‘Hands, face, space’: The material turn in board gaming during Covid-19

In the early months of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic meant millions of people around the world had to change their daily behaviours with immediate effect, often with no real indications of when ‘normality’ (whatever that was) would return. Fundamental alterations in social, physical and cultural norms occurred overnight. Millions of people were confined to their homes or near home environments. The deadly invisible pandemic was here, and it was taking our lives away, both literally and figuratively. In retrospect, perhaps we should have realized what living through a global pandemic might be like, but the fiction imagining such disasters shows either the direct moments of an outbreak, as in such texts as Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006) or Emily St John Mandell’s Station Eleven (2014), or the world as it recovers in the years afterwards, as in such texts as Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic series (2003–19) and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that we were less prepared for what might happen during the months, possibly years, of a viral outbreak, for which there was no immediate vaccine....