For months now, John Evan Lee and Taylor Reynolds have been working to develop a ‘round-the-clock café, based on models sprouting up around the country. In addition to light food and drink, the concept ultimately revolves around games—hundreds and hundreds of them. The seniors at Washington University have gotten far enough along that a website for Revolution Game House has been developed, as well as an ambitious, $40,000 Kickstarter campaign to help move their entrepreneurial dream from idea to reality.
Wanting to start their café in the Delmar Loop area, which they’ve grown familiar with during their time as students, the pair have isolated about three locations as their primary targets, with one Delmar storefront moving into the lead. Though they'd like to open as early as February of 2017, they’ve given themselves some leeway, figuring that launch could come as late as August of next year, “depending on financing,” according to Lee.
“We don’t think of it as just a student spot,” says a naturally upbeat Reynolds. “The reason that board game cafés are popular—here in the US, around Europe and in China—is that they draw of a lot of different human impulses.”
And one of those that he cites is “competiton.”
As it turns out, they’ve just learned that they’ve got competition to getting their concept to the market first. As reported on the Riverfront Times website last Friday, another board game café, Pieces, is targeting the old Franco space near Soulard Market. Founded by a trio of operators, that group’s looking at something similar to Revolution Game House, even down to launching a Kickstarter; as of last night, Pieces had raised over $8,000 on a $5,000 goal.
“We found out about that in the last week, or so,” Reynolds says, trying to distance the two. “In some ways, I think we’re really going after very different groups of people.”
They point to geography as an example of a difference. They note that their version, Revolution, will be located in neighborhood “with the highest foot traffic in St. Louis. It’ll be very accessible.”
While not exclusively catering to Wash U.’s population, the two did find a genesis for their idea while looking for off-study haunts in the Loop. Meshuggah and Blueprint, two of the Loop’s coffeehouses, have students through all the time. But the pair want to push hours far deeper into the night than those venues, while allowing for comfortable places where students can crash for multiple hours. While onsite, the hope is that customers study with coffee, perhaps play a few games with friends (or strangers) and maybe settle into a light meal or some drinks (if 21-and-up, of course).
They also mention wanting to create a space that teens and tweens find fun, where “they’re taken seriously and can be a serious space for them,” according to Lee.
The pair were under 21 themselves when they spent the better part of a summer playing a “Game of Thrones” board game that helped lock them into the idea. Further research, both in-and-out of the classroom, were wedded to the idea which, in some ways, came from a November, 2014 edition of The Atlantic magazine, which sketched out the rise of board game cafés.
From that piece: “While some board-game cafés cater to kids—The Brooklyn Strategist opened in response to what the owner saw as a growing need for after-school activities that didn’t involve sports or crafts—the majority are geared toward a mix of adults and families during the day, shifting toward an adult crowd at night. And, more importantly, they’re aimed at non-gamers—many of the cafés have a dedicated staff member to help customers choose from a massive wall of games and understand the rules of their game of choice. In other words, customers are typically people who didn’t spend their teen years playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement rec room.”
Reynolds says that “St. Louis very much fits the image of places that’re seeing these cafés. They’re cities with a vibrant startup community. Why not here?”
To that end, he easily drops in references to Cortex and Venture Café, having obviously spent hhis own study time in the startup community here.
“One of the things that gets talked about a lot at Venture Café is ‘serendipitous collisions’ for the betterment of business,” says Reynolds. “We see that happening socially in our space. You go in by yourself, or with a friend, and you wind up meeting people. Games cause people to open up and be themselves and that allows for the great possibility of friendships. You’ll see what they’re playing at the next table and think yours is lame and you wind up wanting to join their game.”
Like many folks in the startup sector, both Lee (California) and Reynolds (Georgia) are transplants.
Says Reynolds, “We fell in love with this place and want to stay here. Why not create the type of spaces we’d want, in order to stay?”
Lee admits that they “might be in a minority with that mindset. But we want to try and start something here.”
Reynolds says the idea of students counting down time in St. Louis, until moving to another city is “not an impulse that I’ve understood. I’ve really liked it here. We want to create spaces that we give people a reason to stay here. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m on a mission to get everyone [at Washington University] to stay in St. Louis. I even tell all my friends at the Ivys, ‘No, seriously, come to St. Louis.’ That’s part of my personal mission, long-term. What are the places that would get my peers to stay here, to get Wash U. kids to stay?”
For starters, that mission will involved a 50-60 person games cafe.
One that Lee notes will have something important to keeping people around, whether that be for an afternoon gaming, or a lifetime in St. Louis: “comfortable chairs.”
