Every piece in this game is drawn at the room it really takes. A bench is a plank on two legs and it drops into almost any gap. A corner sofa turns a corner and needs one to turn into. And the table — the most obliging shape on the whole board, a clean rectangle that fills whatever you have left — seats nobody at all.

That is not a joke we put in. It is the trade. The shapes that stack, travel and fit are the ones nobody has to think about: the beer crate, the pallet, the IBC, the sheet of 2440 × 1220. They fit because they were made to fit — an industry agreed on their sizes decades ago and everything since has had to make room for them. Pull one out of a skip and it drops straight into whatever you are building, at a size you never had to choose. Half of what we make at Refunc is made of exactly those four things, and not because they are beautiful.

What people actually sit on does not behave like that. A chair is a back and a seat: an L, and an L leaves a hole under the arm of it that nothing quite fills. An armchair is comfortable precisely because it is wider than it needs to be. A chaise longue is low at one end and high at the other and you cannot put two of them together in any way that helps.

So the board pays you for the awkward shapes and gives you nothing for the tidy ones, because that is the way round it really is. Efficiency is empty. Anything you would want to sit in wastes space by definition, and a room with no wasted space left in it is a corridor.

Design for Succession is largely this argument, held for twenty years and with real material in your hands. What a thing becomes next is decided by its shape long before anyone decides to be circular about it. Which is why we would rather build with the crate than argue with it — and why, when a chair comes in, the question is not what we want to make of it but what it is already nearly.

Ten places on the board, two letters and a number, the way it was on the machine in the chip shop.