There was a moment in the mid-2010s when board games flirted with fashion. Pubs that served artisanal burgers and craft ale started to keep scruffy boxes of Scrabble next to dog-eared copies of The Observer and “board game cafes” sprung up in certain parts of Zone Two. It happened around the same kind of time that people wore plaid shirts and beanie hats indoors, and having a beard or a gin became personality tropes. I suppose for some this legitimised something that had always been a pleasure, but then it fizzled away and turned into a fascination with the next thing (houseplants, wild swimming, kombucha). Either you kept playing board games, or you didn’t.

While I fell for many of other 2010s trends, I wasn’t convinced by the board game cafes. As a child, I played a lot of Scrabble with my grandfather - I think my mother thought that it would keep us both quiet, and she was correct - but after that I’ve long thought board games as a little dusty at best, and deeply nerdy at worst. I don’t find strategy for the sake of strategy fun or easy. I am the wrong kind of competitive. I maintain that there are few things more difficult or boring than having to learn a new set of abstract rules by having them read aloud to you from the small print of a large, glossy-print booklet.

But somehow I’ve become the kind of person who plays a board game several times a week. Always at home, invariably with M, who has spent the past couple of years gently cajoling me into playing with him the way someone might train a cat to feel comfortable walking into a plastic box with a handle on top. This is what our lives are now. While I don’t fully recognise them, there’s no denying it’s what they consist of.

The games we play are the ones M has expertly selected to try and shift my board game refusal: ones that work well with two players, ones that look pretty (so many don’t), ones that have a concept I’ll find charming (foraging for mushrooms, making a patchwork quilt, planning an arboretum) and, crucially, tread the fine balance between being strategic enough for him and simple enough for me. His secret weapon, though, was Wingspan: a beautifully rendered creation in which one succeeds by building and maintaining a healthy bird-based ecosystem.

We have played Wingspan so much we have worn out the “bird feeder” that you tumble dice through and learned that you can acquire a new, 3D printed one on the internet. When we went on holiday to California, we would try to identify the birds there on knowledge we had gleaned through Wingspan alone. We make jokes about corvids, Chetty Warblers and “meaty tucks”. I will frequently find small plastic eggs lurking in the pile of the rug, or under the sofa. Sometimes, all it needs is the word “birds” to encapsulate and understand this whole strange little world, a bird call all of our own. Wingspan is a clever enough game that it can be won in different ways, meaning that we’re equally matched in it. It’s often difficult to know who has won until the nail-biting final scoring, which reminds me of when they changed the Eurovision announcements a few years ago and set an entire continent on tenterhooks. We have reached a point where, if either of us score below 80, we consider it a poor game.

Over the past year of frankly frenetic Wingspannery it’s been interesting to clock the other board game birders among us. Sometimes I’ll post snapshots of our Sunday night, of which Wingspan has practically become a staple, and a flurry of enthusiastic replies will arrive. I once admired the immaculate - and creative - laying out of someone else’s game, which made ours look like trash, in all honesty. Things seemed to escalate at Christmas: not only did we crack open the Oceana expansion pack (I have opinions on this too nerdy for here, but if you do too, let’s talk) but a friend mentioned that they knew of two other secret Wingspan fans who had outed themselves on Instagram. I received a text on Christmas Day of a friend’s family opening a box-fresh edition of the game with the caption: IT BEGINS. We went into John Lewis on Oxford Street and found it on a display next to Pictionary and Monopoly. “Interesting,” mused M. “It’s gone mainstream”.

Perhaps it’s just the age we’re at - mid-Thirties, no kids yet - or perhaps it’s because going to the pub is expensive now. I suspect lockdown had a lot to do with it. What I’ve been most surprised about is how strangely meditative I find the whole thing. Some games are akin to a vigorous work-out (there’s one we know of as Hotels, which is mildly stressful, but I get inexplicable cravings for it), but others are like a good stroll around a familiar park. It might be easier to watch television, but it won’t be anyway near as satisfying. For half an hour or so we’re can engage in something entirely pointless that matters just for that moment.