Over the last few years, boardgaming has become increasingly acceptable amongst the general public and one consequence of this has been the continuing rise of the boardgame café.  Boardgame cafés have come a long way since Thirsty Meeples opened in Oxford just three and a half years ago.  In fact, one online map has the number in the UK now totalling over forty.  There have been several articles commenting on their spread too, including an interesting recent article on Radio 4‘s consumer affairs programme, You & Yours covering crowd funding, boardgames and modern café culture.

Some of the boardgameing reports in the media have been quite poor, but this is one of the better articles.  The reporter, Bob Walker visits the two boardgame cafés in Nottingham, Ludorati and The Dice Cup, interviewing both staff and customers who are clearly having a good time playing a range of games including Munchkin Zombies and while Risk as well as the inevitable Monopoly get a mention.  More interesting is an interview with Peter Blenkharn from Inside the Box , a small company who are producing Sub Terra which has just raised £368,256 via KickStarter.  There are a number of other interesting statistics quoted, for example, it is apparently estimated that the board and card game market in US is worth $1.2 billion.  Bob Walker also talks to Matt Jarvis, editor of Tabletop Gaming Magazine, which was originally quarterly, but is now bimonthly due to increasing popularity.  Matt cites a recent Tabletop Gaming Magazine report which claims that tabletop games made over $100 million last year on KickStarter, more than four times what computer games achieved in the same period.  Much of this was raised by miniature games so the recent reprint of Kingdom Death: Monster alone raised over $12 million – the sort of figure that producers of Euro, or family games, would never dare to dream of – even the infamous Exploding Kittens only raised $8.7 million.  Nevertheless, it is clear boardgaming continues to go from strength to strength.

– Image from a2milk.co.uk