It was a Sunday afternoon and three of us were sitting in the same room, each on our own phone, in what I can only describe as a modern interpretation of "spending time together." We were present in the most technical sense — our bodies occupied the same physical space. Our minds were in three different algorithmic universes, occasionally surfacing to show each other a meme that the other person would nod at without looking up.
This is friendship in the streaming age. Parallel loneliness with a Wi-Fi connection.
Then someone opened a cupboard looking for a charger and found a board game. One of those old ones — slightly battered box, instructions yellowed, at least two pieces missing, a dice that rolled unevenly because it had been stepped on at some point in its history. The kind of game that exists in every household and is played approximately once per decade.
"Should we...?"
We should. And we did. And what happened next was so unexpected and so simple that I've been thinking about it since.
We played the game. Not ironically. Not as a retro novelty. We actually played it, with the specific competitive focus and trash-talking commitment of people who had suddenly remembered that this was a thing humans could do with their time.
For two hours, nobody looked at a phone. Not because we'd made a noble pact about screen-free time — because nobody wanted to. The game was right there. It required attention, strategy, and the willingness to accuse your closest friend of cheating based on zero evidence (a cornerstone of any good friendship).
We laughed. Not the performative exhale you do at a text. Full, actual, from-the-stomach laughing. The kind that makes your face hurt. The kind that's about the moment, not the content — because in any other context, what happened wasn't that funny. Someone rolled badly. Someone made an alliance and immediately betrayed it. Someone misread a rule and we kept playing with the wrong rule anyway because it was funnier that way.
By 6pm we'd played three rounds, ordered food, and had the best conversation we'd had in months. Not because the game made us talk, but because it gave us something to be in together. A shared focus that wasn't a screen. A reason to look at each other instead of down.
The board game didn't "save" us in any dramatic sense. We were fine. We're fine. But it reminded us what togetherness actually feels like — not the parallel-device version but the real one, the one where your attention is in the room, where the activity exists between people instead of inside individual screens.
I've been thinking about why it worked. It's not that board games are magic. It's that they create something that modern leisure has almost entirely eliminated: shared present-tense experience. Everyone is doing the same thing, in the same room, at the same time, and the thing requires enough engagement that your brain can't wander to your inbox.
Digital entertainment is almost always individual, even in company. You can watch the same show and text about it, but you're each having a separate experience inside your own screen. Games — the physical, in-the-room, pieces-on-a-board kind — are unavoidably communal. The experience is the space between people, not the space inside a device.
I bought a few more games that week. Not expensive ones — the kind you find in charity shops with incomplete piece sets and instructions that assume you'll figure it out. We play them now, irregularly, without scheduling it or calling it anything noble. Someone just says "game?" and we clear the table and sit down and for an hour or two, we're actually in the same room.
My phone sits on the counter, face down, doing absolutely nothing.
It's the happiest it's been.