For years, board gaming was a huge blind spot for me. I hated having to play them as a child, although obviously the kind of board games they give to American kids are not exactly what fans of board games play these days. I kind of avoided getting involved with them — thought it was all sorting units, moving tanks, reorganising economies. I don’t like conventions of war when I’m staring down the barrel of a gun, I like them even less when I am looming over some huge map and counting tiny plastic things. I’m indelicate.

Plus, I have dyscalculia, which means that I might sometimes mentally subtract three from five and come up with three, which is a problem if cards are facing off. There are all kinds of minute calculations involved that my brain tends to tangle. I make with the words, not the numbers, really!

But over the past several month, I’ve luckily learned there are all kinds of analog games, some involving just handfuls of picture cards and some social strategy, and I’ve gotten way into a few of ‘em. Totally happy to play a war game if the war is about the Iron Throne, or if I get to be a spy and lie to everyone.  I’m a nightmare to play with.

I’m a little disappointed in myself that it took me so long to engage with this arm of the great world of gaming. Especially since it’s so timely; the sterile, choreographed anonymity of online multiplayer, or the insistent, notification-dependent mechanics of asynchronous social gaming have started to feel sterile, alienating. I love playing games on the iPad whenever I get my hands on one because of how well it imitates the intimacy and physicality of touching things.

I think physicality and genuine social intimacy have an important role to play in interactive entertainment. Earlier this week I did an interview with Margaret Robertson of Hide&Seek to talk about her company’s Tiny Games project, which is looking at how accessible digital tools — in this case, an app — can facilitate, rather than replace in-person folk play. Live event experiences are really onto something, but as with Sportsfriends‘ journey to the living room, we can do more as far as making that more accessible, less time and space-dependent and less in need of setup.

Anyway, if you’re into analog games, too, my sometimes-writing buddy Quinns and his friend Paul have just launched a shiny new edition of their board game-focused  Shut Up & Sit Down. I think they mainly want to put all their friends in videos, or something. No, it’s good. It makes me excited (I even got to talk about a “board game for swingers” with Quinns a while back. It was a thing).