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Gaming Tuesday, August 31st 2010 at 12:25 pm

Board Game Café Opens, Segregates Your Technology

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Snakes and Lattes, a Toronto café, combines board games, sippy drinks and a relaxing atmosphere. Oh, it also supports practices that many people strived to overcome throughout history. Just, you know, against modern technology.

The puntastic café, owned by Ben Castanie and Aurelia Peynet, opened yesterday in Toronto’s Koreatown with a couple gimmicks.Firstly, it has over 1,500 board games available for use:

Secondly, it doesn’t offer free WiFi like most modern cafés, nor does it allow customers to bring their laptops. “I just don’t want people staring at their screens,” says Ben Castanie. He seemingly doesn’t want increased profits as well, considering he’s segregating a huge portion of a café’s general population. When was the last time a café wasn’t filled with people working on laptops, or simply browsing the internet in a more social atmosphere than their living room?

While the availability of fun is not in question (over 1,500 board games!), Castanie makes no mention of other, more vital technology, for example, how does he feel about phones? With modern phone technology, it seems just about everyone is staring at their phone’s pretty screen, occupied by mobile applications.

Another rule with its pros and cons is Castanie’s policy that separate smaller groups will be forced to combine into larger groups. “A game is not meant to be [played by] two,” is his reasoning. “So you know what? If there’s two groups, well then, we’ll just make them play together, right?” Sorry, couples going out for a romantic board game date (an idea which, now mentioned, will hopefully take the world by storm): No alone time for you.

(via Torontoist)

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  • FrankleeMiDeer

    For sale, soon and cheap.

    I’ve always thought it quite sad when a noob business owner has to be sadly introduced to reality at the point of an eviction notice. And I’ve seen it happen WAY too many times.

  • GirlsAreGeeks

    I love the idea of all the board games, and I’m cool with no laptops, clearly if I went there it would be for games. I’m not convinced that two people is unacceptable gaming, it sounds like this place may have too many rules to do well. Although, I don’t see myself in Toronto checking it out any time soon, sad.

    Rosalind
    Girls Are Geeks

  • SubtlyArtistic

    Wow, dude. You have it ALL wrong. I was there yesterday with my husband– just the two of us! It doesn’t sound like you even stepped foot into the place or talked with the owner. He is very nice and very accommodating and his place was PACKED. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone and every since patron was having a blast.

    I really think you are misunderstanding what he meant by the “two player rule” (which is a lie!). You can play two player games and he has quite a number there. We spent hours yesterday playing games, myself and my husband. What they mean by not playing alone is that you don’t need to worry about only playing games with just the people you came with. People there are really friendly and are willing to group up to play bigger games. I saw it happen a bunch yesterday! I was sitting alone waiting for my husband to order us food and a lovely woman came up to me and asked if I needed anyone to play with. I politely declined, but later played two three player games with a man who had come alone.

    You really have no clue what you are talking about and are gravely missing the point of this cafe.

  • trailofdead

    Mr Plafke, I don’t think you even walked into this place. For one thing your quotes and photos are lifted from this article

    http://torontoist.com/2010/08/board_game_cafe_welcomes_you_but_not_your_laptop.php

    Not sure why you took such a negative spin on the place. You are right, every other cafe offers wi-fi, therefore this one does not. You don’t come to this cafe to surf the web, you come to be social and play board games….talk about missing the point man…

  • haslo

    Gee, what a very silly article. I’m not quite sure what world it is that you live in, Mr. Plafke, but personally I live in one where it’s perfectly possible to have one café with WiFi and another one without but with board games, and when I want WiFi I go into the one with, and when I want board games I go into one with board games. In fact, even in places with WiFi, I’ll rarely use it because my mobile data plan is flat and offers ample data.

    Unfortunately, since I live in Switzerland, there is no such place on the continent I live, nor on any continent that mine isn’t divided from by considerable amounts of water, but Toronto has such a place. Which is awesome, totally, and I’d LOVE to have a place with that nearby. Heck, you have such a place and talk it down, obviously without the slightest bit of a clue how much on the rise board games are, and without having done the slightest bit of research.

    I think you should wake up some time. And try some board games, the BoardGameGeek is a good place to start. We have a recommendation forum for newcomers, and are generally quite friendly and welcoming. Unless people are silly and rude, that is, which I’m sure you didn’t mean to be.

    @FrankleeMiDeer What a fine distinguished choice of words. Glad to see you proven wrong in other first-hand comments already, too.