For some years now, it has seemed as though entertainment has been drifting towards the digital. My game of choice, for instance, is a phone app where you have to very carefully move a number of vehicles out of a busy car park. To me this game represents the pinnacle of leisure time: it’s simple, quick and solitary enough to play while sitting quietly in the bathroom when I really should be looking after my children. It represents progress.

But perhaps I’m in the wrong here, because — seemingly out of nowhere — the board game has made a roaring comeback. Last year the global board game market was worth $18.93 billion; this figure is expected to reach almost $40 billion in the next five years. The UK is now home to dozens of board game cafés where groups of people can while away the hours, removed from the constant pinging and bleeping of normal life. Even Waterstones has got in on the act, introducing a featured game of the month last summer. Suddenly they are everywhere.

You may have mixed feelings about this. I certainly do. My pre-internet adolescence was full of board games and they all came with their own stresses. There were the long, drawn-out extended family game nights, which usually took place at the exact moment on Boxing Day when your blood sugar basically transforms into treacle. These were never much fun because the first couple of hours tended to involve watching my aunties struggling to comprehend the surprisingly complicated rules of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? board game.

And then there were the games I’d play with my brother. Usually Ludo, sometimes Monopoly, all of it spent terrified that I would accidentally win, because that would cause him to throw a tantrum of world-splitting magnitude that would last the rest of the afternoon. Now that I’m older, though, I have begun to realise what I really didn’t like about board games. I didn’t like the way they acted as a magnifying glass for the most fundamental part of everyone’s personality. To play a board game was to be reminded up close that my aunts were slow and detail-orientated, that my brother was fuelled by the rage of a million perceived injustices and that I was pathetically conflict-averse.

“A board game really reveals the bare bones of people’s personality,” Will Sorrell, founder of Clarendon Games, says. “If someone’s competitive, it really, really comes across. Or if they’re a bit sneaky, or a bad loser.” But he’s also quick to point out that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sorrell’s bestselling game is Priorities, a riff on Mr & Mrs in which players have to rank a number of items by personal importance while the other players attempt to predict what they choose. It’s not only a lot of fun, but it also teaches you a lot about your fellow players.

And it requires everyone to play nice. As Sorrell observes, you don’t get this from other types of games. “You can play a computer game online and have a tantrum, and it won’t have consequences,” he says. “But try it during a game of Monopoly and people will remember that.”

Figures like Sorrell are leading the charge of the board game revival, purely because they’re such evangelists for the medium. “I love the fact that games bring people together,” he says. “As we get more and more addicted to technology, games enable people to pull away from their screens and interact socially.”

The global board game market is expected to reach almost $40 billion in the next five years

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“There is also the tangible aspect of playing games, which serves as an antidote to the overwhelm of the digital world,” says Nicolas Pickaerts, chief executive of the online design store Abask, which sells exquisite-looking games that can cost thousands of pounds. “You get to enjoy the physicality of holding a beautifully crafted piece in your hand that has been thoughtfully designed — the coolness of a bronze knight or tactility of a smooth wooden pawn.”

It also turns out that my previous board-game misfortune might have been down to bad decision-making on my part. If you have an irrationally angry younger sibling, for example, Ludo is a terrible choice. Your moves are all dictated by a throw of the dice. You’re a slave to chance. A game like that is impossible to rig.

The mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has just written Around the World in 80 Games, a book dedicated to unpicking the patterns of popular board games. As he points out, some chance-based games were designed to have headier goals. “Snakes and Ladders was originally an Indian board game that taught the impact of good and bad karma on your attempts to reach nirvana,” he says. “It was actually a very spiritual game, but you’re still completely giving yourself up to the roll of the dice. There’s no agency in that game. Whereas something like chess, which is pure strategy, allows you to express yourself through your style of play.”

Luckily a middle ground exists, as du Sautoy explains, and that is backgammon. “It’s maybe the perfect game. Pure strategy games suffer from the fact that if somebody is good they’re always going to win. A pure chance game? You can’t do anything about it. It’s all up to the dice. So what you want is a combination of the two, where chance gives weak players an opportunity to win, yet strategy allows you to overcome a bad roll of the dice.”

And he’s right. For all the wonderful new board games around, backgammon does seem to be surging in popularity at the moment. At the launch of Atlantis The Royal, a billion-dollar hotel in Dubai, the main attraction was Jay-Z, who parked himself by the bar, engrossed in a game of backgammon.

Another big selling point of the game is just how available to anyone it is. At the top end of the market, designers such as Alexandra Llewellyn sell breathtaking boards for tens of thousands of pounds, but money isn’t a barrier. You can quite easily print a board from the internet and use dried pasta for counters. The game belongs to everyone.

“You can learn backgammon so quickly,” du Sautoy continues. “It’s so intuitive, which is important. But it also gives rise to complexity. You don’t want just the same game being played each time. The simple rules offer the freedom to go in many different directions. Simple beginnings, complex endings. That’s the beautiful balance.”

Despite the wealth of innovative new games, then, something as ancient as backgammon might still be the most reliable. It’s tactile. It’s social. It requires deep thought, but can also be undone by chance. The way you play it reveals a lot about who you are. Now, if only there was a way to play it alone in the bathroom, I might be convinced to try it.