Fascinating book about some of the psychology behind board games and the social contract we enter when we play games with others. It did get more political than I expected but it was interesting to consider in light of specific games.

"That is the world of the tabletop, a place where many of life’s great lessons leave their mark— but the sting never lasts longer than the time it takes to put all those little pieces back in their box."

At face value, this is a book chronicling time spent playing various boardgames, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it encompasses so much more. The authors, the owner of a book game cafe and a journalist turned avid board game player, take turns writing essays focused on various games with very different viewpoints. Included in these essays are popular games like Monopoly, Scrabble (my favorite) and Cards Against Humanity- but also more obscure such as Alpha Squad Leader, Chinatown and Dead of Winter. Through the dissection of the rules, origins and experiences of playing these games, the authors take a look at society and the impact of gaming in our daily lives. I was not expecting this to be a sociological collection, but enjoyed it immensely and will be recommending this book frequently! Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a free ebook of this title!

I enjoyed this personal look at board games through the eyes of these two people. I would say I wish the epilogue had been the introduction as they touch upon what the book ended up being versus what the introduction stated it would be.

I preferred Joan's chapters to Jonathan's - I think her style was more accessible and her point of view more relatable as she played games similar to myself. Jonathan's penchant for heavy war games made a few of his essays a bit harder to read since I had no frame of reference. I really enjoyed his entry on Chinatown and Scrabble since those both shows a bit more of his personal side than some of the other essays where I think he was trying to sound objective in his critiques but came off as distant.

At a brief 166 pages, this was a quick read and a fun read for anyone that plays board games. I would love to see a similar collection, perhaps each essay written by different people in the games industry - from designers to journalists to online influencers.

I think I was expecting more rigour from this book. It builds itself up as a deep-dive into gaming and the real-life lessons we can learn therefrom, and its frequent self-references enhance that impression that you're going to get something really in-depth (or, in fact, that you've gotten something really in-depth, based on the authors' reminiscences about past chapters toward the end). However, it never seemed to get much deeper than "these two people's super casual blog posts about their own feelings about various games". It wasn't a bad read, just a lot less engaging than I was hoping for.

I was also put off by myriad broad-stroke assertions that didn't apply to me at all. At one point, one of the authors states as fact that everyone loves to belittle Political Correctness. At another point, one of the authors states that all game players take their victories as a very personal vindication of their efforts but their losses as the vagaries of chance. (I am very much the opposite, broadly in life as well as in gaming, and it's something I need to work on.) And there's a theme, inimical to the authors' stated ideas about gaming in some ways, that crops up frequently about players essentially playing in bad faith -- being willing to ruin other people's enjoyment and in fact personal lives and relationships in order to bring their gameplay (even at casual games) to the "next level". That doesn't ring true of any of the gaming groups I've played in at all.

On the subject of one of the authors' derision for political correctness above, the treatment of cultural appropriation rubbed me the wrong way in this book. I'm glad it came up as a topic, but the author of that section essentially sweeps it away trivially by softly asserting that because board gamers are more intellectually evolved people than the general public, it doesn't really matter. That was almost a "time to put this book down" moment for me.

What carried me through, ultimately, was a combination of having previously met one of the authors and found them really intelligent and engaging and having a deep enjoyment of games journalism. However, if I had to recommend a work on the subject, I'm not sure this would come to the top of the stack.

Some of the chapters were enjoyable, and some were less so. There was only one where I was bored enough to skip the second half. More a collection of life lessons/societal themes using board games as a lens, there were some I agreed with and others I didn’t, but I can appreciate their views. Sadly though, I don’t think this helped me add any games to my wish list :(

I really enjoyed this book. It had a little bit of everything that I enjoy about games. But my favorite was the emphasis on the importance of play and learning from failure.

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 deconstruction. 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. Quillette fucking sucks. And to Libertarians and Conservatives out there, happy to have a discussion about regulatory overreeach 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'.

• Netgalley ARC ebook