T.O. board game cafés take craze to next level
Toronto has become North America’s king of analog play, with at least eight spots in town
Geraldo Neto rolls the dice under the pot lights at Toronto’s newest board game café.
Accompanied by four friendly strangers and the hissing espresso machine at AGame, the Brazilian ESL student hurls himself into the world of Catan.
“I’m here to play, learn English and make new friends — except on the board,” says Neto, who’s been coming to A-Game Café since he arrived in the country, a few months after the sleek board game hub opened on Queen St. W.
A-Game is the latest outgrowth of Toronto’s new-found role as king of boardgame café culture in North America. And Neto is the newest convert in a growing congregation of board gamers who now have their pick of at least eight gamestacked temples in which to practise their faith.
“We have a massive number of boardgame bars and cafés compared to cities in the U.S.,” says Aaron Zack, head of operations for Snakes & Lattes, Toronto’s board-games mecca.
The hip Bloor St. hot spot simmers with life and coffee 16 hours a day, drawing people of all ages and backgrounds within its exposed brick walls.
“It’s just a great place to get out and talk to people. And it’s much better than staring at a screen,” says Jared Kennedy, 16.
He and three friends came downtown from Pickering to play Cash ’n’ Guns, their fake pistols strewn beside the board. A few tables over, four teenage girls strive to save mankind from eradication in Pandemic.
Snakes & Lattes, which has expanded three times in the past five years, invites customers in for a $5 cover charge. It hosts tutorials and high-stakes tournaments — the winner of last Monday’s Carcassonne battle will head to Essen, Germany, for the international championships.
“Toronto has a thriving board game scene,” says Gil Hova, a New York-based designer who recently visited the GTA. “The Snakes & Lattes cafe is certainly most prominent, (but) I didn’t come close to seeing everything.”
Soon after it opened in 2010, Snakes & Lattes began hosting monthly gatherings — often into the a.m. — for designers to sound-board ideas and test-play their fledgling games. It became a hive of ingenuity for hobbyists.
Designers such as Stephen Sauer and Daryl Andrews workshop their products in bull sessions that have helped yield two games now on the market, the Walled City and Caffeine Rush. The duo expects the release of half a dozen more in the next couple of years.
“You’re seeing a lot more Canadiandesigned games on shelves,” says Sauer, who lives around the corner with his partner and two children.
More than anything, it’s Toronto’s cafés — none more than six years old — that incubate fresh ideas, sow innovation and feed the creativity mill for board-game designers, says designer Sen Foong-Lim.
“There’s this critical mass of hardcore gamers, casual players and designers there, and now they have all these dynamic venues,” says Foong-Lim, who is based in London, Ont., but is a frequent T.O. gamer.
His game Belfort recently cracked the top 250 on Board Game Geek, a user rating website. Canadian publishers have developed his work, and his latest tabletop co-creation, But Wait, There’s More! — where players do their best sleazypitchman impression to sway party guests — is up for a prize at the third annual Geekie Awards, based in the U.S.
Neither the GTA’s abundance of colleges and universities — “hotbeds of off-the-beaten-path culture,” says Foong-Lim — nor stereotypical Canadian niceness, compatible with the more collaborative style of “Eurogames” like Catan, can account fully for the flourishing analog game culture in Toronto.
“I mean, anyone can play. It doesn’t matter your age; it doesn’t matter your intellectual capacity,” says Steve Tassie, Snakes & Lattes’ curator responsible for the thousands of games on its shelves.
“It’s tough to say how it caught on in here. But there is a game out there for everybody.”
Snakes & Lattes’ sister establishment, Snakes & Lagers, plans to open a new location on College St. in September. It will take over the former Andy Poolhall nightclub near Bathurst St., to achieve, at 7,500 square feet, what its managers claim will be the biggest board-game café and bar in the world.