Will the latest millennial pub craze finally kill the lost art of conversation?

In a time when a spectre hangs over each and every conversation, threatening to drag friends and family from a gentle chinwag kicking and screaming to the battlefield that is Brexit, perhaps stifling the need to speak is no bad thing.

Enter shuffleboard. I bet you didn’t expect that to be the next sentence.

The archaic pastime, said to have been a favourite of that jolliest of English kings, Henry VIII, has followed the course of darts, bowling and mini golf in entering London’s nightlife scene as a millennial substitute for just having a pint with your mates and putting the world to rights. 

Crazy Eight is the most recent addition to the capital’s shuffle scene - which includes the London Shuffle Club (above Crazy Eight), Burdock in Finsbury Square, and the Hat and Tun in Farringdon - where players from all backgrounds can remove chit-chat from their evening checklist and slide wood at each other instead.

I’m not here to tell you that shuffleboard isn’t fun. It is, really, very fun and bizarrely addictive. But I am here to tell you that the game supposedly begun in the 15th century when the great unwashed shoved groats along tables in a game called, brilliantly, shove groat, is just another part of a city social scene dredging the lake for ideas to make bars and pubs more ‘fun’ and further disconnect us from one another.

I am all for darts in a pub, but generally opposed to darts-themed pubs, and I’m a big fan of mini-golf but do not feel the need for a bar dedicated solely to it. Last year, Telegraph Travel on a team outing went to a rooftop pub in Stratford to partake in curling. Again, I’m all in favour of curling - top sport - but why does it need to be marketed as an after-work activity rather than a way for Scotland to win Olympic medals?

And herein lies my beef with shuffleboard bars. Should a group of any kind - colleagues, university friends, professional curlers - enter a drinking establishment and, after ordering, clinking glasses and completing the initial small talk, then spot out of the corner of their collective eye a shuffleboard table, amble over, play, and have a great time, then fine.

However, when bars or pubs are dedicated to a quirky retro game then it facilitates the choice of ping-pong over genuine bonding time, and slowly but surely the idea of entertainment for an evening drifts away from sitting down to converse with your peers.

As we become more and more used to the invasion of novelty amusement in our nightlife, we will struggle to simply discuss the topics of the day without wondering if the table might better serve as a gaming arena.

My colleague Greg Dickinson has previously pointed out that the “infantilising trend” of the capital is nothing new - though the ball ponds are - and that even in the 12th century Londoners were falling over themselves to throw stuff at other stuff, leap, shoot and wrestle for entertainment. But one cannot help feeling that the rise of in-pub gaming has really taken hold in a climate where establishments must do what it takes to survive. This isn’t for fun, it’s a desperate punt at a future.

A brief glance at the history of shuffleboard (thanks shuffleboard.net) tells me that the game, which can be played along the ground or on a shuffle table, took off most recently in the 1940s when young and old sought distraction from the horrors of the Second World War. One can see the parallels today, from the global recession to rising house prices, it is no wonder that anyone who finds themselves at a loose end in the city after 6pm seeks some light relief.

That said, should the current trend of nostalgia-soaked activity venues continue, one is more likely to lose the more traditional avenue of venting their frustrations over two or three pints, and instead have to engage in a rather furious game of bagatelle.