Elm City Games, with their hundreds of obscure, classic, and strange boardgames for all tabletop gamers, is the perfect place to hide.
In a world of click-bait, seemingly endless post-election drama, and your parents being quite active on Facebook, don’t you feel like disconnecting for a while? In addition, winter’s coming, so you’ll need a place to hide out from the sadness and the snow. What better place to disconnect and hibernate than a cafe…or better yet, a cafe with hundreds of weird, rare, and “fancy” board games for curious amateurs and hardcore tabletop gamers alike. With Elm City Games sharing space, but not hours, with The Happiness Lab, which both feature a full menu of drinks and food, you might not ever leave this spot in New Haven.
Survive: Space Attack! available for play at Elm City Games | Photo courtesy boardgamegeek.com
Elm City Cafe grants you a full days access to over 750 board games in their library. Intriguing games like Survive! Space Attack, familiar titles like Sorry, and quirky card games like We didn’t Playtest This at All, Elm City Games guarantees the five dollar entry fee will be worth it. Yes, there’s a fee to access their library and space; however, the game cafe quite rightly explains and justifies this fee on their website, “Why do we charge people to come play games? Because if we didn’t we wouldn’t be able to maintain the quality of library we want with continued growth while replacing what we have when it gets worn out. It also allows us to pay for dedicated staff to help with whatever needs players might have and keep making improvements to everything.”
Elm City Games menu | Photo courtesy Elm City Games website
If one day of perusing doesn’t seem like enough time, Elm City Cafe also offers special memberships so you can play that 15th game of Ca$h n Gun$ without worrying about misplacing those teenie pistols. In addition, the game cafe has a full calendar of events ranging from casual friendly meet-ups with strangers (Friendsnight!), to an intense D&D Adventure League night (duh).
Whether you’re looking for new pals to game with, or just looking to disconnect from the sordid reality of this post-election news-cycle, head to Elm City Cafe, turn your phone face-down, grab an americano at The Happiness Lab and see if you can outsmart your friends in a game of Agricola.
Elm City Cafe is a boardgame cafe located at 758 Chapel Street in New Haven, Connecticut and open weekday nights from 4:30pm on and all day Saturday and Sunday. Check their website for business hours and be sure to follow them on Facebook and sign up for their newsletter here.
A Happy Life cafe is open during the day at this location, Monday – Friday until 8am – 3pm. See their offerings here.
