Maybe I don’t pay enough attention anymore, but since when have there been places where you rent a table to play board games? It’s a decidedly nerdy idea, which makes it perfect for China (a decidedly nerdy country). I had never heard of such a place until this past Sunday when a few friends invited me to join them to play some board games. I thought we would be going to a coffee shop or something, but we in fact were going to a store devoted to board games that rents out tables and rooms to parties of people. What a fantastic idea!
I took the subway to the 东唱路 subway station on the other futurtistic skyscraper-dense side of the river. After wandering the oddly eerie underground mall that sits above the subway station I finally found 悠来游趣. This store, pictured above, has a massive collection of board games and card games that you can play there if you rent a table (30 yuan/hour). Not only do you get to try tons of games but they also throw in free non-alcoholic beverages and have a staff that can walk you through how to play any and all of the games. We started by playing a card game where each player represents a dot-com company, whoever goes bankrupt last wins. We later moved onto another card game called saboteur, where teams try and tunnel to gold or sabotage those tunneling. It was all a lot more fun than I expected and the five hours we spent there went by in a flash. All in all a nice way to spend an afternoon. It was also cheaper than the many other activities available in this city and since it included no alcohol and was a generally leisurely affair it was perfect way to hang out with my Muslim friend during Ramadan. I will definitely be going back sometime.
These board game stores are apparently really popular all over Shanghai and can end up costing a lot of money, ours was on the cheaper end of the spectrum. In China there seems to be a love of renting out spaces to socialize in. The obvious example is karaoke (KTV, in Chinese), but coffee shops, restaurants, internet bars all offer private rooms to hang out with friends. People’s apartments are often small and can be kind of barren in China, so renting space to hang out with friends, even just to play a board game, makes sense here.
