Eric Thurm: Avidly Reads Board Games

Eric Thurm joins us to discuss his new book, Avidly Reads Board Games. Historic board games including, Busted!, a game from the 1970s about trying to start a career dealing weed, Class Struggle, the world’s first socialist board game, and The Grizzled, a modern cooperative game about being in the trenches in World War I, will be available to play.

Avidly―the online magazine founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood & Sarah Mesle and supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)―specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to the intersection of expertise and passion.  Now, Blackwood & Mesle are partnering with NYU Press to launch Avidly Reads, an exciting new series of books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience.

In Board Games, writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships―from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

Eric Thurm is a writer whose work has appeared in, among other publications, Esquire, WIRED, Real Life, and The New York Times.