Russell Brand is into board games now (and he especially likes Pandemic)

Board games probably aren’t the thing that comes to mind when you think of Russell Brand, but that could be about to change.

The divisive comedian and presenter recently took a trip to Leeds hobby store Travelling Man and met with manager Matt Barker, who took him through a brief video tour of some games that might spark his passion for playing.

First up was Elevenses, the card game of warring 1920s socialites fighting to serve up the best tea, which Barker sharply describes as “blood on the china”, prompting a grin to the camera from Brand.

But it seems that the game wasn’t quite impressive enough for Brand, who asks, “What if you want to elevate the stakes even higher and play for the sake of humanity’s salvation?”

Barker quickly steers him toward Pandemic, explaining the iconic co-op battle against the four diseases threatening the world, which Brand remarks could be “greed, wickedness, slyness and self-centredness”.

Brand seems to take an interest – especially when Barker elicits a laugh by recounting his trouble with keeping Cairo germ-free – but it’s still not enough.

“Can you rise the stakes even higher than humanity?” he asks.

“I could go for all of reality!” Barker swiftly retorts, smoothly offering Lovecraftian spin-off Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, which seems to finally satiate Brand’s search for the perfect game.

“Humanity could die out, but a new species could rise to the top over time and time would be irrelevant if you didn’t have the same awareness of entropy because you’re no longer a human in a human body with the awareness of expiration,” he says.

“I’m not even separate from anything else. I am the disease, people would argue.”

You can watch the full video below.