Coffee and rolling die go hand-in-hand

The Cardboard Café, a board game café à la Toronto’s Snakes and Lattes, is scheduled to open next month at 114 Dundas St. in London.

For $5, gamers will have unlimited access to the shop’s game library, which will include everything from party games such as Taboo to more complex strategy games like Shadows Over Camelot.

“You name it, we’re going to have it,” said owner Josh Bricker.

The café will also host events such as tournaments, trivia events and events where people can demo new board games.

Bricker, who also owns a board game design company called The Flux Capacity, says one of the goals of the café is to support the game design community in London. The shop will be a place where game designers can meet and go over their designs and play test their games.

The café will also feature snacks, artisan-style speciality coffee and espresso, and craft beer.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Fanshawe College professor and game designer Sen-Foong Lim said. Lim is helping The Cardboard Café choose games for its library.

He says that often times, people don’t want to learn how to play games and play them wrong. The café will have teachers to teach people how to play games properly.

He also says that it’s great that London will have its own place where people can meet like-minded people and play board games.

“Most game nights are limited to people’s personal homes or to pubs, which may or may not suit an actual gaming environment because of the lighting and the types of food they serve or the music that’s on that has to appease the clientele,” he said.

Bricker has had the idea to open a board game café for a couple of years now.

“The people in the sort of management team are all fans of board games,” he said. “We thought that London would be a perfect place with a good, healthy student population and a fairly strong board gaming community to open up a café.”