GLENDALE, Calif. — The owners of the Game Haus Cafe, a coffee house and fast-casual eatery built by board game fans for board game fans, are opening up their deep game library for lending, with a monthly subscription service.
For $30 per month, subscribers can borrow up to two games at a time from a collection of more than 1,800 board games. On Tuesday night, February 2, Game Haus ran its first night of game pickups at the cafe.
“I was amazed that we’ve gotten such a good response,” said Robert Cron, a Game Haus co-owner. “It’s exciting — we get to see folks, regulars, who we’d seen as customers for years.”
Little more than seven years ago, Cron and Terry Chiu went all-in to bring what was then a wholly new venture to the West Coast: a cafe with its walls stacked floor-to-ceiling with board games for customers to dig into.
The goal, they said, was to create a warm, comfortable place to spend time with friends and family. “It had to be like the Friends coffee house, some place to spend 8 hours playing Risk,” Cron said.
It worked. On the average weekend in Game Haus Cafe, nearly every table in the house (or haus, if you prefer) was packed. People would pay less than $10 for a day-pass, good from open to close, and tables would be packed with clattering dice, cards slapping down, and gamers laughing.
But as it turns out, a business model predicated on people spending hours upon hours in the same place, eating, drinking, and passing around board games, is tricky to run during a global pandemic.
Game Haus closed due to COVID on March 14 last year — or Pi Day, Cron remembers. “We made the decision that we couldn’t really go on, and then it was two or three days later that the county shut everything down,” he said.
They figured that the business would stay closed for a few months until COVID settled down and the county got a handle on things.
When the county briefly announced that businesses could reopen at reduced capacity, Cron remembered looking through the pages of the county's requirements for reopening, and one line stuck out.
“Discontinue use of shared equipment, such as board games, darts, or card games,” Cron said. “There you go. That just shot this model in the foot.”
Game Haus’s model is at odds with the typical restaurant’s plan — instead of turning tables and hustling customers in and out as quickly as possible, Game Haus wants customers to linger, stay as long as they want, play some games, ordering snacks and drinks at their leisure.
The business hung in limbo for months. Eventually, the cafe took to selling its signature pies and desserts in weekly drops, based on special orders from customers.
Then they worked out the kinks in the subscription model, taking cues from the County Library system. Their games can be checked out two at a time, for a maximum of 14 days. Upon being returned, games are quarantined for 72 hours before going back into circulation.
Game Haus’s clientele is nothing if not passionate. Nearly a dozen long-time customers leaped at the chance to comment on this story and sing the cafe’s praises, many of them long-time customers who began going shortly after the cafe opened.
Amanda Wong, a Twitch livestreamer with a collection of more than 300 games in her own library, was among the cafe’s early-adopters. “The atmosphere is so warm and inviting…at least to me, a female gamer of color, I just find that Game Haus has been the most inviting atmosphere for someone who doesn’t have a group.”
Wong would regularly wander into Game Haus by herself, hopping into groups and meeting new friends — something that was all but impossible in many other game stores, where she would get looks just for walking in wearing high heels.
Clay Larsen, another long-time customer, has recommended the cafe to friends constantly over the years. He and his fiancée recently signed up for the subscription service, with their first pick-up planned for Saturday, as a weekend treat.
“It’s one of those small, local businesses that, in the pandemic…that you want to survive and want to still be around,” Larsen said. “It’s a small thing, and maybe a little bit in our heads, but I think that, with the pandemic, if you can buy a pie or get a monthly subscription to a place like Game Haus, there’s a little feeling like having control over it, in a way.”