One Bloor Street café, credited with a whole global trend
How Toronto Popularized the Board Game Café
Snakes & Lattes opened on Bloor Street in 2010 and is widely credited — even if not literally the very first of its kind — with kicking off the board game café boom that later spread across North America, Europe and East Asia.
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Toronto's coffee culture guide covers the city's third-wave café boom. This is a stranger, more specific offshoot: a single Bloor Street café that's widely credited with launching a global trend in how people play board games in public.
A French couple, a Chicago trip, and a 2010 opening
Snakes & Lattes opened in August 2010 in the Annex, on Bloor Street West, founded by Ben Castanie and Aurelia Peynet after a trip to a Chicago game store gave them the idea: a café where the cover charge got you unlimited access to a huge library of board games, staffed by people who could teach you the rules on the spot.
Not literally first, but the one that mattered
Snakes & Lattes is often described — including in its own marketing — as North America's first board game café, and that specific claim doesn't fully hold up; a small number of similar cafés existed earlier elsewhere. What's better documented is its impact: it's been cited by outlets including The Atlantic and The Guardian as the catalyst that popularized the format, directly inspiring the wave of board game cafés that followed across North America, Europe and East Asia over the following decade.
What it grew into
The original location expanded, and the concept spun off a second Toronto venue, Snakes & Lagers, on College Street — part of a wider format that's since become a familiar fixture in cities well beyond Toronto, all tracing back to one café's bet that people would pay to sit down and actually play something together.
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Sources
- Wikipedia — Snakes & Lattes
- The Globe and Mail — Toronto Board Game Café Snakes and Lattes Gets Its Own Sitcom
- Wikipedia — Board Game Café