How to Get Your Board Game Into Board Game Cafes: A Guide for Indie Designers

Board game cafes are one of the most underused organic marketing tools available to indie board game designers, and getting your game on their shelves is easier than you might think. I've been working to get copies of Station Decimus into board game cafes, tracking what works and what doesn't . This guide starts with how to identify which ones to approach through to how to approach them.

Getting a game into a board game cafe can be a great opportunity for designers and also benefit the cafes. I have a copy of Station Decimus in the first board game cafe with more planned, as part of my content strategy focused all around getting the game in front of people to make their own mind up on. The cafe owner was happy to have it. Read on for more information on how I went about getting a board game into cafes and what I put in the box 

If you'd rather watch, the video below covers the same topic.

Why Board Game Cafes Are a Great Organic Marketing Opportunity

Reason 1: The audience is already in the right mindset

When someone walks into a board game cafe, the majority of them will at some point want to play something new or at the very least something they don't own. They want to experience something new and that's exactly what your game is. If it's sat on a shelf alongside other games it's got a great chance of being picked up.

Reason 2: Access to a completely new market

Board game cafes give you a great way of reaching out into audiences you wouldn't have access to otherwise. Not everyone will see your socials, not everyone is on socials. This is an organic way of reaching those people.

Reason 3: Removes the barrier to playing

I've talked before about using a print and play to get people to try the game and it can work really well, but there's still the barrier of printing and cutting out the game before it gets played. This removes that barrier entirely, just requiring someone to pick the game up and get going with it. Of course it doesn't have the same reach as a print and play so the two work well hand in hand. If you want to try the Station Decimus print and play, sign up below.

How Cafe Owners Benefit Too

Cafes with prototypes of unreleased games have an extra angle to attract people. It gives their customers unique and interesting insights into upcoming games they can't get elsewhere. Normally these kind of things are only reserved for conventions and events, this is a much more accessible version for a lot of people. I'll also be telling everyone I can about the chance to play Station Decimus at Noughts and Nibbles - meaning they get free publicity too!

The cafe owners aren't expected to pay anything so they get and extra game in their library for free. If it turns out it's not very popular they can just let you know it's not being played and you can take it back or send it elsewhere. 

How to find Board Game Cafes to Share Your Game With

The obvious approach is to Google board game cafes near you and send them all an email. The problem with that is it doesn't give the cafes the attention they deserve. The people running them have put a lot of time and effort into building something, and it's only fair to put in some effort to make sure it's a good fit for both sides.

With limited copies of Station Decimus I needed to make sure I used them effectively, so I built a rough framework to identify which cafes to approach and in which order.

Shortlisting Cafes Using AI

I used AI to scrape board game cafes and apply a set of criteria to them, giving me a shortlist I could then manually verify. Automating this step was important because there are a lot of cafes out there, many of which have closed or moved, so the information you first find on them isn't always reliable. Getting a rough ordered list and then checking each one myself gave me a much better starting point than working through them all manually.

How To Know If a Cafe Is a Good Fit For You

Distance and drive time from home was the main factor, not just for logistics of delivering games but because I want to build genuine relationships with cafe owners rather than just dropping a game off and disappearing. Copies going further afield would need to be shipped, which adds cost and means the relationship piece is harder.

I also categorised venue type. Searching for board game cafes returns a wide range of results including local game stores, dedicated board game cafes, cafes with a couple of games in the corner, and community venues like village halls. Which category a venue falls into significantly affects how likely they are to accept a prototype and how likely their customers are to want to play one. I wanted to focus specifically on dedicated board game cafes.

Finally I looked for indicators that a cafe would be open to a prototype, things like whether they host playtesting events or have stocked indie games before.

Three types of outreach

Once I had a prioritised shortlist I broke outreach into three categories:

1. Relationship targets: cafes close enough to visit in person and build an ongoing relationship with the owner.

2. Warm outreach: cafes where I could find enough information online to make a genuinely personalised approach, explaining specifically why I thought it would be a good fit for them.

3. Cold outreach: cafes where I had limited information and it was more of a straightforward introduction with less specific reasoning.

This not only gives me a sensible way to frame the communication, but also gives me a good priority ordering.

What to Put in the Box?

Inside the lid of the box there is a note which thanks the players for playing to give them more information on how to reach me with any feedback, and a QR code to the website if they would like to follow along for the Kickstarter. Making sure this is part of the box ensures it won't get taken away or lost, letting the prototype continue to work for both feedback and marketing. This is something I do for all copies now, including blind platesting.

Prototype quality matters more for cafe copies than it does for blind playtesting copies. People in a cafe are probably going to treat the game slightly rougher than you would with your own copies. With my Kickstarter around nine months away at the time of writing I need to make sure the game can survive nine months of being picked up, played and put back on a shelf without falling apart. The spray adhesive method I covered in my prototyping article is what I use and it is sturdy enough for this.

The copy I dropped off with Phil is a prototype, but it's his to keep as long as he wants it. The added benefit of him being close by is that if rules or cards change, I can drop off updated components. I have also offered Phil a free copy of Station Decimus once the Kickstarter funds, to sit permanently in the cafe library, as a thank you for housing the prototype. That offer makes the arrangement genuinely beneficial for both sides rather than just asking for a favour.

Managing Cafe Copies and Following Up

Having a copy in a cafe is not a one time thing. The plan with Noughts and Nibbles is to reach out again in about a month if I haven't had a reason to visit anyway, which I may well have done in the meantime because it is a genuinely nice cafe. When I follow up I want to understand a few things. Has anyone picked the game up and played it? Has anyone given feedback to Phil that never made it back to me directly? And what is the shelf presence like - is the game getting noticed or being overlooked? That last question is particularly interesting. I do not expect a handmade prototype to have the same shelf presence as a published game, but it gives me at least some indication of how the final product might fare.

In the meantime I am hoping to make a few more copies to get into a few more cafes. The goal is to have a handful of copies sitting in cafes and hopefully being played regularly by the time the Kickstarter launches, getting the game in front of as many people as possible before the campaign goes live.

Getting your game into a cafe costs very little and the impact can be very real. The mutual benefit means you shouldn't struggle to find a cafe who'll take a copy of your game and the owners I've spoken to have all been incredibly friendly.

If you're in the Bicester area I can't recommend Noughts and Nibbles enough, you can even try a game of Station Decimus while you're there! If not you can sign up below and get a Print and Play version straight away.