Your Move is a series of essays about boardgaming by Joan Moriarty, game sommelier at Toronto game cafe Snakes and Lattes, and Jonathan Kay, an avid hobbyist gamer, journalist, and currently editor at Quillette*. The essays are pretty populist and surface level. Table top games are fun because we can step inside a magic circle of play and commit fully without having to live with the consequences. They give us something to go with our friends, and offer levels of involvement from the minimally interactive Apples to Apples, to the elegant decision spaces of eurogames, to the grand strategies of complex supergames. Tabletop gaming experienced a massive renaissance in the 2010s, with the whole field growing several times over. Today, there are games for almost any taste!

The essays are best when they get away from the bland generalities. Kay likes Monopoly as an example of an unstable equilibrium, while Moriarty holds to the conventional wisdom that it's one of the worst games you'll ever play. Moriarty's deconstruction of Scattergories as a relationship killer which is actually about political skill in playing the table is brilliant analysis. Similarly, while Kay is not a fan of Scrabble, he has affection for the unique skills required at high level play. Nigel Richards won the French national Scrabble tournament by memorizing dictionaries, and still cannot speak French.

Where this book gets weird is when Kay starts inveigling against political correctness, even as Moriarty calls for a more diverse gaming community. I didn't discover the association with Quillette until after I had finished the book, but Quillette is a publication which spends a lot of time promoting discredited racist theories, employs Proud Boys information operative Andy Ngo, and generally is trying to make fascism an acceptable political viewpoint. So when Kay argues playing Phil Eklund's Greenland (and Eklund has his own issues), is a better way to gain respect for Indigenous people than the media growing out of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools, I roll to disbelieve.

So hey, its a decent set of introductory essays, except half the proceeds go to a guy who's making a career out of destroying Western democracy. I'm not one of those people who requires that every book I read match my politics: I gave five stars to Freedom's Forge, and the author is an American Enterprise Institute arch-conservative. It's just that even by culture war standards, Quillette fucking sucks. And to Libertarians and Conservatives out there, happy to have a discussion about regulatory overreach or anti-competitive tax policy or whatever it is, once you deal with all the racists and actual Nazis you call buddies. Show some actual integrity, and stop making everything about 'triggering the libs'.

Thanks to Netgalley.com for a review copy of this book.

The back and forth of the two authors’ analysis of the assortment of games discussed in this book was delightful to read. Each had insight to offer – a lot with a bit of humor – as he or she explained how each game is played and what we as a society can learn from it. What a great book!

Two writers deliver alternating essays, well-written and thoughtful, that treat board games as an overlooked art form and dig into both what our games say about us and our society, and what separates good board game concepts and designs from poor ones: looking at you, Monopoly, in the latter category!

I was not expecting much from this book - but as soon as the writers started talking about their experiences as a board game teacher at a games cafe, I could relate. This book is a series of short essays and musings on board games, why we play the ones we do, and what we can learn from that.

And that's basically the book - if you love board games and also think about what makes the whole hobby interesting and connected, this is a good book. If your interested in game design or game theory; not so much.

Interesting read. Not life changing in any way, but they ask some good questions and put forward some interesting perspectives. I enjoyed it.

A collection of short essays on a few games and the insights gained from them. A quick fun little read, that neatly fit between my level of knowledge of games and my enjoyment of their hot takes.