Can this new gadget fix screen fatigue?

I love technology. But I also kind of hate it.

Fighting the magnetic pull of screens is like trying to say no to dessert, gossip, and Amazon Prime all at once. I’ve begged for one dinner without phones – but often, I’m the guilty one swiping through my “work” email under the table.

We check our phones around 150 times a day, spend more than seven hours glued to screens, and still feel more disconnected than ever. The U.S. Surgeon General calls loneliness a “public-health crisis,” a side effect of too much digital connection and not enough real face time.

That’s the problem New York entrepreneur Brynn Putnam – the woman who sold her last company, Mirror, to Lululemon for half a billion dollars – set out to solve with Board, a tabletop console designed to make screens social again. Board launches in early November for $499.

“It’s not the screen that’s the enemy,” Putnam told me. “It’s how you use it – and what you ask it to do for you.”

Hands-on with Board: A social console hiding in plain sight

While Putnam unveils Board on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Oct. 28, I’ve had the only working unit outside her team in my living room for months – a front-row seat to see if this new category of “together-tech” can actually deliver. 

Board looks like a sleek 24-inch coffee-table screen, but it behaves more like a playground. You drop real pieces – a sponge, a spaceship, a robot, depending on the game – onto the surface, and it reacts instantly, lighting up, buzzing, and somehow turning a room full of distracted people into an engaged group of happy competitors.

Each piece has a unique pattern baked into its base. When you set it on the Board, the touchscreen instantly recognizes its shape and movement – kind of like how your phone knows where your finger is, but on overdrive. Under the hood, custom software and a layer of embedded AI translate those touches into real-time gameplay. The system knows which piece you’re using, where it’s moving, and what it’s doing – then reacts instantly on screen.

There are no batteries, and no Bluetooth. Just clever design that makes the digital world feel physical again.

In one of our family’s favorite games, Chop Chop, you and your crew basically run a digital kitchen straight out of "The Bear." One person chops, another scrubs, and everyone’s yelling “Behind!” as the clock ticks down. No controllers, no tutorials – just hands-on chaos that somehow gets everyone, from toddlers and teens to grandparents, completely in sync.

The family that plays together, stays together

Putnam lives in a bustling, multigenerational household that spans toddlers to young adults. Finding something everyone could do together, she says, became both a family need and a product mission.

“Our Brady Bunch spans the gamut from age 2 to 20. A lot of what screen time ends up looking like is solo time,” she said. “You’re either on your phone in front of a movie, or a kid is curled up in a corner on their iPad. We wanted to rethink how technology could bring people together.”

To make that vision real, Putnam teamed up with veteran game developer Seth Sivak – whose past credits include leading live-service development on World of Warcraft and founding Proletariat Inc., later acquired by Blizzard Entertainment, the developer and publisher behind World of Warcraft. Together, they mixed Silicon Valley muscle with living-room magic.

“Board’s a hybrid of both board games and video games,” Sivak said. “You can play together, face-to-face, without anyone disappearing behind a screen. The ‘Best Family Game’ last year? (AstroBot) was single-player,” Sivak added. “That says everything. Even Nintendo’s latest innovations focus on online play. We’re bringing it back to the living room – shared, real-world, together.”

Why families are craving tech that connects

Like more than 1-in-4 Americans and Brynn Putnam, I live in a multigenerational household. Mine includes my octogenarian parents and, more often than not, a 4-year-old niece who already swipes through YouTube better than I do.

The first night I showed everyone Board, we launched into Space Rocks, a co-op asteroid-blasting game where teams can use spaceship pieces as controllers. My dad yelled, “Get the UFO!” while my niece fired the Mega Beam that lit the whole table like the Fourth of July. Within minutes, we were all leaning in, laughing – and no one reached for a phone.

Families everywhere are desperate for something that brings them together again. The global board-game market surged to $14.37 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow an additional 10% this year. And have you heard about all the people playing Mahjong? 

“Families want to connect, but they’re competing with incredibly powerful technologies,” Putnam said. “Board is about flipping that dynamic – using tech to support real human connection instead of replacing it.”

In early tests, families reportedly played for two straight hours without anyone reaching for a phone – a small miracle in 2025.

Can Board succeed where others failed?

Of course, this isn’t the first attempt to reinvent family play. Microsoft’s Surface Table fizzled, and Arcade1Up’s Infinity Game Table – fun, nostalgic, but hardly a household name – proved that even good ideas can stall without the right spark. 

Board faces similar hurdles: a premium price of $499, a modest library at launch, and the challenge of proving it’s more than a holiday novelty. The console ships in early November, just in time for the holiday season – when families start searching for something new to do together.

But here’s the thing. It works. The build feels premium, the games are genuinely fun, and the mission is refreshingly human.

“It’s not about replacing game night,” Putnam adds. “It’s about making it easier to have one.”

Sivak puts it another way: “Creating a new category is hard. But when people sit down, play, and look up an hour later saying, ‘That was time well spent,’ that’s when we know we’ve built something worth it.”

Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech columnist and on-air contributor for "The Today Show.” The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY. Contact her via Techish.com or  @JennJolly on Instagram.