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A review by mburnamfink
Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us about Life by Joan Moriarity, Jonathan Kay
3.0
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'.
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'.