Game Night!

Now that we are past COVID, I have the opportunity to establish a weekly game night at a local bar/restaurant. Hopefully, this will be in conjunction with a local game store and focus on community and group gaming for TTRPG’s and regular games like Cards against Humanity, Settlers of Cataan or even Secret Hitler.

I first saw a packed game night in Seattle up on Capitol Hill and since then have discovered other public game nights taking off in Atlanta and other major cities. For young professionals that crave social interaction (beyond left and right swipes) and the peak of D&D in pop culture, this seems like a great time to bring group gaming to the forefront.

Where are you and does your community have public gaming nights at a local bar, restaurant, coffee shop or similar?

4 Replies to “Game Night!”

  1. Kansas City metro area has several dedicated ‘Gaming’ cafe’s. The cafe is a standard bar type restaurant with bar-type food, and typically both alcohol and non-alcohol drinks served. They also have several hundred hundred board games readily available to play, and a large number of tables (large and small) for play. If you show up and don’t have enough players, you can put a table stand up on the ‘Looking for Players’ table with the name of your game, and how many you need. Typically they have 8 person rooms for rent, but RPG’s are always allowed in the main area also.
    My family frequents the ‘Cardboard Corner Cafe’ and ‘TableTop’; sister businesses with patrons flowing between the two. During the week you see 50 or so, but weekends it’s all you can do to find a chair.

    1. this is good info! so they are dedicated game spaces and they don’t run as a “regular” bar or restaurant on other nights?

      1. Well, the floor is open to any game, and you do see a number of different RPG’s running in the main room. I.e. saw 5E and Gumshoe just the other night, and several of the ‘dedicated’ rooms were empty. However, each establishment has 2-4 rooms for dedicated play, typically with HDMI screens for maps, and separate sound bars. For example; I use the main laptop screen for the GM instance of Owlbear, and a the ‘extended’ screen for the player side of ‘Owlbear’. Makes for very light way to show maps, and get Fog-of-War.

  2. I’m just outside Seattle, and there are a fair number of TTRPG stores/venues around. We had two in my suburb, one closed, but another has already opened. Some have food, some don’t, and some that don’t allow you to bring in food or order it in for delivery.
    I actually just got back from a professional conference where we had an ice breaker game night on the first night of the conference. None of the games were RPGs, and though about half the people who showed up didn’t play games, I don’t think they would’ve come to the space if we weren’t there playing games. I know about a half dozen of my colleagues from across the country are RPG players, and given the success this year, I plan to nudge one or two to put together RPG adventures for the next conference.

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