I guess the question is, how does this relate to medicine or well-being?

Well, I spoke to lots of people and saw how games kind of helped create a sense of community.

For example, I spoke to these people playing this game Kyogi Karuta, which is only really played in Japan, and it's like a mixture of Snap and Sumo, right? Where you've got to, like...

Genuinely, it's an incredible game to watch where people are reading out bits of poems and you've got to slap away the card that matches the poem before the other person slaps it.

I played it, despite not speaking Japanese.

It's gruelling, especially if you don't speak Japanese.

LAUGHTER I interviewed people who played it and I was like, why does this game mean so much to you? And three of the four people I spoke to just broke down crying while trying to answer that question and said that it had changed their lives.

you learned the rules

And I wonder do board games have another purpose or is it just the game?

Well, you've hit upon something really key there, which is that evolutionary psychologists often look like something, look at something like play and they go, "This presents a problem," because (laughs) what is it for, you know? This is a technology that keeps appearing, but it doesn't increase our chances of survival on the face of it.

It doesn't increase people's chances of winning a war.

So, what's going on? And we've studied animals 'cause we see play in animals, right? And we've studied, say, kittens that play.

And evolutionary psychologists looked at them and went, "Hey, come on.

There must be, this must be training them to hunt." But when we've done studies, there have been expansive studies on preventing kittens from chasing balls, chasing, uh, doing these kind of pretend hunting behaviors, and does it affect their ability to hunt when they grow into adulthood? Not at all.

Not at all.

What's the connection between chess and checkers? And I ask only because they're played on the same board.