Downtown London is home to many coffee shops, but one in particular seems to stand out. The Cardboard Cafe is London’s only board game cafe and it proudly houses over 300 games.
With online presence increasing, many people are being pulled away from face-to-face interaction. Many board game cafes are being introduced around the world to help battle this problem by encouraging interaction and communication through game playing.
While other cafes downtown attract customers for the free wifi, the Cardboard Cafe attracts customers because it is so different. The cafe is all about keeping people from technology and building a type of community that online gaming just doesn’t have the power to do.
Owner of the cafe, Josh Rivers, says the experience of actually having eye contact with your opponent is like no other. He says that the cafe caters to all demographics, bringing different kinds of people together to share their common interest.
“There’s something to do, as opposed to just somewhere to be. Giving a group a focal point and a shared experience makes it a place to go and a thing to do rather than just a ‘where do we go to kill time?’” Josh Rivers
It’s focused around social interaction and community building and with face-to-face conversational skills depleting, board games are great to help master our in-person communication abilities, especially with people we’re not familiar with.
With it’s central location on Dundas Street downtown, the Cardboard Cafe is a great place to go to meet people, do something new and different and pull away from online gaming which seems to be detaching people from social interactions.