All Fun and Games

“How do we possibly decide?”

Intimidated by the colorful abundance before me, I gaze up at the overloaded bookcase of board games, its rickety wooden shelves jammed with unfamiliar titles like Fauna and Smallworld Realms and Cargo Noir. The plain old Boggle and Scrabble of my youth are nowhere to be seen among these obscure piles of wannabe Battleships and aspiring Apples to Apples. Should we try Dice City first? What about Cube Quest: Clash for the Crown? Would High Noon Saloon be our best bet?

Luckily, Laura has no such trouble finding a favorite. “Giant Jenga!” she squeals, grabbing a worn container about as tall as her knee from the bottom of the bookshelf. But minutes later, as the heavy wooden blocks come tumbling down dangerously near Laura’s mug of hot chocolate, the selection no longer seems like such a terrific idea. Not to fear: We have a box of Schmovie waiting in the wings.

On a chilly Friday night in February, I meet up with my friends Laura and Cassidy at Brookline’s delightfully quirky Knight Moves Café, which has the distinction of calling itself the only board game café in New England. Packed to the gills with 750 to 1,000 board games and a couple dozen 20-somethings, you can find the cozy din of a coffeehouse and the boisterous energy of a game night squeezed between the bookcases in the narrow shop on Beacon Street.

Founder Devon Trevelyan thought up the board game café concept when he worked at Eureka Puzzles down the road. He opened Knight Moves two years ago, and he has built the store’s formidable collection ever since by reaching out to game developers, seeking out game donations from Eureka and the public, and regularly buying new games.

“Almost everybody has played a board game in their lives,” says Jonathan Miles, a manager at Knight Moves, as he discusses the charm of the place. “So the idea of going somewhere and playing a board game while also having coffee or tea or pastries is a very attractive idea to most people, but not one that they ever would have thought of on their own.”

Though Miles likes to start uninitiated clients on a game called Splendor, some customers do not require assistance picking out activities to fill their stay. On a cushioned bench against the back wall, Emerson students Audrey Stewart and Carl Levigne—newbies at Knights Moves who have already plowed through Corrupted Kingdoms and chess—hunch over a round of Rat-a-Tat Cat. “It’s a game I used to play as a kid, and I couldn’t believe they had it because I haven’t seen it anywhere,” Stewart explains. “So I just grabbed it and [said], ‘We have to play it now.’”

But if you, like me, do not have a particular game in mind as you approach the bookshelves, the staff at Knight Moves has got you covered. (Word to the wise: Do not come to the café in hopes of revisiting Hungry Hungry Hippos. Though the shop boasts hundreds of games, that one did not make the cut.) Our encyclopedic waiter Daniel Ansted approaches us at the beginning of the evening to help us make some choices.

“What level of brain activity are you looking for tonight?” he asks.

“Very little,” I assure him—I have more than enough brain activity waiting for me back at Harvard.

He quickly returns with Concepts, a sort of Pictionary in which the drawings are done for you on a board of illustrations. The contestant pulls a noun from a deck of cards—garden hose, Mary Poppins, pajamas, and Rubik’s Cube, to name a few—and places pegs on indicative illustrations until her peers figure out the secret word. The game has no discernible goal, but it keeps us entertained for a surprisingly long time.

Popping by our table every now and then, Ansted—who notes that he “got promoted from customer to employee”—needs no prompting to replenish our supply of board games or give us advice. The man is a human Amazon recommendation: “If you liked Schmovie, you’ll love Channel A,” he chimes in at one point. After he spots us eyeing the R-rated guessing game Dirty Minds on a nearby shelf, he wordlessly hands us F**ktionary, which my parents may be pleased to know we do not end up playing.

One of the cleverest aspects of Knight Moves is how easily it facilitates conversation, a quality that is sure to spill over to the new Somerville location launching this spring. If you have lots to say to your companions, you can easily chat over a game of Billionaire Banshee and a platter of hot dogs. And if you run out of things to say to your companions, look up—750 to 1,000 conversation starters are lining the walls around you.

“[Knight Moves allows] people to come and connect with one another outside of our modern-day lives. It’s outside of cell phones and electronics. It’s... old-fashioned, ‘Let’s sit here around a table and talk and drink,’” Miles comments. “It’s a lot more face time than most people get at other places.”

Indeed, in this comfortable little nook in Brookline, I feel fully engaged in my discussions with Laura and Cassidy, far away from the buzzes of laptops and the pressures of deadlines and the screeches of alarms. As we sip our glass-bottled Coca-Colas, roll our dice, and merrily gab our way through the night, I come to believe that Knight Moves Café just might have a monopoly on fun.