#600： What Board Games Teach Us About Life
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Summary
Jonathan Kaye is the co-author of the book, Your Move: What Board Games Can Teach Us About Life. In this episode, we discuss the board game renaissance that has taken place over the past 20 years, why Monopoly is such a divisive game, and whether board games can teach resilience.
Transcript
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I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Board games have long been a source of social activity and family entertainment, but my
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guest today makes the case that board games can be more than just a way to while away
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It can also offer insights about relationships, decision-making, and changing currents of
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He's the co-author of the book, Your Move, What Board Games Can Teach Us About Life.
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We begin our conversation discussing the board game renaissance that has taken place in
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the past 20 years, and how today's board games are much more nuanced, complex, and arguably
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more fun than the classic games you probably played as a kid.
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Jonathan and I then discuss how the evolution of the board game life can teach us insights
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to our culture's changing ideas of virtue, and how board games often reflect the attitudes
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We then discuss what cooperative games like Pandemic tell us about how to handle overbearing
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people, and how the game Dead of Winter highlights the way private interests often conflict with
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Jonathan then shares why Monopoly is such a divisive game and whether board games can
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At the end of the show, Jonathan gives his personal recommendations for board games to
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check out that are way better than the chutes and ladders type games you played growing up.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash boardgames.
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So you co-authored a book called Your Move, What Board Games Teach Us About Life.
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Have you been a longtime board gamer and you decided to bust this book out?
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So I played a lot of games when I was in my teenage years, and then I had kids and work
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And as my kids got older and I had a little bit more time, I came back to it, which is not
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A lot of the most passionate gamers I know were huge gamers in college and then didn't
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And so sometimes you'll go and there'll be like tournaments, you'll see 50-year-olds
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playing with sort of 25-year-olds who've just picked it up.
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So you often see that sort of generational lag.
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And as with many things that you come back to later in life, you become way more analytical
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and passionate about it and you're telling everybody about it.
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And after every game I'd play, I'd sort of hold forth and talk about all these social
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And I realized that these games I was playing were inspiring me to write, in my head at least,
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sort of miniature essays about what these games said about the human condition.
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And it was just a question of putting those down on paper.
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Well, I mean, I think games are a really great way to explore these different human elements
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or human issues because a lot of, I mean, if you think about it, if you take a step back,
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a lot of what we do in life is like a game, right?
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There are rules you have to follow in order for that thing to happen.
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Like take like a courtroom, for example, right?
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There are rules to that game that you have to follow in order for that trial to go as it's
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And a game, like a board game, allows you to do that with low stakes.
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Yeah, it becomes like a testing ground for that sort of thing.
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And it's also the case that the way the human brain works is when we become goal directed,
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the same kind of synapses fire off regardless of how trivial the goal is.
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So when people talk about making money or, you know, taking care of their family or, you
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know, really important goals, sometimes your brain is activated in the same way when you're
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playing a game because you've convinced yourself that it's really important to win this trivial
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And so you're able to study yourself in these situations of stress and competition, even
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though the stakes are either, you know, low or non-existent, it's still this interesting
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And as we argue in the book, it's also a laboratory for organizations because some of the games
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we talk about are cooperative games where you're all working together toward a goal.
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But that cooperation is sometimes nominal as it is in many companies or media organizations
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So that's the kind of thing we explore in the book.
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So for a lot of people who are listening to this podcast who aren't big gamers, when they
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think of board games, they probably think of like the old standbys, Clue, Monopoly, the
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But as you guys start off in the book, in the probably like the past 20 years, there's
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Now it's taken hold in North America of board games coming out that are like new and they're
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What kickstarted it and what are, how are these new games different from these old Milton
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So the history of board games to simplify it a little bit is that until roughly the 80s
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and 90s, you had this, what people will remember if they're old enough like me from their rec
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rooms in the subculture, it's called Ameritrash.
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It's kind of a derisive name, but it's like, it's like games like Clue and Monopoly, Battleship,
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Stratego, and these are like brightly colored pieces and they appeal to kids.
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And there were, there weren't even that many of them, right?
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In terms of the classics, it's like you keep hearing the same couple of dozen names when
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people rhapsodize about the games they played in their youth.
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And then there was those, and then there was this completely other echelon of hyper complex
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war games with names like Panzerblitz and Arab Israeli Wars and Rise and Decline of the
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Third Reich, which is really very complex and highly militaristic games played out on like
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You had like the battleship end, and then you had these, these hyper complex games.
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And what you're seeing now is sort of a fusion of the two, something that's fun, like the
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so-called Ameritrash and something that's also complex and strategic, like these old war
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And, and as you alluded to, it was the Europeans largely in the eighties and nineties who fused
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the two into what is now called the Euro games.
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So if anyone is familiar with like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride, those are examples
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And as we, and as we, I think it's the second chapter, I argue that a lot of this is the
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legacy of World War II because Europeans were kind of, I'm generalizing here, but a lot of
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them were turned off by these hyper militaristic complicated games from the seventies, which
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You know, this wasn't so long after the entire European continent was ravaged by World War
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And so they wanted that complexity and instead they created the genre of game that took that
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complexity, but it's all about building things.
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Like if you look at Settlers of Catan, which is now just called Catan, maybe listeners will
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know it's about building settlements and cities or Ticket to Ride is about building railway
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So this hobbyist Euro game craze that I guess, well, it's not really a craze.
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It's oriented more toward adults and it fuses some of the best features of the two extremes
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And as you mentioned, it takes out a lot of like the direct, like aggressive competition.
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It's more of a, I mean, you're still competing, but it's not, it's not like risk, for example.
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And if you look at Settlers of Catan, I keep going to that example because it's accessible
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A lot of people have maybe at least seen it played.
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And in Catan, there's no way to destroy the other person's settlement or city once it's
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been constructed, at least not in the basic version of the game.
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Same thing with some of these other games I've mentioned.
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And so you're competing, but it's an indirect form of competition.
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And in that way, it takes away some of the bitterness that you got from the old games.
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Like in Risk, you were actually destroying another person's army and taking over their territories.
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And it's actually surprising these games were so popular because they, in some cases, they
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I mean, people are still competitive in Euro games, obviously, but you don't have these
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metaphoric destruction of the enemy that you had in traditional games.
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So a Catan game, I think experienced, a four-player game of Catan, if you're an experienced
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player and you don't have that one person who just takes forever for their turn and keeps
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offering really long shot deals to everybody else, I'd say you could play Catan in 90 minutes
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But the trend, by the way, is towards shorter games.
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Like I've noticed in the last couple of years, there's more like 45-minute and 60-minute
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I think producers realize that, especially for couples and maybe people who have kids and
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stuff like that, they might only have an hour or an hour and a half to play a game.
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They're not going to play a game that they're not going to be able to finish before bedtime.
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So these Euro games, there's sort of a passive competition.
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The whole thing's about enjoying it a little bit more.
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Then you also make this point, too, about how games can be used to explore a culture's
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values that they have or they're trying to inculcate.
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And you and your co-author use the example of life, the game of life.
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Now, I'm sure everyone who's listening to this probably played life at one point in their
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They got the cool board with the hills and you get the car and you get a wife and you
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Well, the original game was called the Checkered Game of Life.
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And that game was made in the Victorian era in the 19th century.
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And it was actually trying to teach virtues and values.
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So tell us about the Checkered Game of Life, the original version, what it was trying to
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do, teach, and how did that change in the 20th century?
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So it's kind of interesting because even in the construction of some of these early games,
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they didn't like dice because dice, it was associated with gambling.
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But for some reason, you were allowed to create these things.
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So even though they have the same effect as dice, it's basically a random number generator.
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For some reason, that was considered acceptable, whereas dice were seen as sort of a gateway
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The original version, it was more like a snakes and ladders type game, and you would land
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It's kind of horrifying because the square would be, you know, you suffer a disgrace,
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you know, go back five squares, or you lose all your money.
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Like it was really like these moral pitfalls in life.
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And it was all about, the lesson was that it's really easy to sin and to do wrong things in
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life and to suffer a bad end, and that you had to avoid all these things.
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And then in the modern era, it just suddenly was all about making money.
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And how much money can you get, what kind of job do you have, and how many kids do you have?
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Almost like, you know, this is decades ago, but sort of this like very bright Facebook-style
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image of what life is like, and very materialistic, and all the Victorian moralism is gone.
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So it does roughly track the evolution of the way society has thought of what the purpose
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You know, it used to be, in a more religious era, it was avoiding sin.
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And you talk about those snakes and ladder type games.
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Those are basically games where you spin something, draw a card, spin dice, and then you move
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And I mean, even that idea that life is just luck, that can teach, that can kind of subtly
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So what's interesting is there's a philosophical argument about whether Snakes and Ladders is
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actually a game, because it's totally deterministic, right?
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You go forward or backward, depending on the roll of the dice and what, you know, if there's
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It's kind of just this random, deterministic adventure that you have no control of.
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And yet these games are, if you want to call them games, are strangely popular.
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There's another game called Unicorn Glitter Luck, which is sort of a modern version of
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Snakes and Ladders, but, you know, with slightly more updated atmospherics.
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People don't necessarily always want to make decisions or engage in any kind of strategy
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I think some people approach games almost like a TV show.
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Like, they're just kind of, they want to see what happens, how it ends, even if they're
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So, you know, every game has its own subculture and people come to different games with all
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The chutes and ladders games, like kids like them because they're easy.
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So we had this game that was like big in our family for a bit.
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When we moved into our house, the previous owners loved a whole bunch of board games.
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And one of them was like this 90s version of Uncle Wiggly.
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It's about this rabbit who has rheumatism and he's trying to get the Dr. Possum to get
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And along the way, you meet these pitfalls and creatures.
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Well, so we started playing it because like it was easy to play with our kids.
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And then we, so my wife and I started looking into the history of it.
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And apparently this thing started in like in the 1920s or 1910s.
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So we tried to get like earlier versions of it.
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And we got like this in like 1950s version of it.
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And one of the interesting things we saw, we sort of seen the 1950s version compared
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Like the 1950s, like you draw these cards and to be like these like really complicated poetic
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And then eventually by the 80s, it was just like move five spaces.
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And actually that was, I mean, there was, as with many things, I think the 60s, well,
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70s probably was like a low point in some ways for board games because like half the
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games that were released then were just these terrible knockoffs on TV shows.
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So if you look in people's attics, it'll be like Happy Days, the board game, or like Laverne
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and Shirley, the board game, it's just like these super terrible games that just take
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some, you know, generic premise, like a roll and move premise and apply like some really
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thin pretense of game theme of TV show theme to it.
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And for many years, that's what making a game was.
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So at least in the Victorian era and in the early 20th century, they did invest some moralism
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I mean, the moralism seems old fashioned to us, but at least it was thematically interesting.
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Whereas, yeah, as you say, around the early Cold War decades, it was, everything got
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I wonder what the Happy Days, like you draw a card and like the Fonz jumps a shark.
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Like I remember when I was a kid, we had like Pink Panther, the board game, or, you know,
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No, it was, it was like having a breakfast cereal.
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You know, it was like, it was just part of the sponsorship thing.
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And some guy was probably given like three weeks to create the game.
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And, and yeah, they were super crap, but that was all we had.
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So, you know, and this was like in a four channel universe.
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So people played bad games because there, there wasn't that much to compete with it.
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One of the reasons games are better now is they're competing against Netflix.
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And if you're competing against Netflix, you got to produce a better game.
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So there's an example of how games can reflect a culture and how that, how that's changed
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Because you also devote a chapter to how games can be a way to explore negotiation.
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Because there's these genre of Euro games where that's what you do.
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And the ones you talk about, I've never played these before, but they sound really fun.
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One's called Chinatown and the other one's No Things.
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So what can, what can these games teach us about how we make decisions, particularly rational
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So that chapter, I wrote that chapter and it's one of the more technical chapters because
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I get into something called the ultimatum game, which isn't actually, it isn't actually
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It's something that's used in social psychology to test whether people will cooperate with
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other people or whether they'll be vindicative.
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It's well known in the social science literature.
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And I talk about how some of the social science implications of that are modeled in this game,
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I described Chinatown as like, if you like the negotiation aspect of Monopoly, but you
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don't like the dice rolling and randomness and stuff like that, Chinatown is fantastic
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because the pace of the game is that basically, it just drives you straight toward negotiation.
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And I related this anecdote involving my friend, where my friend gave me a deal, but then kind
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of went back on it and still offered me like a bad version of the deal.
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But the bad version of the deal he was offering me was better than no deal at all.
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But I was mad at him because he changed the terms of it.
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And I basically, I spited myself by saying no to the deal, even though I knew I would lose
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It was more important for me in that moment that he suffer and he lost the game too, but
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And I talk about like, what is the evolutionary psychological reason that people do that?
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And what I conclude is like, because it isn't just that deal, right?
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This is a very abstract, of course, but it's about evolutionary psychology.
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And if this guy can make me a sucker once, it might be worth the short-term pain of spiting
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myself on that one deal so that the next hundred times people will realize that they shouldn't
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shortchange me like that because I'm willing to spite myself to spite them.
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And so I talk about the evolutionary psychology behind that.
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And I think games like Chinatown and No Thanks, which is another simpler game that I talk about,
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But in the long term, it could make sense to spite yourself.
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And I guess like the schoolyard version of that is the kid who's willing to fight the
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bully, even if he thinks he'll lose, just because he doesn't want to be known as someone
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That it's worth it to get a bloody nose just so it sends a message like, you know, you're
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not going to get a free ride by trying to intimidate me.
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You pay a short-term price as a reputation building tool, as a warning, but it only works
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Like, if you're just interacting with random strangers who you never see again, these instincts
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unfortunately kick in, which is why people get into fistfights over parking spots and
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But even though it's completely irrational in that context, it goes to the evolutionary
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wiring we have, which says that you can't just have a reputation as somebody who gets
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You need to show people that you have some ability to fight back.
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I mean, that's why people would never, whenever they got called to a duel, like you, you always
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said yes, because you had to have that reputation that you would, you would, you wouldn't get
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Honor codes, which people talk about honor societies and honor codes.
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They are often very elaborate extrapolations of the instinct I'm just describing, where honor
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And you do see that in many societies, unfortunately.
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It can become a pathology if everybody's just going around challenging each other to duels and
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But it has its origins in, as I argue, an evolutionary instinct that is not completely irrational.
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But like everything else in our brain, it can be taken to extremes.
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Well, you know, you do see people who get really upset and animated and they start fights.
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They tend to be people who like make their living playing board games.
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Like, you know, there are great chess players who are known to be really irascible.
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And so, you know, there's a reason they take it so seriously.
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And then on the other extreme, it tends to be very new players who it's their first time
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It's not for them, but they don't realize it yet.
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And they're just, their personality isn't right for it.
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So it tends to be people who are either lifelong professional gamers in some board game subculture
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or other, or people who are first timers and don't know the protocols of board games.
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It's rarely the seasoned hobbyist because those people usually know where the boundaries
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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So there's a genre of board games, or there is a board game that deals with, it's called
00:21:20.660
And we're in the middle of a pandemic right now.
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And this, what this game is, it's a, it's a group dynamic game.
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Like it requires you to cooperate with other players for you to win this game.
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So for those who aren't familiar with it, can you describe pandemic and sort of like
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And what do you think you can teach people about group dynamics?
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So pandemic, one of the reasons it's such a popular game is it was an early favorite
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And a cooperative game as distinct from a competitive game is a game where you all have the same
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So in a typical competitive game, if I win, you lose.
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In a cooperative game, we either win together or lose together.
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And the theme in pandemic is that the world is being besieged by all these terrible plagues.
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And, you know, one person is a doctor and another person is like a military officer and another
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And you have to cooperate in order to destroy the pandemic and save the world.
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And as I say, you either win together or lose together.
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I think one of the guys who might have been the creator of the game just wrote a piece
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for the New York Times about the implications of the game in the modern world, because we
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What we talk about in our chapter is how cooperative games are fun, but there's a common pitfall.
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And it's a common pitfall that applies to a lot of common projects in life, which is what
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The term of art in board gaming is the alpha player problem.
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And the alpha player problem is where it's nominally a cooperative game and it's a team game
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But really what's happening is that one person who's more assertive or more experienced or
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thinks he's more experienced and knowledgeable just tells everybody else what to do.
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And so he or she is the only person who has agency and everyone else is just following his
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And that has become a common problem in some of these cooperative games.
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And you could also be like a freeloader problem, right?
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Like you just have a guy that just doesn't even, he's not even doing anything and just lets
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That typically happens when you have somebody who didn't want to play in the first place,
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I think in economics, that problem is sometimes described as moral hazard or, you know, you
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also have, I guess the inverse of it is tragedy of the commons.
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However, when people are playing board games, it's unlike life in the sense that we don't
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Board games are a little different because everyone who's playing a board game made the
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conscious decision to say, I'm going to play this game.
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And typically you don't play a game with the intention of not doing anything.
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The more common problem in board gaming is that you want to play, but there's some guy
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and unfortunately it's usually a guy is telling what to do and you're not getting a chance
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So, I mean, this probably, we've probably seen this in other group dynamics where you
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want to contribute, but some guy or some person just sucks all the air out of the room and
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This happens all the time in MBA programs and other university programs where it's supposed
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to be a group project and you show up on Monday and there's five people and it's 20%, 20%,
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And then by Tuesday, it's more like, you know, 30, 20, 20, 2010.
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Like you just gradually, people start to get marginalized.
00:24:53.420
In those cases, sometimes it is because they're lazy, but often it's just because there's one
00:25:01.540
Like what can gaming like pandemic teach us about overcoming that?
00:25:04.540
Yeah, well, this is why people have to buy the book.
00:25:07.100
We describe how modern game designers get around this alpha player problem by taking
00:25:14.920
So one thing you can take away from the alpha player is time.
00:25:20.000
You actually have like, you're using your phone as a timer for each move and everyone
00:25:26.060
And the alpha player might only have like 30 seconds to do his or her turn.
00:25:30.360
They don't have time to tell the other three players what they should be doing.
00:25:34.160
Everyone is racing around trying to do their own thing.
00:25:39.280
If you have an organization where a boss is micromanaging everybody, one reason that could
00:25:43.080
happen is because the boss doesn't have a lot of work to do.
00:25:47.940
You give that boss more actual work to do and you find the micromanagement stops.
00:25:53.020
Another thing you can do is take away trust, which sounds bad, which is bad in a real world
00:26:01.200
So one game we describe is called Dead of Winter.
00:26:04.120
My co-author loves that game and wrote a great chapter about it.
00:26:07.080
And in Dead of Winter, it's a zombie apocalypse game where you're a survivor of a zombie apocalypse
00:26:11.280
and you have this public objective, which is the cooperative objective where, you know,
00:26:18.240
But then each of you has the secret private objective, which often is at odds with the
00:26:24.200
So there's no alpha player because to be an alpha player, you have to have all the information
00:26:31.820
If they have their own agendas, you can't tell them what to do.
00:26:34.760
So it's a really interesting solution to the alpha player problem, albeit a solution that's
00:26:41.180
horrifying in real life because in real life, you want everybody to have the same mission.
00:26:46.340
But unfortunately, as in many organizations, there is a publicly professed universal objective,
00:26:50.980
but then everybody has their own little secret agenda that they're conniving at behind the
00:26:56.220
When the chapter on Dead of Winter and the games where there's cooperative plus a private
00:26:59.940
personal goal, I was like, that sounds awesome because I just, I love the idea because it
00:27:05.600
Like everyone, like you just said, like every organization has this stated public goal, but
00:27:09.440
every person in that group, while they are working for that public goal, they each have
00:27:14.380
their own thing going on that they're privately trying to do.
00:27:22.220
And one point we make in the chapter is that if you go to a bookstore, there's lots of books
00:27:28.060
about managing conflict and, and that's an important skill, but cooperative board games
00:27:36.380
teach us that a lot of the dissatisfaction that people experience in organizations is not
00:27:43.300
really the result of outwardly expressed conflict because they all have the same objective, which
00:27:49.120
is, you know, make money, maintain the health of the organization, serve the customer, et cetera,
00:27:54.080
The real friction comes in these unstated, sometimes passively aggressive disputes where the common
00:28:05.740
objective masks the fact that everyone has their own little private agendas.
00:28:09.940
And sometimes the private agenda, it's just about, it goes back to the alpha player problem.
00:28:13.880
It's that they feel isolated in their desires to try and pursue the public objective.
00:28:19.360
Like they're just being marginalized because someone is taking all their work because they
00:28:22.460
don't trust them to do a good job or so board games, especially this cooperative genre of board
00:28:28.060
games, I feel it gives a really nuanced view into the way a lot of us experience the somewhat
00:28:34.940
unspoken stresses that occur within organizations, even when everybody has the same objective.
00:28:45.760
So we can't have a podcast about board games and not talk about the board game that people
00:28:54.260
So first of all, why do you think this game like causes such strident divisions amongst people
00:29:00.620
Well, it's a, it's a paradox because as we argue, Monopoly would never be produced today.
00:29:10.280
It breaks so many rules of good board game design that it's a wonder that it's so popular.
00:29:16.300
And if somebody, if it didn't exist and someone came to a game producer and said, Hey, I've
00:29:21.900
It wouldn't be produced because it has a lot of problems with it.
00:29:25.280
The main problem with Monopoly, which you would never see with a modern Euro game is that
00:29:32.080
So it might be a three hour game, but one guy gets eliminated after an hour and he just
00:29:37.140
spends the next two hours being pissed off at his friends.
00:29:45.940
Especially when you know you've been eliminated from that game.
00:29:48.700
And so like, you know, no matter how badly you do in Catan, you finish the game at exactly
00:29:57.460
And that's, that's true of all good modern board game designs.
00:30:02.200
The other problem with Monopoly is that it has the same problem as actually a lot of winner
00:30:08.200
take all economies and that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
00:30:13.920
So as you know, in Monopoly, it's in engineering, we call this an unstable dynamical mechanism.
00:30:19.240
But you have a situation where when you land on someone's hotel, not only do you have to
00:30:24.560
give them your money, but you may have to mortgage your properties and sell off your
00:30:29.800
own houses and hotels at 50% value, because that's what the rules say.
00:30:34.420
And so you're not just making the other person richer, you're compromising your own value
00:30:38.840
And the analogy here is that, you know, if you lose out to a competitor in real life in
00:30:43.500
your sector, you know, you may have to sell your car.
00:30:46.000
And when you sell your car, you can't run your business, or you lose your house, and
00:30:50.440
then, you know, you're homeless, and your life goes down in a sort of spiral, like there's
00:30:58.280
And there's very few mechanisms in the game that allow a person to get back into the game
00:31:05.120
Whereas modern games have that, like in Catan, you have this thing called the robber, which
00:31:10.240
sounds bad, but I joke that it should be called the icon of social justice, because the
00:31:14.340
robber typically victimizes the player that's winning, because the other three players will
00:31:17.980
put it on that player's most productive property.
00:31:21.340
Whereas there's very little of that in Monopoly.
00:31:24.320
And the reason people stick money in free parking, which, by the way, is not in the rules, but
00:31:29.860
it's become this sort of folk rule that says, okay, we'll have all this big pot of money,
00:31:34.280
The reason people do that is it allows people that are losing to get back in the game.
00:31:39.720
It's like people have created this folk solution to a problem in Monopoly, and we have collectively
00:31:48.100
decided that this is how we're going to solve that problem.
00:31:50.260
It's still a terrible game, and I don't like it, and I don't recommend it, but it's better
00:31:55.880
maybe with the lottery in the middle than without it.
00:31:59.660
Well, that's something you and your co-author talk about with some of these old standby
00:32:03.120
games, that people have actually modified the rules to make them more palatable, or make
00:32:10.820
I mean, so Monopoly, yeah, there's the free parking rule.
00:32:12.940
I think in life, you talk about people, like, they're selling kids, which is terrible.
00:32:17.160
You wouldn't do that in real life, but it's like, well, it's something different.
00:32:20.740
It's not, it adds some spice to the game, makes it a little bit more fun.
00:32:23.580
Well, the reason people sell kids to each other is it's such a great way of undermining
00:32:30.160
the bright and shiny bourgeois normalness that the game exudes, right?
00:32:36.760
Like, it's just, it's transgressive, and people like being transgressive.
00:32:43.520
By the way, life, I don't want to be a gaming snot, but life is not a game that serious gaming
00:32:49.340
If you're playing life, it's typically because you're out with your friends, you're having
00:32:52.320
a few drinks, or, you know, you're playing with your kids or something.
00:32:59.320
You know, you would never find this kind of customizing of rules on this casual basis done
00:33:06.700
in like, you know, among serious chess players, for instance, or serious backgammon players
00:33:11.940
or something like that, or even serious Scrabble players.
00:33:14.840
You know, this is a sort of screwing around you see in very casual gaming subcultures.
00:33:19.860
So, with these games, like, there are, there's, what makes a game fun is that there is an
00:33:29.200
And, you know, doing this for as long as you have, do you think your experience, like,
00:33:34.240
failing in board games, has it carried over to the rest of you?
00:33:36.820
Like, I mean, has it made, like, what I'm trying to say is, has, have board games sort
00:33:39.560
of been exercised for resiliency, or do you think that there's no crossover?
00:33:43.320
So, I think, yeah, resilience is, it's an important characteristic, especially when it
00:33:51.720
I think it's something everyone is now trying to teach their kids.
00:33:55.100
I think it depends on your personality, what you're going to get out of it.
00:33:58.400
In my case, one huge thing is because of the way board game subculture works, among hobbyists,
00:34:06.460
there is this, it's not required, but it happens a lot where you play the game.
00:34:11.560
And then as you're putting the pieces back in the box, you spend, like, 10 minutes analyzing
00:34:16.040
the game, and it's sort of like, ah, yeah, I thought I was going to win, but then you
00:34:19.800
got control of this space, and then I realized that I had to take this risk, and the risk
00:34:24.100
didn't go well, and then this, you know, and a lot of people hate that.
00:34:28.340
Like, when I play with, there are certain people I play with who are like, you know, John,
00:34:32.040
the game's over, like, let's talk about something else.
00:34:34.520
But there's other people who the discussion literally will sometimes go on almost as long as
00:34:46.880
That habit of mind has totally influenced the way I live.
00:34:52.560
It's influenced the way I parent, that if something doesn't go right, I try and ask myself, like,
00:34:57.820
say, hey, look, I wasn't snakes and ladders I was playing.
00:35:02.480
What were the decisions I made that were good, and what were the decisions that were bad?
00:35:05.860
And because I play a lot of board games, and I'm in that habit, I now just do that in every
00:35:13.180
And it can be super annoying to others when you think out loud, like, you know, why could
00:35:20.320
But it can also lead you to get lessons from stuff that formerly would have just caused
00:35:28.700
It sounds like the games, like, they give you a mental model to think about your life
00:35:33.900
Yeah, and by the way, that model is not always reassuring.
00:35:38.060
Like, if you lose a game because of bad luck that you couldn't control, that can make you
00:35:43.160
fatalistic if you apply that to the rest of life.
00:35:46.140
Most of the time, though, when you lose a game, like a strategy game, the kind of game that maybe
00:35:51.560
we talk about more in the book, there's a reason.
00:35:58.940
Now, you can take that too far and just, like, turn that into a cult of self-recrimination
00:36:03.220
and say, oh, I made those four mistakes, you know, stupid, stupid, stupid.
00:36:06.980
But that's not the way you want to approach it.
00:36:10.160
You want to say, hey, look, I'm glad those mistakes came in this game.
00:36:13.920
There's, you know, no one got hurt and they're designed to be low stakes, low stakes.
00:36:19.160
My co-author has this metaphor that, you know, games are, they create this sort of circle.
00:36:28.500
The circle, and if you stand in that circle, you can experiment and you can have fun and you
00:36:32.280
can try new things and you know it's just a game.
00:36:36.100
And you're in this environment where, you know, you can try and be aggressive or passive
00:36:41.340
You're not bound by all the same rules that govern your personality outside of that circle.
00:36:46.620
And if you're smart or if you're adventurous, you will use that experience to field test ideas
00:36:53.120
and strategies for dealing with life that you can then apply when the stakes are higher
00:37:00.660
Are there any games for people who are just starting, who want to get started in this,
00:37:06.220
Any ones you recommend checking out that are, that are easy to learn and fun to play?
00:37:11.120
So I generally start people off with shorter games because if it's kind of like everything
00:37:19.080
else, it's kind of like going to the gym is you don't start people off with like a three
00:37:24.380
You might start them off with a 45 minute workout and there's a game called Splendor
00:37:31.540
It's not the greatest game in the world, but it's fairly short.
00:37:36.000
It's like 45 minutes and there's a lot of, it doesn't take up a lot of table space.
00:37:46.540
There's a game called Can't Stop, which is, has this very simple premise.
00:37:57.760
It has some Euro trashy elements, like it's plastic and it, you know, bright primary colors.
00:38:03.540
So the aesthetics are kind of like these games from the seventies, like Battleship, but it's,
00:38:07.900
it's a fun game and there's more strategy in it than people think.
00:38:11.860
There's a game called Azul, A-Z-U-L, which is in that 45 minute genre and has a very tactile
00:38:19.380
It has, it's almost like playing with tiles and mosaics, which click together in this
00:38:24.220
A lot of people like the tactile element of the game.
00:38:29.780
You're making stained glass windows, very visual.
00:38:32.500
Well, Jonathan, this has been a great conversation.
00:38:34.240
Where can people get to learn more about the book in your work?
00:38:36.200
So they can just Google the book, which is your move.
00:38:39.180
My name is Jonathan Kaye and my co-author's name is Joan Moriarty and the book's available
00:38:51.080
I don't tweet that much about board games, but when people tweet at me for recommendations,
00:38:57.020
I always, always make a point of responding to them.
00:39:00.460
My DMs are open and I love talking about board games.
00:39:04.280
And then, well, Jonathan Kaye, thanks for your time.
00:39:10.700
It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:39:13.120
You can also check out our show notes at aom.is slash board games where you can find links
00:39:16.480
to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:39:25.920
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:39:28.680
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00:39:32.200
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00:39:35.520
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00:40:02.360
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