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"How we should think about board games, and what do they do to us as we play them?"

Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships--from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly--an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books--specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author's emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

1. Throughout chapter one, Thurm describes several different experiences playing Catan with different people — friends, family, and so on. Have you experienced games rules changing based on who you were playing with?

2. A game like Juden Raus feels immensely dated, even though the attitudes it expressed were common in Germany at the time. What ideas and “facts” do we take for granted in game form that might appear embarrassing or repugnant in 50 years?

3. What aspects of traditional board games does Brenda Romero’s Train include? What does it lack? Do you think it should be considered a game, or something else?

4. How does knowing the history of Monopoly change the way you feel about the game, and past times you’ve played it? Would you approach it any differently now?

5. Games like Blacks and Whites and Woman and Man try to teach the player something by putting them in the position of another person. Do you think games can be successful at creating this kind of empathy? Have you ever learned to see another person differently in this way?

6. How does the experience of quarterbacking compare to group dynamics on other sorts of projects? Is winning a collaborative game by yourself still winning?

7. How does The Grizzled use its rules and mechanics as its avenue to communicate its lesson about World War I? What other rules do we deal with in our day-to-day lives that communicate similar lessons?

8. Explore the comparison between legacy games and seasons of television. How do the experiences line up? Differ?