The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too, Tim Clare, Canongate, £16.99.

Wherever in the world archaeologists dig, they almost always turn up boards and pieces such as counters crafted from stones, seeds or shells, proving that games are rooted in global antiquity. The excavation itself is even game-like, similar to a giant jigsaw puzzle, with teams piecing together fragments and identifying objects to be photographed and logged. 

At Ziyaret Tepe, in south-eastern Turkey, lie buried the remains of the ancient city of Tushan, on the northern edge of the great Assyrian Empire. When excavations got going, around the year 2000, astonishing artefacts came to light, including a clay tablet in cuneiform script hinting of a previously unknown language. Excavators also uncovered more humble things, including evidence of ‘knuckle bones’, usually the ankle bones of sheep, used as an early precursor for dice.

Simple games are still played the world over, proving their appeal and timelessness. A few years ago, I witnessed a lunchtime match between a group of young graphic designers in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, who left their computers to play a quick game of knuckle bones – essentially a game of chance – on the floor of their high-tech office. It was something, they told me, that their ancestors had likely played out on the steppe.

There is so much to say about the unwieldy world of games – their history and sprawling geography, our shared human desire for them – that the subject demands a discerning storyteller. Tim Clare, taking on the role of author and games master, plays his pieces well in The Game Changers, while making no apology for his long-held infatuation for gaming: ‘I love games so much. My big question going into this was: why? Why do I find them so engaging, so beautiful, so fascinating? Why should the fall of a die or the turn of a card matter?’ From that central query comes an engaging exploration.

Clare sets a boundary early on choosing to focus on tabletop games, or board games (there are no video games or sports, such as football or cricket). Games of his chosen form have ‘outlasted dynasties, empires, languages and whole belief systems’.

Human inventiveness paired with a desire for competition and entertainment has resulted in our everlasting love of games, and they matter to us because they represent so much of life: ambition, combat, strategy, learning, fun and companionship.

They are not a luxury or mere amusement, Clare argues, but rather a necessity. As well as offering a means to improve critical thinking, they have presented ways for humans to bond. And it is likely that playing games grew out of a simple longing for a break from the day’s work, a form of ritualistic leisure time that was different to religion (though the Aztecs might have called up Macuilxochitl, the god of games, to pray for good luck). 

It isn’t all positive, of course. Games also encourage competition, frustration, envy, gambling and arguments. The Romans indulged a ‘mania for dice’. Visiting Rome in the fourth century, ‘soldier Ammianus Marcellinus reported that what had once been “the abode of all the virtues” has now filled with “the multitude of lowest condition and greatest poverty… [quarrelling] with one another in their games at dice, making a disgusting sound by drawing back the breath into their resounding nostrils”’. 

Pinning down precise historical and geographical data of the history of games is an intimidating, and a seemingly impossible prospect. As Clare puts it ‘the history of games is not a river you can follow to its source’. However, he tries his best. The ancient Egyptian two-player game senet – usually taking the form of ‘slab-style’ boards of wood and graffiti scratched into stone pavements or box-style boards, with the competition being to get from one side to the other – is often thought to be the oldest game recorded, dating back around 5,000 years. Naturally, experts debate this. It may also be that another ancient Egyptian game called mehen, named after a snake god, is older still. Archaeologists describe the latter as a race game, where the snake’s body forms the track, and players race to reach the centre. 

The problem with ancient games is that much of the earliest evidence of them has inevitably been washed away – like chalk sketched onto stone – and it is sometimes hard to know if a pebble or a shell had a special meaning, if found within a funeral mound for example, or if it was just flotsam lying around.

It isn’t all relics and archaic histories. Clare also looks to modern Ukraine, where stoic chess players can be found in parks and cafés, moving their rooks and bishops about as war rages nearby and drones fly overhead. Clare singles out one instance in Kyiv, at almost midnight, where draughts were played to pass the time: ‘Their M14s and Soviet assault rifles slung over their backs, the men stood round a stone slab that served as the board. The temperature had dropped to freezing – they were wearing heavy coats, and balaclavas under their helmets. Some held flashlights, casting a spectral glow over bottles topped with rags – twelve black, twelve white. Their playing pieces were Molotov cocktails.’

On chess, Clare quotes from Journey to Armenia by the poet Osip Mandelstam (born in Warsaw in 1891 and raised in St Petersburg), who wrote: ‘Who has not felt envious of chess players?… These little Persian horses made of ivory are immersed in a power-solvent… The chessboard swells up from the attention concentrated on it.’ 

Mandelstam visited Armenia for several months in 1930 before he was targeted by the Soviet authorities and, given Clare’s citation, it was perhaps a missed opportunity not to explore Armenia’s chess obsession a little. After all, chess has been on the primary school curriculum since 2011 and the country has produced a disproportionate number of grandmasters for its small size, including Tigran Petrosian, who won the world championship in 1963, and defended his title three years later. The capital’s modernist Chess House, completed in 1970, is named after Petrosian and the building features on an Armenian bank note.

Yet this is a minor quibble and not everything can be included in one book. The options are dizzying, and Clare makes this clear early on: ‘Games are so ubiquitous, surrounding us as the ocean surrounds a squid.’

Eventually, taking a circuitous, albeit highly enjoyable route, Clare concludes: ‘Humans play games because we love joy, and we love feeling free. We play because the experience – even the delicious, squeezing frustration of a dilemma, or the shock of a betrayal – expands our sense of self, and our economy of emotional sentiment. Play is a core human activity, and when we deny ourselves play, we suffer.’ Both ordinary and extraordinary, games are undoubtedly true survivors.