Why a board makes conversation easy

Something to do with your hands and eyes turns out to be the great social lubricant.

Two adults across an empty table have a hard job. They must generate everything: topic, rhythm, reason to still be sitting there in forty minutes. Pauses become conspicuous. Eye contact must be managed, offered and withdrawn on some schedule nobody was taught. Put a board between them and the job changes completely. There is now somewhere for the eyes to rest, something for the hands to do, and a slow supply of events to remark upon. The pauses stop being holes and become the ordinary quiet of two people thinking. Nothing about the friendship changed. The furniture did.

This is why so much good talking happens sideways, over an activity, rather than face on. The activity carries the structural load. It supplies a shared present tense, a stream of small things happening that anyone may comment on without having to have brought a subject from home. It also legitimises silence, which is the part most people badly underestimate. A table where nobody is obliged to speak turns out to be a table where people speak far more freely, because the speaking has become optional, and therefore chosen rather than performed for the benefit of the room.

There is a further effect worth naming. A game gives everyone the same thing to be looking at, which means nobody is being examined. Difficult topics surface at these tables more often than at deliberately arranged ones, and they surface easily, in the gap between turns, because the format allows a person to say a hard thing while looking at a board and then keep playing. The alternative arrangement, two chairs facing each other and an announced intention to talk, applies a pressure that many people simply cannot work under.