Tim Clare

@timclare.bsky.social

3636 Followers 293 Following

(he/him) Author, podcaster & tabletop games writer. Books: The Game Changers, Coward, The Honours & The Ice House. https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-game-changers-how-playing-games-changed-the-world-and-can-change-you-too-tim-clare/7687024

"This world of hype and speculation is both fascinating and horrifying, but unfortunately, Mallaby appears unwilling or unable to engage critically with his interviewees’ claims. “Artificial intelligence,” he writes, “heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought.” No it doesn’t, Sebastian. More profound than agriculture? More profound than language?"
The card game Loop, box art
Boxes for 1AM Jailbreak, DNUP, & Scout.
The Floor is Lava by Ivan Brett
A wooden walkway surrounded by reeds on the edge of a lake, blue sky
Overparked - a board showing cardboard cars in a parking lot with wooden traffic cones
The book lovers cover
Me lying on the lawn
Toadsworth
36 d6s in two rolling trays
A row of cards showing shops & piers
Railway Porters, the boardgame, with dice showing various colours of suitcases on matching spaces
'These folk stories are delightful,’ Sophie smiled but I don’t grasp -’ ‘Then there is the architecture beyond the door in a mirror, very strange constructions to be sure, Those inverted acres can be bought for nothing, No trespass, no poaching. Behold the Lincoln glass’ She pranced over to a round mirror big enough to step into. ‘What if I told you this world of ours was in fact made left-handed, but the right-handed are using it? This life is a system of agonies, but across there? Everything points the other way. All patterns are reversed. And who's to say that pain mightn’t point away into relief? No wonder we are haunted by that reverse room behind us.’
A pile of cards & wooden books forming a bookshelf with a wooden cat lying on it
A tin with string spaghetti in it and wooden food bits, with white tweezers
The Game Changers cover
A baked potato with four vegetarian cocktail sausages sticking out of it
Magical Athlete shot from the side, centring a meeple depicting two frogs who might be twins (?)
A selfie of me pulling a silly face
Box for Nebular Colors, with stars on
An Austen inspired ttrpg based on the Desperation system; black & white cards
3 Witches, cards & tokens on a table
Coloured dice from Guessocracy
Pigeons on a disco floor from Oh My Pigeons! the expansion
Me with my hair up
Me in a gengar shirt
Tenby
The Game Changers hardbacks
A gengar car accessory
A picture of a two page spread of Senet, with the title Beneath the Surface and an artist's picture of designer Saashi
A big toad in the shade surrounded by grass & weeds
A toad
Me with Keeley Mills and Mark Grist at the recording studio
Big rubber ducks lined up on a bridge all decorated with differently themed designs
Richard Scarry illustration showing a piglet looking at bacon with the caption 'a piglet who wants to be a butcher when he grows up'
A sugar ring doughnut & sima in a Moomin mug
Some plastic white buildings with blue domes & some figures on top, from the boardgame Santorini
Front cover of The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria & Gondal
A hnefatafl board with wooden pieces on a grid
A picture of the riverside in Oxford, with a path, a bench and trees
Two card game boxes - on the left, CVLT, & on the right, 3 Witches
"It is refreshing and exciting reading a book on games that looks at the history of games in such a expansive and inclusive manner. I loved this book, and think it should be used in schools. So many of our books on games focus on how to make good games, or play well - few are about what games mean to humans and their culture" -- RICHARD GARFIELD, creator of 'Magic: The Gathering'
A selfie of me, a hirsute bespectacled man with dark hair, holding a big movie drink & wearing headphones
A map made out of hex tiles showing islands & ocean, with coloured longboat pieces on top and viking meeples in red & yellow
The Compania board showing fifteen action spaces with player tokens on
An illustration of some toads flying low over a pond on lily pads
I'm responsible for assembling two kinds of truck transmissions, and by now I can do about 90 percent of the required work. I'd give anything just to keep up with the murderous conveyor. I hate having to push the button to call the team chief and reveal my incompetence again and again. Takeda, whose position is next to mine, helps me sometimes by rushing through his own work to give me a whole minute of his precious time. “Tell me how to do it and Ill help you. My job is simple. I can spare the minute.” I know he really can’t spare the minute. Nobody on the line can afford the luxury of helping others. I am touched. But there’s another side to Takeda’s generosity. He’s dying from the monotony of his own work. I'm thankful for his help, of course, but Takeda also wants to try something new and strange, something that breaks the deadly boredom, the relentless repetition of the assembly line, There, where no amount of intelligence, creativity, or freedom is permitted, he can release some tension and refresh his energy by helping me, and that helps him get through the day.
A newt on a wet rock. The new is coloured crimson & cinnabar with ruby notes, through to a blazing orange with yellow highlights. Its eyes are golden with horizontal black pupils. It is facing us with its tail curling back round like an eel. It is slick & shiny
A shrink-wrapped copy of the boardgame Compania + the deluxe upgrade kit
The best boardgame ever invented, Joraku, with some wooden samurai meeples on a map of Sengoku era Japan
Lots of slips of paper laid out for Gibberers
Dice and a blue 2 card in Nokosu Dice
A board with spaces for various letter tiles
The Gang, poker cards laid out
A grid of properties covered in coloured discs in Chinatown
A sheet from Framlet with various shapes penciled into a grid
Colourful Ethnos board
Old King's Crown colourful board
Gachapon Trick, laid out with cards & an upright box with a slot for coins
Trick-taking Werewolf the card game, box art showing two chibi witches