The Piano Bench and the Board Game Table

I’ve been tuning pianos for going on fourteen years now, small shop, a handful of house calls a week, the kind of work where the whole job is noticing something a half step off before the client does. You get a piano that “sounds fine” to everybody in the room and you sit down and within four notes you know exactly which string is drifting and by how much. It’s not a talent so much as a habit worn into your ear over thousands of hours. I didn’t expect it to leak into anything else.

It leaked into board games first, and I noticed it happening rather than deciding to let it happen. I was opening a new box a couple years back, one of the bigger Kickstarter ones, and before I’d even read the rules I’d already clocked that the card backs had a print register off by maybe a millimeter, just enough that the border wobbled if you fanned a hand of them. Nobody else at the table saw it. I couldn’t stop seeing it the whole session. Same thing happens with a warped punchboard token, or a rulebook where the page numbers in the table of contents don’t quite match the actual page, small stuff, stuff that doesn’t ruin anything, but once you’re built to notice tolerances for a living you don’t get to turn that off on your own time.

It’s made me a specific kind of annoying reviewer, I think. I’ll forgive a lot in a game if the ideas are strong, genuinely, some of my favorite games have rough components. But I notice the rough components every single time, out loud, whether anyone asked or not. My gaming group has started preemptively telling me “yeah we know the tile edges don’t line up” before I get the chance to say it myself.

The stranger crossover is with books, actually, more than games. Reading dense prose, the Calvino and Borges kind of writing where every sentence is doing careful work, feels close to the same listening I do at the piano. You’re tracking rhythm, you’re noticing when a sentence is a half-beat too long or clipped a beat too short, and a writer who’s actually good at the sentence level reads the way a well-regulated action feels under your hands, no extra resistance anywhere, nothing sticking. I don’t think I’d have noticed that about prose if I hadn’t spent this many years listening for the equivalent thing in wire and felt and wood.

None of this makes me right about anything, to be honest. Plenty of people play a warped game and have a great night anyway, and that’s the actual point of a game, not the tolerances. But I doubt I’ll ever sit down at a table without checking the corners of the box first. Occupational hazard, I guess, in the most literal sense of the phrase.