I invented League of the Lexicon for my two boys, Sonny and Jude - the ‘two brothers’ of Two Brothers Games. It was 2020, and Britain’s Covid lockdown was in full swing. Schools were shut and parents were doing their best to keep kids busy.

I quickly realised that I was a hopeless homeschool teacher, but it turned out I was quite good at inventing games to provide much-needed distraction. One in particular, League of the Lexicon, was designed as an antidote to boring English homework. It was a quiz game about language, created to inspire a sense of curiosity about all things wordy.

Something about the game struck a chord, so even after the lockdowns ended, my work on it didn’t. There aren’t many board games for language lovers and I thought League of the Lexicon had something. I started contacting linguists and lexicographers, asking them to contribute questions. I also became an accidental linguist myself, as I assumed the role of the game’s Question-Writer-in-Chief.

In 2022, the game launched on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Three frantic weeks later and it had become the most successful word game in the platform’s history. Then the UK bookchain Waterstones made it their Game of the Month (where it sold out). Even more extraordinary, luminaries like Stephen Fry, Susie Dent, John McWhorter and Richard Lederer had said lovely things about it, and the game appeared in The Observer, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the BBC, The Washington Post and more.

I still wonder at how a game invented for two boys during a global pandemic has come so far. As well as the five editions of the game - the British and US editions, and three special editions - there is the book - The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia (Bloomsbury, 2025), and our monthly newsletter, The Lexipedian. But while the game has been on a long journey, its essence - the love of words and language - is unchanged.  

London, 2025