It's All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan

It's All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan Tristan Donovan New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017. Introduction, references, acknowledgments, and index. 292 pp. $26.99 paper. ISBN: 9781250082725

In It's All a Game, Tristan Donovan explores the roots of board games' persistent popularity. Analyzing the influence of social, political, and economic influences on board game designers and manufacturers, Donovan maps the evolution of our modern-day relationship with board games across time, international boundaries, and cultures. He also examines the impact this leisure activity has had on popular psychology. Donovan concludes that games have "shaped us, explained us, and molded the world we live in" (p. 7).

In sixteen chapters, the author takes his readers on a journey that underscores the history and evolution of ancient games and their contemporary counterparts. Donovan traces the Indian and Persian influences on chess, highlighting the game's journey along the Silk Road trade routes and how the rules and game pieces evolved to reflect first Muslim and then European societies. He examines how games such as backgammon, Milton Bradley's The Checkered Game of Life, and Monopoly developed as games that required both strategy and luck. As with chess, Donovan emphasizes the ways in which the original versions of these games addressed the concerns of the day and then evolved over time.

Donovan devotes much of his book to twentieth-century games and illustrates the international influences of modern games and how changing mores affected games and game play. He discusses the development of popular games such as Clue and...