CAT, PLANT, MONSTER

In Out of Sorts, you and your friends have been abducted by an alien. They want help organising their library, and it’s down to you, the abductees, to come up with a filing system. Naturally, there are some cultural and linguistic barriers to surmount. For a start, none of the alien’s books has a conventional title. Remember when Prince changed his name to a symbol that was sort of a combination of the male and female symbols mixed with the Thurn and Taxis horn? That’s the kind of thing each book is called. And my convoluted attempt to transmute it into something vaguely recognisable is the kind of thing players will find themselves shouting all game.

It’s a cooperative challenge where players race against the clock to find specific symbols amongst a thick deck of cards, match them to the corresponding index card, then hand them to the archivist, who has to arrange them in their hand according to a bizarre filing system you all have to spontaneously invent. You’ll have three words like ‘Cats’, ‘Plants’ and ‘Monsters’ as your Dewey Decimal System criteria, and somehow you find yourselves arguing about whether a squiggle with two dots dangling off it is more cat-like than a sort of squashed olive or more plant-like, or maybe really it’s a Monster – but more or less a Monster than the hairy sword?

If you’re struggling to picture how this game plays, believe me when I tell you how quickly it all becomes frighteningly natural, as the group coheres around a shared, ad-hoc paratextual logic. Out of Sorts rewards memory, creativity and solid teamwork, but these skills need not be distributed evenly amongst your group. Different players’ strengths have space to come to the fore, and it’s hard to feel too crushed by failure because it’s all so silly, the bibliomaniacal xenomorph’s disapproving eyes slowly rising from behind a card with each check of your filing system that you fail.

Language works by consensus, appealing to mutual experience to convey meaning. If you are marginalised in any way, if your experience of the world is different to most people’s, either because of how you’re perceived or because of how you think and feel, our everyday language no longer serves you. A core part of you is cut adrift, and – because you don’t have the words to articulate it – you might not even fully realise what it is that’s missing. Even if you could find the words, would other people understand them? Or would it be like showing the letters D O G to someone who had never seen a dog? The words and their meanings were made by the majority, and the majority aren’t like you.

Out of Sorts is a game about building a community where you’re understood.

–

Life is quite the adventure when you have the roving curiosity of a late-medieval alchemist and the emotional resilience of a tired baby. I eat the same breakfast every morning (porridge with soy milk, fifteen red grapes, and a stovetop coffee with soy milk) because the cognitive pressure of choosing and preparing one spontaneously feels overwhelming – and even with these restrictions, I usually wait until everyone else is at work or school before eating, because the noise and bustle of people around me while I make and eat it – not to mention the threat of interruptions, of being asked to assist with a separate task while I’m mid-flow – is too intimidating.

I’m not normally thinking about my breakfast while I make it, either. Rather, I’m only semi-present, my cerebellum running most of the show via muscle memory, while my brain rushes off in a hundred different directions, playing music, chewing over problems, practising dialogues in my head, worrying, perhaps repeating some phrase over and over to stop me forgetting something important I simply must do that morning. Interruptions – that is, any human attempting to interact with me in any way – feel like getting unexpectedly whipped with a wet towel while you’re wearing a VR headset showing you the complicated circuitry of a bomb you’re trying to defuse.

I find focusing on work hard, compounded by an often-paralysing perfectionism that triggers a cascade of self-criticism and catastrophising the moment I start writing anything that isn’t, to my mind, immediately of a publishable standard. To cope with the anxiety and rumination, I procrastinate by reading things online, doing hobbies, playing video games and sometimes by doing housework.

I hate when plans change, and I like to know what’s coming every day, so I know when I can relax and when I need to prepare for an interruption. I’m also horribly disorganised, struggle to remember commitments or reply to emails, and get so anxious about upcoming events that I put off preparing for them until the last second. Loud ambient noise – like chatter in cafes, air conditioning fans, the noise of the TV in the next room – takes effort for me to block out and quickly leaves me exhausted. I struggle with admin and have a support worker who helps me with things like emails, my schedule, and filling in forms (and even then I frequently mess things up, misread dates, or forget to invoice for work I’ve done).

When I get overwhelmed, unless the source of overwhelm can be removed or overcome, I will have a meltdown. This involves a cascading failure of my ability to control my eye contact, movement, volume and decision-making until I am crying, covering my ears and shouting. Most people are sympathetic in theory, but in practice, losing control of your emotions and being loud and upset as an adult are stigmatised as ethical failures. It is an exhausting experience for me, and the shame and fatigue can last for days.

I was only diagnosed as autistic four years ago. Since then, I’ve also been put on the waiting list for an ADHD assessment. Different studies put the number of autistic people who also meet the criteria for an ADHD diagnosis at 50%-70%. I spent three years writing a whole book investigating every aspect of anxiety I could think of and hunting for treatments that might help me, and at no point during the process did it occur to me that I might be autistic. I didn’t understand that it was possible to be autistic and not know – to me, the idea I could have gone four decades without realising made about as much sense as claiming you had a late-diagnosed gunshot wound.

Of course, autism is not a wound – many autistic people argue it’s not a disorder. But it’s not a superpower, either. Most of us experience it as disabling in many important ways, whether we locate the causes for those challenges in our brains, our learned beliefs and behaviours or our society.

Exactly what autism is and where its boundaries lie is still very much an open question. It is the most broadly-defined and heterogenous phenotype in psychiatry, a squiggle that might be a cat, a plant or a monster. Some autistic people are nonspeaking. Some, like me, have sufficient oral fluency that we can give lectures or perform standup or present TV shows.

But just because a mouth can produce words, doesn’t mean those words are understood. The ICD-11 says that autism is ‘characterised by persistent deficits in the ability to initiate and to sustain reciprocal social interaction and social communication’. (in my diagnostic report, the speech and language specialist summarised our talk as ‘sometimes comfortable’ but ‘one-sided, with Tim tending to talk at the assessor rather than with her’) The back-and-forth of conversation, the ability to recognise and employ what the linguist H. P. Grice called ‘conversational implicature’, to ‘read the air’ as they say in Japan, is harder – sometimes impossible – for autistic people, according to standard medical wisdom.

Some of us can speak, but we can’t dance.

–

The Gang is a co-operative game where you and your associates are attempting a bank vault heist in the tradition of Ocean’s Eleven. To hit paydirt, you’ll have to work in harmony, reading one another like members of a freestyle jazz quartet, without saying a word.

In practice, this means playing a round of Texas Hold Em poker in silence, and, once all five cards are out, accurately predicting the rank order of everyone’s hand. Poker chips marked with stars from one up to the number of players sit in the centre of the table, and your only communication comes in the form of taking or rejecting one of those chips. The number of stars on your poker chip represents where you think your hand ranks amongst the group.

You do this when you receive your pocket cards, after the flop and the turn, each time with the benefit of incrementally more information. When the final river card comes out, the chip you settle on represents your actual guess.

It sounds impossible, having six people wordlessly, correctly predict where each of their hands sits, purely through the medium of numbered chips. But you quickly cotton onto little stories by what chips someone grabs when. If the player to your left has snatched the one-star chip three times in a row – indicating they think they have the worst hand – then grabs the six-star chip when a seven appears on the river, you can infer they probably just made a straight. If someone took the highest chip after the deal, only to gradually downgrade their chances on subsequent rounds, maybe they have a pocket pair.

The speed with which someone takes a chip reveals confidence or doubt. Even a vexed dispute, where players keep snatching the same chip off each other, almost always means their hands are pretty close, maybe even of identical value. When all the back-and-forth, the agonising and the furrowed brows are over, it’s genuinely electrifying to see players reveal their hands, from lowest to highest, and realise that, against all odds, you got it right. It feels like magic.

The Gang was everywhere at UK Games Expo, with good reason. It takes the emergent feel of Spiel des Jahres-winning card game The Mind, that weird hivemind flow state where you’re communicating via wordless intuition, and gives it more of an arc, a build up and a grand reveal.

But it relies on everyone round the table having a fairly intuitive understanding of poker hands and their relative rarity. We played with an old friend of mine who, at the start of the game, admitted he didn’t know poker very well. The various hands possible and their rank order is laid out on a handy player aid, but as we soon discovered, actually the game asks for far more than that. How much better than 3-of-a-kind is a Flush? According to the chart, a Flush is bang in the middle of the rankings. But if you’ve played Texas Hold Em for any time at all, you’ll know it’s often a winning hand. A Royal Flush, Straight Flush and 4-of-a-kind are rare enough that you’ll often not see one all evening.

When I sat down to play The Gang, I brought this whole ambient knowledge of poker hands and relative probabilities to the table I’ve spent decades absorbing, from poker dice back when I was 11 to Texas Hold Em at university to watching tournaments online that bring up instant percentages and graphics displaying the spread of possible winning hands. To me, the cognitive labour The Gang asks for was simple, intuitive and obvious – so obvious, I forgot it was there. To my friend, it was much, much harder, to the extent that the smooth, spooky interchange of information I’d experienced in other games just wasn’t possible. He didn’t know what a three-star chip was telling him. He couldn’t read the air.

–

The Fantasy novelist Mike Shel – who also has decades of experience as a therapist specialising in anxiety – once told me that all the work you do in therapy is for naught, until you feel understood. Feeling understood, feeling that some important part of you has been seen and comprehended by another human being, is a deeply grounding, healing experience.

One of the big processes people talk about post-diagnosis for autism and ADHD is unmasking. Neurodivergent people often intuit very early on that their natural way of being is unwelcome, their needs are viewed as silly or selfish, their interests are shameful, their tone of voice, the way they move, how they dress, even the frequency with which they make eye contact are wrong, and like Cinderella’s stepsister hacking off her toes to fit her foot in the glass slipper, they mutilate and contort themselves rather than face a lifetime of rejection, bullying and criticism.

Still, it’s a lot of unseen effort. And it’s lonely! Damn, is it lonely. Sometimes you feel accepted, when you do the character, perform the elaborate dance you’ve learned from others, and people seem satisfied. But then that glow of passing fades, and you’re left knowing that it wasn’t really you they liked at all, it was the corporate, customer-facing you, delivering the spiel, nodding and grinning, cramming every scrap of personal preference or self-expression down into a locked box because being yourself would be unprofessional. Whenever you’re with people, it’s like you’re running a stall at a trade show. You have a product to sell. And that product is Normal Tim™.

Since my diagnosis, I’ve gradually become more open and vocal about being autistic. But a lifetime of shame and feeling misunderstood and having to get by with no help have all had an impact. Research shows considerably worse mental health outcomes for late diagnosed autistic people than those who get a diagnosis and sufficient support in childhood. I am frequently too ill to work or look after my children. As a self-employed writer, I get no sick pay or paid holidays. My daughters are eight and eighteen months, and they need me.

It’s been tough, accepting that I actually am autistic, because autism is not a mental illness, it’s a permanent, inherent difference. I can’t ever be cured. I am in awe of the autistic and neurodivergent people I have met who seem at peace with their identity, who feel happy and proud and who seem to have found ways to manage it that make their lives liveable. I am not there, yet. Often, I don’t honestly believe that it is possible. But I’d like to get there.

It’s not easy, spending your life playing a game whose rules you’ve never quite grasped.

–

When I first went to UK Games Expo, back in 2021, I didn’t know anyone. It was my first convention, and I spent a lot of time sat at tables alone, shuffling cards.

This year, from the second I arrived I kept running into friendly faces. People messaged me and asked if I wanted to meet for a game. The whole three-and-a-half days were a bricolage of faces old and new, being generous and welcoming, sitting with me round the table to play and chat and share our mutual enthusiasm for this incredible storied human artform. From fellow writers and tabletop media people whose amazing work guides and inspires me to dear friends I only ever see at boardgame conventions, game designers, artists and random strangers who I had the good fortune to find myself seated with during a demo, every interaction was charged with joy and kindness and humanity. I felt accepted. I felt understood.

I am fascinated by Joraku designer Iori Tsukinami’s new trick-taker Lunar Trick, where suits and trumps change each round. It has a beautiful cloth board depicting the phases of the moon, and wooden moon segments that represent your points.

Orapa Mine is somehow both conventional and deeply weird – a game about performing seismic surveys for gemstones by shooting beams into the ground and recording how they’re refracted. Essentially, it’s battleships, except you’re searching for coloured shapes hidden on an opponent’s grid by picking a square round the edge, into which you fire an imaginary beam. Your opponent tells you where on the grid the beam emerges, and what colour it is when it does; striking a blue shape, for example, will turn the beam blue – striking a blue then a red will turn it purple, and so on.

It’s a quirky little thing that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a copy of Games & Puzzles in the 1970s, so I sat down for my demo with some trepidation, but gosh darn it. Once you get started, it’s rather compelling. It’s not quite like anything else – a lovely little two player puzzle that really puts your deductive skills through their paces.

For The Emperor is a tiny box Schotten Totten esque game where you and one other player duke it out for control of several territories. Two identical sets of nine cards apiece, each with a unique ability, makes for a tight, balanced, quick skirmish that fits in a pocket. I love games with that push-pull dynamic – Hanamikoji: Geisha’s Road is my favourite example – where a thrust in one spot might leave you vulnerable somewhere else. It’s a balancing act – a swordfight with added plate-spinning.

Esperisation aka Gibberers is another communication game, this one about slowly reconstructing an ancient language. You make up nonsense words for various key basic words, then use your new limited vocabulary to try to guide the other players towards unlocking gradually more complex ones. So, for example, if your new word was ‘makka’, and the definition you were trying to convey was ‘ice’, you might look at your shared vocabulary list and find ‘unvee’ – meaning ‘not’ – and ‘blay’ – meaning ‘hot’ – and say ‘Unvee blay! Unvee blay!’ maybe adding appropriate expressions. Eventually the words get more abstract until you’re babbling in a language of your own invention trying to describe ‘crypto-currency’. It’s funny and engaging and oddly moving, as you cobble together this temporary micro-language that, over a relatively short period, becomes somewhat comprehensible to you and two or three other people only.

In the years since I first started wearing the sunflower lanyard, increasing numbers of people seem aware that it signifies an invisible disability. At one demo table, a man in a football shirt paused before we started and asked if my disability meant there was anything extra I’d need to be comfortable. An interpreter took a moment before we started an interview to ask what my flavour of neurospicy was and to check if I had any extra accessibility needs. A fellow lanyard wearer understood I was autistic within about sixty seconds of meeting, and told me it was okay to drop the mask while the neurotypicals weren’t listening.

Sometimes I meet autistic people and it’s like being part of a secret society. We’re not all one big village but occasionally, after a flash of mutual recognition, there’s a rapid and easy bidirectional flow of information. Damian Milton proposed something called the Double Empathy Problem, which posits that it’s not so much that autistic people are intrinsically impaired at socialising, we just start in a different place to neurotypical people, with different habitual thinking styles and different experiences as a result. Neurotypical people are actually just as bad at reading our emotions, making accurate inferences based on what we say, and maintaining conversation with us as we supposedly are with them – it’s just that they, being the majority, get to say that their way’s right and ours is wrong.

Several studies, as well as lived experiences as reported by autistic people, suggest we’re often really good at connecting with, understanding and socialising with other autistic people. It’s just that neurotypical people are the dominant culture, they set the norms – without realising – and it bleeds into everything, stories, music, language, such that we perpetually feel like lost tourists, frantically trying to guess what the local house rules for poker are.

One function of special interests then – or ‘restricted interests’, as the ICD and DSM choose to pathologise them – is to cobble together a home culture, a floating country of reclaimed land built from fandom or history or nature or science, where we do know the norms, where our preference for deep engagement isn’t scorned as weird, and where the formerly uncertain and baffling world feels briefly knowable. Loving boardgames and wanting to play them all the time marks me out as odd, immature, dorky and boring in the big wide world. At a boardgame convention, it is utterly unremarkable. Socially, at UKGE, it is a boon. The average neurotypical person without my interest in boardgames would feel bewildered and lost. I glide through it like a gorgeous debutante at their coming-out ball. I thrive.

People were gracious and thoughtful, and each of those moments where someone saw me and checked in, and let me know people with minds like mine were welcome too, meant the absolute world. Everyone who made the time for a game with me – even if only a five-minute one before the halls opened for the day – made my weekend.

Please understand, I would have struggled to just meet them in a café for a chat. It’s not that I don’t like people – I do – it’s just that everyday interactions feel like trying to walk barefoot across a pitch-black room strewn with Lego. The real me is just bursting to geek out about stuff, and to sit and listen while other people geek out about the stuff that makes their heads fizz. In the normal world I’m starved of that. At the gaming table, I can feast.

Games have been bringing us together for millennia – before every major global religion, before we had a written alphabet. They are an elemental technology of connection, of communicating something that the fickle and transitory language of words struggles to capture.

I love games, and I love people. The weekend just gone felt deeply affirming, and I’m going to try to carry some of its lessons forward, in the hope of extending that love, someday, to myself.

–

If you liked this piece, you might like my book about the history and culture of tabletop games, The Game Changers. Click here to pick up a copy.

If you’re in the US, it’s called Across The Board, and you can order a copy here.

Out of Sorts from Always Awake Games.

The Gang from Kosmos.

Lunar Trick from Synka Games.

Gibberers from Hobby Japan.

Orapa Mine from Playte.

For The Emperor from Allplay.