Communities provide support to tabletop cafés
The impact of COVID on the hospitality and retail industry has been well documented, with UK hospitality yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, and some of UK’s biggest cities experiencing a year’s worth of loss in retail sales.
This impact also affected tabletop outlets, who hold a more niché target than general cafés or retail, aiming their space and sales at the roleplay and adjacent hobbies. Many of these outlets hold in-person events or encourage visitors to spend entire evenings hosting their own games, activities which help supplement product revenue.
“A lot of extra steps other hospitality services didn’t have”
One of these cafés is Meeple Perk, Newcastle’s first dedicated boardgame café which opened November 2018. The independent business, which was able to launch following a successful Kickstart campaign, was forced to shut its doors only after around a year and a half later when the March 2020 lockdown was enacted.
“We chose to close a little earlier than other venues being a place where people have to handle game pieces with each other,” Rhi Gotobed, one of the co-founders of the café explained. “All of our bookings started to drop off, and we got to a point where we essentially just went ‘we’re spending money just to be open, and there’s really no need’.” Rhi, alongside co-founder Drew Gotobed, continued on to explain the added risks present with a boardgame café differentiated it from other hospitality services.
“We have the large board game collection and there was a period of time where people were uncomfortable with the idea of coming in here for the long periods of time to play games,” Drew assessed of the situation, especially once hospitality services were permitted to re-open. While people can visit the café during quieter hours just for drinks, food, and somewhere to sit, Meeple Perk’s USP encourages visitors to stay for an hour or a few to play from their library of games.
To help promote COVID safety, Meeple Perk introduced a quarantine system for its games, where they would be seperated from the others once played for a period of time before being cleaned and returned.
The support of the community
Despite being shut, like other commercial businesses, Meeple Perk still had expenses to maintain such as rent. While the Government did introduce support measures a period of time after lockdown had commenced, this still left Meeple Perk with a gap where Rhi and Drew were unsure how they were going to pay rent.
It was during this time that the community the café had built for itself while it was open provided an extra level of support.
“People kept questioning, ‘oh, is there any way we can help out?’ So that’s where the Ko-Fi came from.” Ko-Fi is an membership and donation platform, similar to Patreon. Rhi and Drew set up a Discord server, initially exclusive to people who had at least donated once on the Ko-Fi, but then with tiered free and member access, as a thank you to their community.
“It was the only way we were running games, there was some people on there who were saying they didn’t really speak to anyone else except for the people they met for Meeple Perk on the Discord.”
Other outlets
The Newcastle branches of Geek Retreat, Forbidden Planet, and Travelling Man all had to shut their doors for the lockdown. Erin Young, who joined as a duty manager during the pandemic when Geek Retreat operated as an online-only store, feels that their customers likely missed the opportunity for in-person play at the café store, and by late 2022 they have returned to a near-pre-lockdown state.
