Tim Clare
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tim Clare’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
slowly accruing all the real estate and money and you were meant to get to the end of it and think that was incredibly unfair and the game was meant to be a teaching tool it was not meant to be fun so when people say i i feel like that was frustrating and drawn out more than anything else they're getting at something fundamental about the game design
You hit upon something that is so compelling to human beings. It's one of these magical formulas. The archaeologist Dr Irving Finkel at the British Museum said that they're called roll and move games. in academic literature.
And he said that there's something fundamental about that, that wherever in any society, a game where you roll some dice and race around a board first past the post games appears, it spreads like wildfire. It always comes to dominate the culture that it's in. Why is that exciting? Well, I suppose what those games do is they take simple dice rolling and maybe you make tally marks and get a score.
They turn that into like a horse race. And human beings love a race. And even something like the game Pooh Sticks, right, where come from Winnie the Pooh, where you throw sticks over one side of the bridge and then you run to the other side of the bridge and there's a river underneath and you see whose stick comes out first.
I think there's something fundamental in the human spirit, something irreducible about racing.
My first thought when video games came out is that board games are doomed. That has not been the case at all. I think, if anything, the ubiquity of video games has fueled this desire to get away from screens and get away from digital experiences. Not that I don't love them, but I think that People really crave that physical experience around the table with other people.
Board games have never been doing better in terms of sales. They are doing phenomenally well at the moment.
It depends who you ask and where you date it from. The game Chaturanga, which was an Indian game, has been around for at least a millennium. But the current rules of chess... would probably only solidified in the past 500 years, I think. The last thing that chess decided upon was the movement of the queen. The queen could only move one square at a time.
And then they created this variant called Mad Queen's Chess, where the queen could move as far as you wanted, what we have now. And universally, everyone went, this is brilliant. And that's where the final rules of chess that we have today solidified. So probably about 500 years.
There was no difference except that you could lose the queen without losing the game.
Absolutely. I think chess is this completely magical game that, through tiny rule changes, became the version it is today, became the game it is today. It wasn't designed so much as discovered, really. And it's an incredible game in terms of the complexity that can come out of a relatively few number of rules.
The answer is that we don't. At some point, it disappears into the ether and we're not sure. Checkers or drafts, as it's sometimes known in the UK, goes back about as long as chess. And there's The thing that has happened with checkers that hasn't happened with chess is we've never decided. The world has not decided on the definitive version of checkers, right?
You go to any country, it has its own version of the rules. It's like Canadian drafts, which has like a much bigger board. There's Frisian drafts where you can jump backwards. There's versions, Turkish drafts, where you move forwards and backwards instead of diagonally. How related is it to chess?
Well, checkered boards go all the way back to the time of the Buddha, which is one of our earliest lists of board games. He gives this list of games that monks aren't allowed to play, and he talks about checkered boards.
so did it make sense to a lot of people that drafts came and checkers came before chess because it appears to be the simpler game we don't have any evidence for that um but it seems like it's still a game that's in flux um so do they have any relationship as far as we know one didn't come out of the other but they may have used the same boards but that checkerboard has existed for at least five millennium
Yeah, Backgammon went through this renaissance where it became really cool, where, like, the Rolling Stones were playing. People were going to Monaco and playing these high-stakes games of Backgammon. So certainly...
It did go through a renaissance, but then you go to somewhere like Syria or Iraq or Turkey, any of these countries, and this is a game that has never gone away and can probably trace its lineage back at least 4,500 years. It is an old, old game in various forms.
you could imagine backgammon all it would take is a couple of celebrities to become i think backgammon fans it's a game that is has some skill has some chance you know you roll dice you move but there's a great deal of strategy that that you can develop by playing the game but you could there's still some luck right it's a game i think that could easily have a revival at any point.
I think you're absolutely right because it's very accessible. Like I could teach it to my eight-year-old daughter and I think she'd enjoy it. But the skill ceiling of getting really good at it is actually quite high.
I think that's true of some of the lesser-known games, at least in the US and the UK, like the Mancala games that are so popular across Africa, like on Hueso and Wari, games like that, these games that you play with stones or pebbles, where you capture each other's pieces, you pick them up and drop them in these different... houses, they're called, these little divots in a board.
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