When most people think of games played around a table, they probably think of the staples of childhood: Scrabble, Ludo, Monopoly.  Those, according to a scrape of Google data done by a sharp-eyed PR firm, are among the world’s top searches for boardgames online.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Monopoly as much as the next student of rentier capitalism, and its lessons are quite relevant to the era of permanent quantitative easing, asset-price inflation and a political class that refuses to address the resultant undercurrent of injustice and anger.

The others are fun too; Ludo, in particular, is delightfully spiteful: the German incarnation — mensch ärgere dich nicht (“Don’t get angry”) is a rather more useful name than the English. Scrabble is OK, but tends to encourage trade in the false coin of sesquipedalianism. Longer words aren’t a sign of cleverness, just proof that you don’t know how to communicate clearly. Short words are good. And can score higher.

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Overall though, I’m afraid I can’t get excited about games where the dice have just six sides and you can actually see what’s happening on the table in front of you. Boardgames are OK, but they are not the game.

For the benefit of civilians, the game is Dungeons and Dragons, and it taught me everything I know about politics, government and journalism. Well, maybe not quite everything, but quite a lot. Enough to sustain a 20-year career in and around Westminster, anyway.

D&D — or AD&D, if you, prefer the Advanced version — is not a boardgame, in that there is no board. There isn’t really anything, in fact, beyond a shared story gradually told between friends over hours, days and months. And dice. Lots of dice, including some quite odd-looking ones.

The lack of physical stuff is arguably the most important, and interesting, thing about D&D and other pure role-playing games. All you have is the story, generally about a quest or adventure undertaken by the characters you imagine yourself to be in a world that exists only in the imagination. There are no screens, no sound effects. There aren’t even any little toy soldiers, painted or otherwise.

Those little toy soldiers are, these days, a big deal. Most of them are made by Games Workshop, a little British business now worth £3 billion and which first brought D&D to the UK. But don’t mistake Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K minifigure wargaming for something like AD&D. No matter what wannabes such as Tom Chivers might tell you, Wargamers aren’t true nerds, because they still cling to something physical in the real world, and often show some degree of physical aptitude by painting their figures quite nicely.

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Real geeks have no truck with that sort of physical reality, and rubbish painting skills too. All we have is stories, stories that go on for months or even years.

What do you need to sustain interest in that shared narrative for long periods of time? Time, obviously, and often an absence of better alternatives. All those jokes in the Big Bang Theory and elsewhere about socially awkward males playing Dungeons and Dragons because they can’t talk to girls? All utterly accurate, at least in my late-1980s experience.

But more than that, to happily immerse yourself in a prolonged exercise in shared storytelling, you need language, a love of and respect for language and its power. You must understand how to construct a world solely through words, to use language to persuade other people to imagine and inhabit that world, accepting its rules, systems and ways.

Politics usually comes down to words too. Elections are generally won by the people who can tell the best story about the world — or about a world, one that does not yet exist. I wouldn’t want to take this too far, but it’s not hard to look at Brexit and see a national adventure into the unknown in search of undiscovered treasure, led by people who fancy their chances of rolling a 20-sided dice and getting the 20 they need to bring down a dragon in flight.  You may not be surprised to learn that one Michael Gove is a former D&D player.

Nor is he alone at Westminster in that. Some people, perhaps swayed by bad TV and films, sometimes have the idea that politics is dominated by heroic over-achievers, the sort of men and women who in school days were captain of a sports team, prefects, handsome, popular and all the rest of it. And while there are a few such paragons around SW1, they’re quite rare, largely  because the cool, pretty kids often grow up to live happy and fulfilled lives and have no need of the validation that politics can offer.

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We nerds, however, know that Westminster is our place, the home of awkward, clever kids with something to prove, or just a need to put to use the skills we learned rolling funny dice and telling stories about heroes and monsters.

And be in no doubt, those skills are useful and relevant to many aspects of government and politics. The funny dice matter: once you understand the chances of repeatedly rolling 16 or higher to hit an armoured storm giant with your longsword, then a 7 or 8 on an eight-sided dice to do the thing real damage, then you find probability and statistics familiar, if not simple. I suspect that a fair few of the “superforecasters” venerated by a certain Dominic Cummings got their start playing the game.

Then there’s rules. An imagined world needs rules, lots of them. That may seem strange for an exercise in fantasy, but as with good fantasy and sci-fi writing, the fantasy of an RPG must have an internally consistent logic. If someone can just say “I transform into a helicopter and fly away”, there really is no point. So AD&D teaches players to know and understand — and usually follow — rules, because without those rules, the game makes no sense.

This, I and others have found, helps you understand political life both in terms of system and culture. Honestly, if you can absorb rules on character classes, combat, stealth, advancement through acquiring treasure and the process for making a magical axe, the Westminster processes that others find arcane (second reading, committee stage, report, third reading….) are perfectly straightforward.

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Likewise the seemingly strange, unwritten rules of political life and death, the words you cannot say and the words you must say to survive. The idea that a “gaffe” based on a few choice phrases can have disastrous career consequences makes perfect sense if you’ve lived in an imagined world where saying the wrong thing to an 18th-level lich lord brings a rain of fire down on your head.

Westminster’s D&D community has been quiet for many years, not unreasonably ashamed of youthful misadventures with polyhedral dice and pretend paladins. But I am quietly confident that change is coming. The year of the boardgame and the relentless rise of Games Workshop are all part of a trend that will one day allow us to venture out of the dungeons and into the light. The geek shall inherit the earth.

The shop was the Games Workshop on Tottenham Court Road; the habit was painting plastic spacemen. As a grown man of 36, I was painting little sci-fi figures again, just as I had been when I was 12. Hello everyone; my name is Tom, and I’m a Warhammer addict. 

This means I like to spend hours at a time painting tiny, intricately detailed miniatures with some ludicrous name like Mortarion, Daemon Primarch of the Death Guard, or Belial, Grand Master of the Deathwing, and it is as though I am cut off from the cares of the world. I just care about the paint running off the brush, and the angle of the light. I won’t check my phone, or think about work, or worry about my kids or the coronavirus or Brexit. It’s an addiction, one my wife tolerates but can never understand, but a healthy one. It gives me access to a sort of Zen stillness and flow; I have discovered a genuine skill of which I am fiercely (if abashedly) proud.

I can trace the exact course of my resurgent problem. It was an indirect route, via another old nerdy habit of mine; building model aeroplanes. We took the kids to the RAF Museum in Hendon in early 2017. We wandered around looking at the Vulcan bomber and the Short Sunderland and so on; I mildly disturbed my wife with my ability to name almost every aeroplane on sight (although I got the Curtis P-40 Kittyhawk mixed up with the Hawker Typhoon. I’m still embarrassed about it). The eldest kid, three at the time, got upset about not being allowed to sit in cockpits, but I was enthralled.

On the way out via the gift shop, as a bit of nostalgia, I bought an Airfix kit with glue and a few basic paints and paintbrushes. My wife went out one evening and I started sticking it together. It turned out to be bloody difficult. I’d forgotten all the stuff you need; for instance, an anglepoise lamp. I ended up sitting at my kitchen table wearing a mountaineering head-torch and I looked genuinely insane. But it turned out to be a gateway drug. 

For those of you following this micro-saga, my 1st airfix kit in 25yrs is complete & I feel PRETTY GOOD ABOUT IT. Only buggered up one decal pic.twitter.com/ib0lpZQ0J4

— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) February 12, 2017

A few months later, in a local toy shop, buying a Brio locomotive for my son, I found a Warhammer 40K starter kit; three little one-inch-high soldiers and, again, the necessary paints and brushes. After that things quickly got out of hand. Second-hand miniatures off eBay kept turning up in the post; I’d rush to the door to intercept them so I didn’t have to explain why I’d bought something called an “Interrogator-Chaplain in Terminator armour” or a “Lord of Contagion”.

Have I lost you, yet? Perhaps I ought to jump back a bit in time here. In 1975, three young men, John Peake, Ian Livingstone, and Steve Jackson, started a business called Games Workshop. Its initial success was as the first European distributor of Dungeons & Dragons, but in 1983, they created their own game, Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Like D&D, it involved elves and goblins and so on and rolling dice to see how much damage you did. But where D&D involved little groups of warriors completing quests, Warhammer gave you whole armies; you and an opponent would line your miniatures up and do battle, taking turns to fire your catapults or charge your cavalry.

It was all very cod-Tolkien – noble elves and stalwart dwarves, savage orcs and wise mages – but with a difference in tone: the Warhammer world was doomed. The elves, dwarves and the human Empire fought to hold back the forces of destruction, as in Tolkien; but unlike the broadly hopeful if elegiac tales of Middle-Earth, in Warhammer, the bad guys were not going to be stopped.

Then, in 1987, came Warhammer 40,000. It was, essentially, the Fantasy Battle ported into a science-fiction setting: “Eldar” instead of elves, “orks” instead of orcs. And it took the bleakness and turned it up to 11. This was, remember, the 1980s, the time of Judge Dredd and other darkly satirical sci-fi; but this really went all-out. If you’ve ever heard sci-fi described as “grimdark”, that is a direct reference to Warhammer 40K, and its tagline: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” 

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I don’t think I can do justice to the backstory here, but, in essence, the galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is a fascistic, backwards, hate-filled hive of xenophobia, obsessed with racial purity and fearful of innovation. Genetically engineered super-warriors slaughter millions in the name of the God-Emperor; a brutal Inquisition tortures anyone suspected of heresy; ordinary people live brief, grim lives as slave workers in violent megacities, or conscripted as cannon-fodder for the Imperium’s endless wars. The regime is fairly accurately described as “Catholic Space Nazis”. 

And, for the avoidance of doubt, those are the good guys. And, again, they’re losing. 

Obviously, I love it. 

Like Fantasy Battle, 40K involves moving little miniatures around on a scenery-covered tabletop. You might be playing as Space Marines (the aforementioned super-soldiers) against an opponent playing Orks; you might have guns with a 24” range, say, and when it’s your turn you roll dice to see if they hit their enemies, and then again to see if they hurt them or if it bounces off their armour. Or they charge into combat and try to hit each other with hilariously over-the-top weapons like chainsaw swords or massive electrified hammers. You can play any mission or scenario you like, from “the winner is whoever kills all the other dudes first” to complex capture-the-flag type situations.

A friend who plays more tabletop games than I do tells me that — in terms of the mechanics — as tabletop games go, it’s middling. It’s kind of fiddly; you have to roll a lot of dice to find out if anything happens and the rules can be confusing. Others, such as the Star Wars X-Wing tabletop game, are much more streamlined.

But the point of the Warhammer games is that they’re not just games. The point is that they’re a hobby. The miniatures come unpainted and unassembled; you have to paint them yourself, and some people do it with astonishing skill. If you want to play, certainly at any Games Workshop store but at most organised events too, you need to have painted them – it’s fine to paint them badly, but grey plastic is frowned upon. The game is only one part of a whole lifestyle; there’s a huge amount of fiction, there are video games of varying quality, beautifully made fan-art, painting competitions, and massive festivals, although the latter, obviously, are getting cancelled.

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And the universe is a mad grand-guignol festival of bloody excess, all towers of skulls and shrieking daemons and psychic superheroes; vast spaceships fighting Patrick O’Brian-style broadside-battles in space or gigantic war-robots with gatling guns the size of skyscrapers. But it’s also a rich and detailed backdrop, perfect for telling stories against. Your little characters in their little battle fit into it neatly: you can have your religious-fanatic Sisters of Battle holding an Imperial shrine against the plague-spreading heretics of the Death Guard, or your slavering xenomorph-like tyranid aliens overrunning a last stand of terrified Imperial Guard, bayonets fixed to their cheap, inadequate rifles, their commissar threatening to execute any man who runs.

Games Workshop has had its ups and downs over the last 40 years. It expanded hugely in its first two decades, but the internet, rival games like Magic: The Gathering, and its own bad behaviour – secrecy, overzealous defence of its copyrights, refusal to listen to its fans – led to a collapse in profits in the first years of the 21st century. But the company has changed. It ended Fantasy Battle and released a follow-up, Age of Sigmar, which had some teething troubles but is now much loved; its eighth edition of 40K streamlined the game significantly; and it opened a community website specifically to let fans share ideas and grievances.

Its stores are one of the few remaining high-street successes, because they don’t really exist to sell miniatures but to provide hubs for local gaming communities. If you’d bought a grand’s worth of shares in the company in 2014, they’d have been worth £14,000 in February. (The coronavirus, inevitably, has hit it, but no worse than the rest of the stock market.)

I don’t play much; only half a dozen times or so since I started again, and one of those was against my sister, who took pity on me. It’s the painting that I enjoy. I think it fills a similar space, psychologically, to knitting, or jogging, or gardening: it requires the absolute attention of one part of your mind, while letting the rest of it wander. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts, and focus. Hours can go by. It soothes the soul; problems that seem insurmountable when you start appear, by the time you switch off the anglepoise and put away the brushes, not solved, but somehow solvable. Best of all, I’ve got pretty good.

Just tweeting this so I can link to it! pic.twitter.com/Kjvsku3reI

— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) March 16, 2020

It’s not perfect, as a hobby. It’s bloody expensive, for a start (£90!?); and as it’s got bigger, it’s become harder for Games Workshop to maintain the sly, satirical nature; it’s a gigantic business now, and playing it straight sells more. But traces of the old black comedy remain, especially in the gurgling, foetid troops of the plague-god Nurgle, and the cheerfully malevolent orks with their junkyard tanks and comically oversize guns. Besides, spending £50 on some minis that take you 20 hours to paint is probably good value for money, and they’re of incredible quality, all made in Nottingham where the business has its base; it’s a huge, global British success story.

And the best thing of all is its community. It’s so wholesome – hilariously so, given the spectacularly un-wholesome subject matter. The tendency of online communities (from Star Wars to Young Adult fiction to, weirdly, knitting) to turn toxic has been well-documented; gatekeeping and purity spirals. But, at least in the Reddit forums I spend time on, the Warhammer community is gentle and kind. There’s something deeply heartwarming about someone writing in the comments underneath a picture of Abbadon the Despoiler, Chaos Lord of the Black Legion, saying “I love how you’ve got the skulls looking so clean and realistic! Care to share your recipe?” When newbies tentatively show off their first models — blotchy thick paint, mould-lines still visible — experienced painters share helpful tips (“two thin coats!”) and make supportive noises. It’s a male-dominated hobby, predictably, but very welcoming to the many women who do play and paint. 

I don’t know what it is about it that keeps it so friendly. One possibility is the absolute ban on any political discussion: I once shared what seemed to me an interesting post about why the universe was more engaging than the Star Wars one, and was quickly but kindly told to take it down because it included some very minor hypotheses about the political implications. The complete absence of any discussion of Trump, Brexit, or any other hot-button issue might be why everything seems so civil. Or perhaps it’s just that everyone gets their aggression out by shooting lascannons at the enemy’s Keeper of Secrets so they don’t need to scream at each other online, I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, though, I am glad to have it in my life. Community and social contact is going to be at a premium for the next few months; having a bunch of like-minded nerds online telling each other that they’re doing nice work seems like a good start, even if we’re not supposed to meet up to play it. Besides, self-isolation comes easily when you’ve got miniatures to paint. Perhaps my shameful pile of grey plastic will finally start to shrink.