mostly void. The houses looked tiny.
Lightning is wild – you can play it on top of anything. The card feels so good to pick up, so decisive to play – a swift, conquering “aha” moment that brooks no resistance. I played Speed with my dad, my brother and my grandpa, and I loved it. How glorious to conjure that power against them.
In early adulthood, I left board games behind, mostly as part of a doomed project to reinvent myself as a Normal Bloke who watched football and liked beer. In my absence, games underwent a revolution.
Most people put the start of the tabletop golden age at 1995, with the release of dental technician Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of Catan (now known simply as Catan). I prefer Teuber’s earlier game Adel Verpflichtet (released in English as Hoity Toity), where you play landed gentry stealing antiques from one another – a delicious, gripping farce of bluff and anticipation where you’re cackling one moment and crooning with despair the next.
The last 30 years have seen unprecedented growth in games’ quality and diversity. It’s a revolution most folks outside the scene have missed. Mention board games and most people still think of Monopoly, a 90-year-old torture device bound in cardboard. It’s the game that everybody knows and nobody loves. “Oh,” pipes up some contrarian, ‘I like Monopoly actually.’ No, you don’t. You like evoking it as a cultural touchstone: Don’t pass Go. Arguments with the family at Christmas. But you never play it. No one does. It’s a horrible, hateful ordeal.
My return to games came soon after I quit drinking. I thought sobriety would be good for my mental health, but with alcohol gone, reality felt suddenly noisier, spikier. It was like joining a dance class 12 weeks in, where everyone else knew the moves except me.
The first game I bought was Twilight Struggle, a tense, immersive retelling of the Cold War for two players. It’s not my typical fare at all – sprawling, mathsy and, on the face of it, rather dry. But beneath the avalanche of fiddly cardboard tiles, it’s a work of remarkable satire. You find yourself absorbing the deranged logic of Domino Theory and Mutual Assured Destruction. What if I sponsor a coup in Zaire to distract them from Vietnam? you wonder, as if that were a normal, sane question.
One night my mum came in to find me and my dad hunched over the games table. “You’ve been standing up for half an hour,” she said. Our chairs were right behind us. We could reach the whole map perfectly well sitting down. Twilight Struggle had kept us out of our seats through pure tension.
From there, I was hooked.
As a phenotype, autism is very loosely defined (“If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person,” goes the old saying). It has a lot in common with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of games; there’s no single trait, he said, common to all games that excludes everything not a game. Rather, we must rely on “family resemblances”. The best we can do is point to a bunch of activities and say: “These things, and things like them, are games.”
Tabletop games are a vast, sprawling island chain of loosely federated states, each with its own laws and customs. Trying to sum them all up in a neat little Baedeker feels measly, incomplete. Again, there are miles of open water between chess and Crokinole, Dungeons & Dragons and Votes for Women. Each offers me different ways to unmask and connect.
I love the gentle, pastoral games of German designer Uwe Rosenberg, like Caverna, where you’re grazing little wooden sheep and raising sheepdogs to look after them, or his flawed but charming Cottage Garden, a sort of Tetris for horticulturists where you fill empty plots with flowers and dozing cats. My friends and I spend much of the game heads-down, absorbed in our work like members of a quilting circle. I love Turncoats, an extraordinarily lean, beautiful game where players use glass beads on a fleece map, a map that cinches together to become a bag that holds the game. Turncoats is light and intimate – it asks you to feel out the mood of the group, to sense which way the wind is blowing and tack sharply into it.
Modern games have a reputation for being ruinously complex, but that’s only true of a minority. Take Coconuts, a game where you try to get little rubber coconuts into cups via spring-loaded monkey catapults. There, you know the rules. You’re ready to play.
When I play these games – when I’m playing charades-adjacent Monikers at a convention and our group gets so good at guessing clues it feels like telepathy – life retracts its spikes, the continual blaring of sirens and ticker tape alerts fade into the background. It’s when I stop, briefly, feeling like a donor organ the body of the world is trying to reject. Conversations are easier. I feel like a person who can and should exist. Who makes sense.
I appreciate that, for many, introducing games to a social situation creates not connection, but encumbrance. The act of play feels like trying to hold a conversation while we all assemble a flatpack wardrobe – sure, tell me about your week, but first you have to decide how you’re going to feed your garrison in Nantes. No, you can’t use those wheat tokens, they’re stored in your granary until next turn. It’s like hosting a dinner party where everyone gets audited by the Inland Revenue. Isn’t talking enough?
But, of course, conversation is itself a game – one with lots of hidden rules, where your winning conditions are oblique and shifting. What should we talk about? For how long? How do I know the right time to leave?
One lesser-mentioned upside to being autistic is our capacity for intense joy. The rumble of dice, the satisfaction of tucking a card beneath a game board – these small wonders make me glad to be alive.
For me, games function as an accessibility tool that enable me to connect with people. I crave company and strong, meaningful social bonds like anyone else, it’s just that the everyday hurly-burly of conversation feels like trying to cross a room strewn with Lego barefoot in the dark.
Games offer structure, shared goals and an alibi if conversation dwindles to silence. They also allow anxious perfectionists like me to explore failure with none of the usual downsides. I can drive my car clean off the road. Lose the election in a landslide.
In life, we’re constrained by necessity to do the same stuff, over and over again. A lot of it isn’t very interesting. Games free us to explore wide-ranging vistas of human experience, to expand our repertoire of emotional sentiment. How does it feel to be lied to, swindled, double-crossed, utterly vanquished? Delightful, actually.
In an age of extraordinary busyness, games do something quietly radical. They ask us to sit and commit ourselves entirely to working on something together – something that, at the end of play, will disappear forever. They are community in its purest form.
These days, when my dad asks how my life’s going, I often don’t know what to say. But I always know the answer when he says: “Fancy a game?” Sometimes my eight-year-old daughter joins us, too. She dances when she wins at Uno, which is gallingly often. Recently, my dad introduced her to Speed.
Life can be tough. Games don’t fix that. But they do, while the spell lasts, offer me a reprieve – permission to step out of the swirling, intimidating maelstrom of reality into something smaller, more manageable. They are an emergency cabin in the middle of the Arctic tundra, a place I can rest, thaw my toes.
My dad will set up the board. My daughter will choose her piece, roll the dice. And I’ll be home.
Your move: Tim’s top five games
Don’t know where to start? You can’t go wrong with these
Best quiz game: Wits & Wagers
A quick, rowdy trivia for all ages that – best of all – requires zero general knowledge
Best Monopoly alternative: Chinatown/Waterfall Park
All the rows, haggling and play money of Monopoly with none of the tedium
Best card game: Forest Shuffle
An absorbing puzzle where you place cards to build a thriving forest full of owls, trees and adorable piglets
Best cosy game: Dorfromantik
Strategise and work together to create an idyllic rural landscape of rivers, windmills and forests
Best couples game: Hanamikoji
A modern classic – a subtle dance in card-game form, drenched in sumptuous art of Geishas in Kyoto
The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too by Tim Clare is published by Canongate at £16.99. Buy it for £15.29 from guardianbookshop.com
