Other forms: planchettes
A planchette is a small triangular board used in automatic writing, a phenomenon associated with spiritualism.
Although planchettes today are most commonly associated with the three-legged plastic moving window that comes with Ouija boards, the original devices predate the Ouija and included a pencil in place of one of the legs. Anyone from a psychic medium to curious parlor game player would then lay their fingertips atop the board, and the pencil would move, seemingly without any direction from the user, writing out answers to questions asked aloud. The word came into English in 1860 as the name of this device. In French, planchette means "little plank."