STUPID GAMES, STUPID PRIZES

A week ago, in 34°C heat, I went with my wife and daughters camping. We deliberately chose a site only fifteen minutes’ drive from our house, near a familiar spot we’ve often visited, to make things as stress-free as possible.

During the build-up, I felt increasingly anxious. I didn’t want to go, hated the idea of trying to sleep in a tent on an unfamiliar campsite, of breaking our usual routine, of trying to find ways to fill the time, of the heat, of hayfever, of other campers being loud or unfriendly, of having nowhere to rest or hide. But I also hated the idea of letting down my girls, of missing out on family memories, of leaving my wife to manage the whole trip herself, of giving into my fear. So I went.

As we approached the campsite, my anxiety was so bad I was rocking back and forth in the passenger seat, sobbing. I yelped every time we went over a speed bump. I was beside myself with something close to terror. I wanted to hide, run, plunge underwater and stay there forever. Simultaneously I felt intense shame – my daughters were in the backseats, watching their dad react like this. My wife was trying to find the campsite entrance. I was being selfish and ridiculous. I was letting everyone down. If I had stayed home I would have let everyone down. There was no right move.

In his essay Such, Such Were The Joys, George Orwell wrote: ‘All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude — and all this, it seemed, was in escapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.’

Told, upon his move to boarding school at eight, that he is wetting the bed deliberately, he internalises a sense of deep shame coupled with powerlessness – loathing himself for not meeting the standards his teachers demand ‘yet unable or unwilling — I could not be sure which — to do any better’.

He yearns for change. He does not change. He cannot win.

–

This last weekend, I went to the UK Games Expo, the largest tabletop event in the UK, for my fifth consecutive year. This year’s show seemed to occupy twice the floorspace of last year’s, which was twice the size again of when I first attended in 2021. This year was also my first time taking my nine-year-old daughter with me for one of the three days.

I’m always nervous about coming – nervous about leaving home, nervous about the journey, nervous about being able to pick up my tickets, nervous about the intense scrum of the press preview on Thursday night, nervous that I might have got my hotel reservations wrong, nervous about the queues on Friday morning, nervous about something going wrong at home while I’m away, nervous about my wife feeling let down or resentful having to hold down the fort while I’m gone, nervous about being too loud and annoying when I talk to people, nervous about my place in the scene now my book has been out for over a year and the places I write articles have shifted, nervous about exhaustion and overwhelm, nervous about asking people who I rarely get to see if they’d like to meet up for a game, nervous about speaking to publishers on stalls, nervous that my approach to checking out new games is disorganised or unprofessional, nervous that I’ll lose something important or crash my car, nervous that I’m frivolously, indulgently attending, larping as a journalist and writer when really I don’t belong, I’m just a weird hanger-on. These are all thoughts I experience, entertained and held with varying levels of seriousness at different times.

I had been asking my daughter if she wanted to come with me for some time. I don’t quite know what my true motivation was – I found myself second-guessing that a lot – but I just wanted to show her all of it. I wanted her with me. I love her so much, and she quite likes boardgames sometimes, and I miss her bitterly when I go away to things, and maybe it was as simple and as selfish as, an event like this, and playing games, are part of me, and I want her to know me. When I’m gone, I want her to be able to say that she knew who her dad was.

But of course, once she said yes, I had new anxieties. Was I doing this just for me, because it was what I like, not what would be fun or manageable or interesting for her? Was I doing it to assuage my guilt for attending in the first place? Was I actually capable of coping if something unexpected or unwelcome happened? Was I able to look after her, to anticipate her needs and meet them? Was I taking on too much? Was I pulling her into a potentially horrible experience, where she’d be stuck with me, alone, as I had a meltdown in an unfamiliar place? Was I setting her up for a scary, stressful trip?

I am AuDHD – that is, I am autistic and I have ADHD – and so is she. Tolerating uncertainty can be difficult for both of us. Transitions and changes in routine can be difficult. Loud noise, bright lights, heat, crowds – all these things can be very difficult. All these things were at UKGE in abundance.

The night before we left, I barely slept. I felt like I had made a terrible mistake inviting her, believing that I could take on the responsibility of looking after her in the way she needs and deserves. Sometimes – frequently, perhaps – I feel like that when we’re at home. I fail my family, over and over. I forget or neglect things. I get overwhelmed. Whenever someone proposes an exciting new adventure, my first instinct is to curl into a ball.

I should be less pessimistic. I should remember that things have worked out in the past and worry less about the future. I should write down and organise and diarise all my commitments and upcoming events so I can prepare. I should respond with calm, friendly warmth whenever my family speak to me. I shouldn’t spend so much time locked in a room, alone, shuffling through Magic cards or trying to find nights when I can meet a friend to play boardgames or to roleplay with my group. I should be kinder to myself. I should let other people’s expressions of kindness go in.

I know all this. Yet I am unable or unwilling – I cannot be sure which – to do any better.

–

Tear-able Quest is one of the stupidest, most stressful games I’ve ever played (complimentary). Players are handed identical sheets of paper with little emoji-sized pictures of skeletons, ogres, swords and bows on them. On each of the three rounds, you flip a card showing you a type of monster and a type of weapon. You have to rip your paper such that you end up with a piece that contains only the icons shown, and no other icons. If you accidentally include a bird’s stray wingtip, you score zero. If you accidentally tear off the horn of the ogre you’re hunting, that ogre scores zero. The more monsters of that round’s specific type you manage to tear around – while avoiding all non-scoring icons – the more points you get.

And you do all this with a two-minute timer.

Oh, and the paper is double-sided. On the back are coins and treasure chests which, if you happen to include them in your scoring piece, and if you got the whole coin or treasure chest with no missing corners, score you extra points. There are also curse icons with minus points from your score, which still count even if you only snagged a teeny piece of curse.

Finally, you can only choose one piece of paper, of what remains of your sheet, to take into the next round. So ideally you want to keep as much of the rest of the sheet intact as your tear.

It’s horrible. I am not exactly dextrous at the best of times, and I found myself shearing pieces off skeleton’s legs – having spent nearly a minute painstakingly tearing around them – twitching and ripping my sheet in half, ruining all my hard work with a single instant where I lost control.

In many ways, it’s my worst nightmare: demands to perform tasks above my skill level, with an audience, under intense time pressure.

It is, in fact, a common worst nightmare. Plenty of psychological research suggests that the above combination reliably produces anxiety and impaired task performance – protocols like the Triers and the Mist stress tests do exactly this, and are used to generate anxiety in lab conditions so we can study it.

I also really, really enjoyed it. Not every game is about strategy, or tactics, or contemplating a webwork of beautiful, bifurcating decisions, each with opportunity costs and potential payoffs. Not every game is about the thrill of a card flip, the rumble of dice, the gasp of a uncloaked bluff.

Sometimes, a game can just be – on the face of it – very stupid, and arbitrary, and unique, and produce a definite state, or communal mood, or experience. The outcome generated need not be one of simple victoriousness. Actually, I feel as if Tear-able Quest makes explicit an aspect of play that many games go to some pains to hide. As the philosopher Bernard Suits put it: ‘If playing a game is regarded as not essentially different from going to the office or writing a cheque, then there is certainly something absurd or paradoxical or, more plausibly, simply something stupid about game playing.’

Tear-able Quest is no ageless classic, but as a short, novelty game it produced laughs, gasps, groans of anguish, tuts, hissed curses and sympathetic grimaces. My daughter beat me convincingly – as did most of the other players – and revelled in her victory.

–

It’s Monday after the expo, and traders are totting up balance sheets, publishers are looking at stock levels and mailing list sign-ups and sending emails to follow-up on meetings with manufacturers or distributors, the organisers are sharing metrics showing ticket sales and daily footfall numbers (it was the biggest UK Games Expo ever, with over 50,000 attendees across the weekend) and attendees are posting photographs of their ‘expo hauls’ – piles of shrinkwrapped game boxes, rpg books, dice, neoprene mats and other merchandise, often spread out to cover a bed or stacked in mountains to emphasise the scale and volume.

The emphasis – mostly – is on numbers and measurable economic activity, often softened by a backdrop of social media-friendly shots of smiling staff dismantling the company stand in empty halls and thanking all the costumers who visited to play [lead title X]. There’s a second tier of folks complaining about parking this year or the price of hotels or the unclear etiquette around claiming tables in the Hilton open gaming halls.

It all makes sense, from a consumerist perspective. Here’s the evidence of economic events. Here are the metrics of bodies and profits. Here is the branding and the products. Here is the criticism from the customer base, demanding different outcomes in return for their money.

It still surprises me, how we all so naturally fall into this post-con performance of Capitalist productivity, as if rushing to justify all that play by paying obeisance to legible, mature, market-driven values. Maybe I sound cynical or ridiculous, at this point – like I’m viewing it all through a distorted agitprop lens, or straining to detect something sinister. Maybe, I just sound absurd and self-important. We’re so used to living in a world of commerce and metrics and acquisition that it feels inevitable – questioning it sounds like you’re having a go at people for obeying the law of gravity.

I’m certainly not an economist nor a political scholar, and I’m not claiming that everyone is a thoughtless thrall to consumerism. I’d say the above applies to me, too. I found myself getting swept up in the buzz around games, in rushes to grab copies before they ran out. We were barely through the doors on Friday when I made my daughter wait in a queue with me for over twenty minutes to get a copy of cosy tableau-builder Tenby, which the Waterstones’ stall staff were limiting to one per customer and handing out from under a table.

Game publishers exist to generate profits. The Birmingham NEC is a business. Distribution networks and publicists can get a designer’s game into more players’ hands, maybe with better quality production, maybe at a lower price, than if that designer had to make and promote and ship that game themselves.

It’s all very justifiable, very grown-up. You take the logic of the market, a logic so pervasive that it has largely colonised and parasitised our ability to imagine any alternative, and all this activity feels smoothly plausible, and not absurd or paradoxical or stupid at all.

We’re just going to the office. We’re writing a cheque.

–

Lots of autistic and neurodivergent people like me discover, fairly early on, that we are bad at performing adulthood in the way Late Capitalism conceives of it. To be an adult is to produce and acquire. You generate capital for others and for yourself. You acquire property. You do not get sick. You do not take rests.

As we get older, the range of permissible public behaviours shrinks. For autistic people in particular, performing adulthood can be hard when it requires interacting with systems not built for or by us, when ‘being an adult’ is synonymous with ‘passively accept all rules and behavioural norms, be legible’.

There are some – perhaps many – adults for whom giggles of delight, flapping their hands in excitement, and gasps of happy wonder would feel horribly humiliating. They want to be regarded as Serious Brokers in the realm of Adult Affairs – as businesspeople, statesmen, intellectuals. These are acceptable roles. ‘Happy, free human’ is not one of the options.

‘To be concerned about being grown up… to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence,’ wrote C. S. Lewis. ‘When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.’

It was Bernard Suits who argued that the main – perhaps only – activity of truly autonomous, utopian beings, would be playing games. Maturity and self-actualisation, in Suits’ view, are not about obedience to received norms. Work is not inherently more ethical or sophisticated than play. Work is a form of preventative medicine. It creates shelter, food, vaccines. Work’s ultimate goal is its own annihilation. If we study and build, one day we might solve all our major problems. What then? Well, suggests Suits, then there would be nothing left for us to do but to create our own problems – new, interesting, voluntary problems – and solve them ourselves, for fun.

–

Strange Slot Simulator feels more like a bizarre, dystopian piece of interactive theatre about the future of work than a boardgame. But it is a boardgame – or, rather, a game with cards, and player screens, and pads and pencils – and one of the oddest I’ve ever played. Did I enjoy it? Let me explain it, first… insofar as any of it is explainable.

There are six decks, each consisting of cards that show different symbols from vintage slot machines: bells, cherries, bunches of grapes, bells, etc. These six decks represent six different slot machines, each with slightly different probability spreads – some decks have more bells, with some, it’s like a damn vineyard baby (there are lots of grapes).

Each player has a cardboard screen that shows the six decks/slot machines along with the exact number of each symbol in each one, and histograms mapping the probability distributions of those symbols. Sounds fun already, right? It’s GCSE statistics, the game.

The identity of each deck is hidden, and on each round, you’re going to grab one, shuffle it, and deal yourself three cards, as if you were pulling the lever on the machine. Or pressing the button. Or whatever horrible frictionless means modern addicts use to spin the reels. You note down the three symbols on the sheet of paper hidden behind your screen, by checking the corresponding boxes. If you get a bell, you also make a mark on the bonus track along the bottom of your sheet.

Then you shuffle the deck, and deal again. That’s it.

Your goal – perhaps I should have led with that – is to, by the end of the game, deduce with slot machine is which, based on the distribution of results.

Each round is timed – you have a few minutes to repeatedly pull the lever, note down the outcome, shuffle your deck, pull the lever, note it down, repeat, repeat, repeat. Every fifth spot on your bonus track gives you a one-shot power where you can deal yourself five cards instead of three. If you get to the end of the bonus track, you get a permanent upgrade where you can now draw four cards after each shuffle, instead of three.

You only have one deck in your possession at any given time, and can swap it out for whatever’s left in the middle – meaning you can’t access a machine another player is using until they put it back. The entire game loop is shuffle, deal, tick. Shuffle, deal, tick. Punctuated by groans.

Actually, you also have to announce when you’re using one of your one-shot bonus powers, by saying ‘Bonus’, and – strangely enough – this does add to the sense of a communal project, reminding you that you’re in a race, that other people are toiling alongside you, struggling to interpret the same data.

It’s strange and Sisyphean and gruelling. It reminded me, in part, of a time long ago when I overdosed on brownies at breakfast and ended up on the pier in rainy Great Yarmouth playing bingo, looming wall-eyed over my numbers, gripping the table, clinging to the caller’s incantations like a spell that might hold back the demons.

I also really enjoyed it? That question mark is me doing upspeak at the end of my sentence. I don’t know how replayable it is, what the other game modes are like and how often I’d want to face that challenge again, but it was kind of a beautiful puzzle. The art and the production are great, the symbols are bold and colourful, I love the shared project of a roll and write and games in adjacent genres – a sort of competitive knitting circle, where every hiss or moan or ‘ohhhh?’ purls our work together into a shared garment. One sign of a successful game of this type – where there’s deduction, hidden information, and a certain amount of private effort during the actual play – is the desire to have a debrief immediately afterwards, and we did. We wanted to chat about how we’d constructed strategies on the fly, moments where we realised how we could narrow the field when a deck threw up particular results (hit three bells in a single spin, for example, and you eliminate two-thirds of your candidates – only two machines have three bells in the deck).

And those histograms? The little bar charts showing the probability of certain symbols showing up? The neat magic trick is that, providing you’ve sampled each deck enough times by the end of the game, the check marks on your player sheet end up somewhat resembling the bar graphs on your screen. It’s like a cheesy technothriller where they take the waveform of a suspect’s vocal sample and overlay it on another ripped from a phone call and my God! They match!

Repeatedly dealing yourself three cards, shuffling, dealing three more, and noting it all down is self-evidently unnecessary, inefficient and, by ‘normal’ standards of human behaviour, stupid. Days later, I’m still thinking about it.

–

I’ve been taking medication for ADHD for nine months, now. When I started, the leaflet that came with my pills warned of side effects that included ‘weight loss and euphoria’. Oh no, I thought. Whatever next. An unexpected tax refund? Satsuma peels always coming off in a single, spiral piece?

For two or so weeks, it was great. I lost weight. I felt happy. But more, I could focus. Small, boring tasks formerly left undone were just… done? I did them. I sent the email. I folded and put away the clothes. I wrote stuff. I actually wrote stuff. I had been losing days and weeks of precious writing time to procrastination, to social media and video games. I actually want to write books, ok? I want to create stories and explore important topics, to crystallise ideas and unpack things I don’t understand and to communicate all that to other people who might wrestle with the same issues or who might want an escape or who might just enjoy having this colourful, textured sphere of compressed time handed to them so it enriches their experience of being alive, expands their sense of who they are and what ‘this’ is.

Procrastinating had always felt sickening, self-destructive, an act of monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude, yet I kept choosing it. And as soon as I started on my meds, I began to choose differently. Is this what it’s always been like for other people, I thought. Like, you can just… choose? And now I can choose, I am choosing? I’m not a worthless piece of shit? I just had a different starting point to them?

It did not last. Not completely, anyway. In fact, the process of adjusting to medication, including the potential pitfalls – forgetting to eat, drink or sleep, overwork, the rebound if and when it wears off – triggered some of the hardest and worst months of my life.

Alongside this, my grandmother died, in peace, after a long life, and my mother-in-law died, after five hard years of managing the progressive ravages of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s. I loved them both very much, I admired them both a great deal, and I was grateful for how they loved and accepted me and both told me they were proud of me.

I am still trialling different doses of ADHD medication, to see if anything truly sticks. One of the best things that early, honeymoon period gave me was an experience of calm under periods of high-demand, like the school run. Instead of snapping ‘what?’ whenever anyone asked something of me, I could say ‘just a minute!’ or smile, or rush to help. I felt competent, safe, not like a fighter pilot with bullets whistling past his ear desperately trying to climb or dive.

I felt like, maybe – just maybe – I would finally be able to do everything the modern, adult world demanded of me. The admin, the emails, the tidying, the brilliant, creative imaginative labour, the parenting, the husbanding, the socialising, the rest, the exercise, the spiritual development – I would balance it and perform it and relax and be happy and help others and I wouldn’t feel like a duck asked to pilot a helicopter.

Some things have improved from the deepest lows of 2025. I’m back in therapy. I’m doing my best. But if I seem, when I talk about my time at events like UK Game Expo, intense to the point of messianic, if I seem to be trying too hard to force significance onto it, if I seem worryingly invested, this is why.

All weekend, people were kind to me. I only had to walk the floors for a few minutes to bump into someone I knew, someone who would smile and say ‘hi Tim’. I could sit at a table and play games and talk about games and stim and rock and talk too loud and say ‘I’m not okay right now’ and cry and sometimes not say anything for quite a while and it was all okay.

–

The last game I played at UK Games Expo was Magical Athlete, which is not new (although many people were hunting for it at the show, and stalls that had it sold out). It’s a simple roll and move where you’re each a racer trying to get to the end of a track. You roll a six-sided die, move that many spaces, and pass the turn. The first person past the finish space wins.

Except that each racer – picked from a selection at the beginning – has a special power. Many feel like game-breaking powers – Legs can just move five spaces instead of rolling the die, Flip Flop can switch places with any other racer instead of moving – many look like they do little or nothing, then turn out, under the right circumstances, to be devastating.

Once you’ve picked your racers and the game starts, you often have little to no agency. Some powers are optional – like the Magician’s chance to reroll – but many just happen. The current edition was reworked by Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, and when we played, my gosh did it feel like a four-player game of Magic’s Commander format. Endless weird rule interactions, play continually grinding to a halt as we debated the proper interpretation of the timing of effects, or which of two apparently contradictory powers took precedent. So much confusion, so many missed triggers, players who watched helplessly as they were eliminated and left with no further role, so many long chains of powers triggering powers triggering powers where we had to shuffle pieces round the board to no great consequence and most ended up back where they’d started.

It was almost a satire of the whole concept of play – this tangled, legalistic vipers’ nest of bureaucracy and frustration, a monster wearing the skin of a fun, happy game, its crimson glare glinting wetly behind the eyeholes as we said ‘no, you can’t do that, it’s not your main move’ or ‘wait, that means you move forward two, which means you move back two, which retriggers my power’ or ‘the rulebook doesn’t say anything about it’. It was completely stupid.

I loved it. I love it. Whenever a game becomes the darling of the moment – I’m thinking The Gang, Codenames, Flip 7, even to an extent Blood on the Clocktower – it can quickly turn into something of a Bête Noire for anyone only lukewarm on it. And look, I only want to play Magical Athlete occasionally. I find it’s best savoured in small doses.

But the masochism and the stupidity, the lack of agency and the fiddly admin, the impromptu quorums formed to figure out how to interpret phrases on particular cards – I find it all perversely, comfortingly fun and silly, like slapstick. It pokes a knitting needle into the big balloon of pompous academic theories of ludology and strategy and games as art, while simultaneously affirming all those positions. I find myself unable to defend it on any level, except that, for me, it’s brilliant fun.

And it’s stupid. It is a game of failure and incompetence and lack of agency. Of humiliation and setbacks and pratfalls. If you win, you do so like the sleepwalker stumbling unscathed through the minefield. If you lose, it’s very likely there was almost nothing you could have done to prevent it.

The stakes are so damn low. The apparatus for arriving at an outcome is so Kafka-esque, so disproportionate, so shrouded in the rainbow garb of simple, harmless frivolity, it feels like finally, finally, we’re seeing the skeleton beneath the skin – the baffling and arbitrary technicolour nightmare of trying to navigate a world built for the convenience of the few, constructed as if you neither exist nor matter, a world clogged with bureaucracy, unfair advantages and invisible, counterintuitive rules, where you scramble and trip and stampede over one another in pursuit of rewards that vanish and are forgotten minutes later.

It’s perfect.

–

I had such a happy time at UK Games Expo. I got to hang out with many people who I both like a great deal, and admire for a variety of reasons – some professional, some just because they exemplify some of the best qualities a human can possess. I love the colour and the excitement, I love that I can be a games enthusiast and not feel scared or – too – weird, I love that people want to get together, in a world full of division and fighting and prejudice – to celebrate play, leisure, peaceful human interaction. These are not minor, quirky nice-to-haves. They are us at our best.

My daughter had a great time, too. She enjoyed exploring the re-enactment village (she has been studying the Vikings at school) where she got to try on a helmet while wielding a sword and shield, learn about different traditional dyes, and watch a demonstration of how difficult it would be for one person to carry everything the typical Dungeons & Dragons adventurer might have in their inventory.

We demoed some games, she bought some trinkets from some of the independent craft stalls, and she got to sit down with a bunch of my friends to play games with us – including Tear-able Quest – and join in with the teasing of her father. By the end of it, she was yelling and thumping the table and playfully barracking people. When we’d arrived, she’d hardly said a word. I watched her come out of herself – and also got to spend time at the show with my Dad, who seemed to like it too – and watched how my friends and various strangers across our time there made a point of including her, helping her feel welcome.

I know lots of lovely game designers, artists, publicists, journalists and publishers, and lots of wonderful fellow players. My antipathy for the gears of commerce, and the post-show performance of consumption, is not a knock on any of them. It just always feels like a stark contrast, in the comedown after a very full-on weekend, where I genuinely feel safe and happy and like maybe I deserve to exist, to see such an emphasis on stuff. It feels like going to a wedding, or a funeral, and when someone asks you how it was, you lead by telling them how many miles to the gallon you got on the round trip.

My daughter went home on the Friday evening. I got a message from my wife in the wee hours, telling me our daughter had had a great time. ‘And Daddy was really calm,’ my daughter had said, ‘because he was with his people.’

–

I wrote a book about tabletop games past and present, and how they make us human. It’s called The Game Changers (or Across the Board in the US) and you can order it into your local bookshop or get it online in hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook, maybe by clicking here.

If you enjoyed this and would like to support my work, you can drop me the price of a coffee at my page: www.ko-fi.com/timclare