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 North American Scrabble Players’ Association has called for 238 “slurs” to be banned from the game on the grounds of their offensiveness — including not only the obvious racial epithets but terms such as “wrinklies” (offensive to old people), “papist” (Catholics) and “Jesuit” (apparently offensive to followers of St Ignatius of Loyola, though this seems to me highly questionable). “When we play a slur,” says John Chew, the association’s Chief Executive Officer, “we are declaring that our desire to score points in a word game is of more value to us than the slur’s broader function as a way to oppress a group of people.”

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There’s no certainty yet that this daft idea is going to catch hold. The international standard of tournament play remains Collins’s Official Scrabble Words (which is what we used to call SOWPODS), and Collins haven’t indicated that they’ll start expunging words from that. (There already exists a bowdlerised version, the Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary, which up till now was reserved for children.)

But it’s not a sensible direction of travel. Ebi Sosseh, described in a news report I read as “a BAME player from Bournemouth”, was quoted as calling the move a “trivial gesture”. I’m with him. I’m not much for the N-word in Scrabble — not out of political correctness but because who ever has two Gs at once? And besides, it’s low-scoring and hard to play. But “wop” and “wog” are both pretty tasty in a tight corner (by which I mean the corner containing a triple-word tile) and Scrabble players would be the poorer without them.

More to the point, the meanings of the words used has never had the faintest bearing on a game of Scrabble. TI, KA, KI, TE, UT, MI, XU, NA, OE. Do you know what any of those words mean? I don’t — and I have played all of them many thousands of times in Scrabble games over the years. I have a dim sense that a GI is some bit of judo paraphernalia, but I may be quite wrong and it has never even crossed my mind to check.

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Indeed, it’s perhaps not so much the fact that I don’t know what those words mean that matters, as the fact that when I’m playing Scrabble the meanings of the words I do know barely impinge. Looking over the list of allowable two-letter words, it requires a conscious effort to recall that “EH” is an expression of surprised curiosity. When you’re playing, it’s just one of a handful of two-letter words that you know will often let you get an H on a triple-letter going in two directions at once — which is a creditable 24 points right out of the gate. Scrabble players are more familiar with QI than any new age mystic, and get through more ZA than a teenage mutant ninja turtle.

The serious Scrabble player does not take the slightest interest in the meaning of the words he or she plays. It’s closer to a mathematical exercise than it is to a lexicographical one. The English language and its morphology (all those plurals and comparatives and conjugations) just provides a convenient corpus on which to perform the game’s operations. The question of meaning — another admittedly more useful thing that language does — is neither here nor there. The insight by linguists that language is a “discrete combinatorial system” — an essentially mathematical insight — is what makes this possible.

But here, perhaps, I’m getting a bit too abstract. It’s worth remembering how little eliminating a word from acceptable vocabulary serves in any case to limit the availability of the thought or the sentiment it expresses. When the Spastics Society renamed itself Scope — in part in consideration that the word “spastic” had become a 1980s playground insult — children simply started calling each other “scopers”. During the Falklands War, British paratroopers were told to stop calling the Falkland Islanders “Bennies” (after the dimwitted, beanie-wearing character from the TV soap Crossroads). It’s said that a commanding officer later overheard one of the men calling a local a “still” and asked why. “It’s because they’re still Bennies,” came the answer.

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All words exist and have meaning in a context — and that applies to their offensiveness as well. Just as an image of a virus in a textbook, a virus on a microscope slide and a virus propagating in the human body are rather different propositions, so too are a word played in Scrabble, a word in a dictionary and a word hurled across the police lines at a protest march. The charge of offence does not inhere in the word itself, in an isolated phoneme or in a combination of letters. If we thought it did, among other things, we would have to rename Scunthorpe.

Take “jew”: quite inoffensive as a noun, but viciously derogatory as a verb. If a Scrabble player places it on the board, do they need to be cross-questioned as to what part of speech they had in mind and penalised accordingly? If they put down “scoper”, should it first be established whether the word as they played it meant “one who scopes” or “person with cerebral palsy (derog)”? Or “benny”, come to that: slang for a benzedrine tablet or slur against the genetic stock of the Falkland Islands? Is “slope” an incline or a racial insult? Is “faggot” a Lancashire lunch or a homophobic insult? Is “tranny” a radio? Making these issues the province of the Scrabble authorities is to make what philosophers call a category error.

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And there’s a wider point here, too, to do with the tendency of a certain strand in progressive thought to reach for the low-hanging fruit, for the showy symbolic victory rather than the systemic fix. I’m often reminded of Naomi Klein’s wise and rueful line of self-reproach in her first book No Logo — where she described how her generation (during the first wave of what was then called ”political correctness”) poured its political energies into arguments about language and signification.

They missed, she said, the way in which, while they were doing that, globalisation was marching on unopposed. The material basis of human thriving — workers’ rights, corporate accountability, the wages and safety of the poorest people on earth — was changing while well-meaning college kids argued over whether it was better to say “black person” or “person of colour”.

To think that words themselves have power extracted from their context — and to evince a superstitious fear of that power — is to return to a primitive form of magical thinking. It’s a form of magical thinking that is well represented everywhere from the Kabbalah to the works of Aleister Crowley and the 1,001 Nights — but it’s not really for grown-ups in the secular and rational world to which progressives are supposed to aspire.

It is only in the most extreme circumstances that people, stripped bare of the veneer of civilisation, show their true natures. A crisis like the present one brings out the best, and the worst of the humanity. We are tested in the fire. In this case, not the purifying fire of war but the ouchy burny fire of staying at home with our spouses and children for ages and having to play boardgames because we feel guilty about too much screen time. And real characters emerge, thus, according to our favoured boardgames.

Risk

Risk is great fun. You get to try to take over the world. You build armies, squash your enemies, and eventually dominion is yours. There’s a bit of strategy in it, a lot of aggression, and more than just a soupçon of chance: if a few dice rolls go against you, your magnificent army is suddenly a lot less magnificent and, oh crap, there goes Russia. It’s a game, really, for people who want to have kind of a lazy and consequence-free shot at taking over the world, have a bash and hope for the best. Steve Bannon, say, or the Prime Minister.

Diplomacy

Another world domination game, Diplomacy is much subtler and better than Risk. With Diplomacy you can’t just hole up in South East Asia and build an impregnable defensive army in some Pacific island bottleneck. And there is no element of chance. Every territory on the board can house only one military unit – so the game’s essence is in strategic horse-trading with other players in secret conferences in, for instance, the spare bedroom. Then, of course, comes the opening of the sealed orders in which it emerges that everybody has betrayed absolutely everybody else. Henry Kissinger is very good at this game. Michael Gove thinks he’s good at it but isn’t. Gavin Williamson knows he is hopeless, but wants to play with the bigger boys anyway. 

Scrabble

Nobody who seriously plays Scrabble nourishes the illusion that it’s a game for people with good vocabularies and imaginative ideas for unusual words: rather, it favours vicious sadists and pedants who have memorised a complete list of the allowable two and three-letter words (most of which look like a fat-thumb error on a QWERTY keyboard) and who are determined to deploy them in the most pinched and obstructive way possible. You’re thinking: “Wouldn’t it be lovely to make ‘BANANA’ with my two blanks!” They’re thinking: “Good. If I play QG sideways that will spoil the triple-word for everyone else.” I have a hunch Priti Patel plays a mean game of Scrabble, pun intended.

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Cluedo

It’s a game about logic, really, isn’t it? I mean, what are you doing just drifting from room to room making random guesses? You idiot! Now you’ve got the player to your left showing you Professor Plum again: a totally wasted suggestion! Look, I know it looks like a bit of fun to you but actually I think you’ll find there are any number of optimal strategy guides available in the rationalist blogosphere. Oh — you what? Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room? Dear me. Well let’s have a look. You fluky BASTARD: I know from my notes that it was a 17-2 chance against you guessing correctly and now you’ve won — which is sad, actually. A senior government source is very good at this game but still always loses.

Monopoly

The attractions of this game to the egotistical, plutocratically minded and unimaginative are obvious enough just from the name. It’s all about money — and about winning by getting all of it. It is also notable for three other features of its gameplay. Once you’ve established a commanding lead, it gets easier and easier, just like real capitalism. Cheats almost always prosper, and people who win at Monopoly almost always cheat, just like real capitalism. And Mayfair is expensive and crap, just like real capitalism. This is the ideal game for the Sir Philip Green in your life.

Trivial Pursuit

This game is a particularly interesting psychological test, not because it attracts pub quiz bores (though it does), but because of the design of the game itself. Ignore the idiotic questions about the litreage of Lake Titicaca or Ginger Spice’s bra: the mechanism is irrelevant. The point is that it is a very long game. It lasts at least twice as long as it takes for everyone around the table to be bored to tears as they make a 65th attempt at getting that orange piece of pie. The team in the lead doesn’t want to stop, though, because they think they’re going to win; and the losing teams can’t give up for fear of looking ungracious. Mind-forg’d manacles, right there: chaining you to the table. It’s the game for god-tier passive-aggressive monsters. Theresa May is the sort of person, I’d suspect, who’d finish a game of Triv. 

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Bridge

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe,” wrote John Donne. He was almost certainly thinking about the game of bridge when this insight occurred to him. Here is a game in which partnership and communication are everything. It is a game in which ruthless killer instincts are couched in extreme courtesy, and if you exclaim “Three no trumps are you out of your tiny mind?” at your partner it will be distinctly frowned on by your opponents. Glory is shared in bridge, as is ignominy. Suitable only for happily married couples with an intellectual rapport such as Ant and Dec, Dr Evil and Mini-Me, or Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.  

Catan

The game for policy nerds. You are encouraged to build a civilisation, gathering and allocating resources, building infrastructure, and basically doing all the stuff that for most of us seems to be rather ruled out by the word “game”. If you’re the sort of person who’d rather muse on the parameters of short-term outlay versus medium-term economic growth implied by HS2, go wild. You are likely to find yourself playing Catan with earnest, slightly thyroidal young men from free-market think tanks or, if you’re specially lucky, George Osborne. 

Cranium

This is the game for your flamboyant uncle and your tipsy mum who misses karaoke. It’s a game for the high-spirited and giggly and creatively inclined and slightly showy-offy. Why master chess when you can measure out the rest of your life in 45 second bursts, trying to hum the Wombles theme tune or make a recognisable three-dimensional image of Ann Widdecombe out of a thumb-sized piece of orange Play-Doh? Davina McCall is undoubtedly excellent at Cranium, as — secretly — is Jeremy Corbyn. 

Snakes and Ladders

It’s entirely random, snakes and ladders. It barely qualifies as a game at all. With poker, say, you’re surfing the waves of chance with on-the-hoof calculations of probabilities, all tempered with psychological acumen. With snakes and ladders it’s more like: yeah, rolled a six. I won. Woo. Or: yeah, rolled a four. Back down the ladder for me. Like, curses. Your turn. Accordingly, it is the preferred game of existentialist philosophers. Also, toddlers.

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