First board game cafe opens in Chennai

While catering to board game enthusiasts, Arjun Sukumaran and Chitra Appasami have opened ‘The Board Game Lounge’ in Adyar, Chennai. The Board Game Lounge is a cafe with over 250 board games.

"The Board Game Lounge is Chennai's first board gaming cafe dedicated to modern tabletop games, beyond the classics we all grew up with," the cafe’s Twitter handle says.

The idea for a board game lounge started back in 2015 when Arjun Sukumaran along with some of his buddies started a board gaming community.

Along with classics like Monopoly and Scrabble, the cafe also has board games like A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, Scythe, Splendor, 7 Wonders among others.

“People have great interest towards board games, but they were used to gaming with their own family or among their own group. So, to take that hobby a step forward, we formed Chennai Board Gamers in 2015 and brought people from various spheres and provided them a platform.” Arjun told the Indian Express.

“Since it (board games) has become accessible, a lot of communities have grown. With board games becoming more and more popular, we thought we will start a gaming lounge. And given the response Chennai has shown us in just a couple of events, we thought this would be the right time to try something out like this,” Arjun added.

Currently, they boast a total of over a thousand members as part of their gaming community.

The Cafe is open from Tuesday to Friday (2pm-10pm). The cost per person is INR 200 per person and on weekends (12pm-9pm), it’s INR 300. With this initial fee, people are given the luxury to play multiple games and do not have to pay for individual games.