you don't need more friends. you need more strangers.
(and, probably, something to do with them)
come inhi, i'm brenen.
i believe we all need more real, face-to-face connection — more exchange with strangers, more third spaces — in our modern, digital lives.
so: i started hosting game night gatherings that bring people together around a table, a game, and a candle.
how can i help you?
here for team engagements, speaking, or consulting? that's over here.
what i've been building
i spent the last year hosting strangers in bars. i'm more than forty nights in now, with a table, a game, a candle, and a room full of people who mostly arrived alone.
the experiment is called ligare gatherings, from the latin ligāre, to bind. i seat strangers by how they connect, not surface-level identities, and give them a little ritual to make it easy: a candle, good questions, some music, some fancy mints.
i host public gatherings where strangers meet, and private ones where teams actually bond. i shared what i'm learning through TEDx, and i write about it on substack.
three things a year of gathering strangers taught me
- we're not short on friends. we're short on strangers. most of us can name our friends. we keep our group texts alive and plan the coffee and trips. but we know something is missing: acquaintances, a broader community, the people we could simply bump into in an earlier world.
- we're surprisingly good with strangers, when the table is set for it. put open people in a room actually designed for meeting, and they open up in minutes. humans reliably produce the magic, if you set the stage and make a room where opening up is the whole idea.
- games are uniquely powerful at closing the gap. a game flattens status, gives your hands and head something to do so you can meet each other sideways, and opens a temporary world you step into together. the game is what opens the door.