Tristan Donovan

Donovan's collection of essays about the development of board games is made up of two rather awkwardly intermingled halves. Roughly half the essays are about specific games: what led up to their development, how they achieved success, and then either how people have continued to build upon their cultural familiarity or how our culture's appreciation of them has shifted over time. The other half are about changing cultural values and how they are applied to board games over time, perhaps best typified by, but not limited to, a specific popular title. Though they may not sound very different at first, one set of essays satisfies, and one does not.

The essays driven by a single game are very satisfying because they tell coherent stories. By and large, these are found in the first half of the book - covering chess, backgammon, Monopoly, the Game of Life, Scrabble, and Clue - and while they occasionally divert into tangents, those seem connected to the original topic. The backgammon chapter examines its fall from grace with the celebrity set, who moved their attention to Texas Hold 'Em poker; the Scrabble chapter increasingly becomes about the development and purpose of Scrabble dictionaries. These little offshoots make sense. They are compelling. They clarify rather than confuse.

The second set of essays isn't nearly as attention-grabbing, mostly because they lack that cohesive, unified story. Sometimes they feel like they've each been bolted together from three or four smaller articles that couldn't stand on their own. The Risk chapter is only minimally about Risk, and far more about the use of war board games to strategize real conflict, from Kriegsspiel on up. The Trivial Pursuit chapter contextualizes Trivial Pursuit as just one game in a big social shift in the '80s to create "grown-up" board games. The Twister chapter somewhat clunkily veers from the sexual implications of Twister to the very real sexuality of Monogamy. Only two of these broader-style essays really come through clearly: the one about ancient games at the very beginning, and the one about the rise of German games at the end. For whatever reason, those have a cultural point to make that carries them above the specific games involved; they feel meaningful in a way that, say, an examination of the development of machine learning does not.

To Donovan's credit, there's a recognizable pattern in the essay titles. Almost all of the essays that focus directly on a specific game centralize that title, while others provide a specific game or games only in a subtitle. Still, a casual browser could be excused for making assumptions.

Overall, I recommend the book, especially as a library read. Just don't be surprised if the coherency feels like it starts to dwindle away the longer you go on.… (altro)