Switch Off and Roll the Dice: Board Game Cafés Are Taking Over Our High Streets

Where once a struggling high street unit might have become another vape shop or an empty shell with a 'to let' sign, an increasing number are becoming something rather more unexpected: board game cafés, packed with dice, cards and customers who arrived for a coffee and stayed for four hours.

"We opened with a library of 200 games. We're now up to 650, and honestly, customers keep donating ones from their attics because they want us to have them," says Ben Coulter, who runs a board game café in Nottingham with his sister. "We've become this weird community hub nobody quite predicted."

The model is simple but effective: customers pay a modest admission fee, typically £5 to £8, for unlimited access to the games library, and then order food and drink as they would at any café — except they might be there for a five-hour game of Twilight Imperium rather than a quick flat white.

"The average dwell time is extraordinary," says hospitality analyst Owen Pettifer. "A normal café might turn a table three times in an evening. A board game café might have one table occupied by the same four people for the entire night, and they're still spending steadily on drinks and snacks the whole time."

Part of the appeal is nostalgia crossed with novelty. Millennials who grew up on Monopoly and Cluedo are discovering a vast modern board game industry that barely existed in their childhoods, with elaborate strategy games, cooperative adventures and party games designed specifically for group play in venues just like these.

"People come in expecting Scrabble and leave three hours later obsessed with a German strategy game called Wingspan," laughs Coulter. "We've had customers cry actual tears of joy building a bird sanctuary in cardboard form. It sounds mad but it's true."

For a generation increasingly wary of screen time and searching for genuine face-to-face connection, board game cafés are being framed by some as an antidote to the isolation of app-based socialising.