nithya ramesh and her 12yearold son have a weekend tradition that they never miss they spend their saturdays at a board game caf in egmore munching on snacks and playing tabletop games and puzzles well in the past few years chennai has seen a rise in cafes and lounges that offer fun puzzles and board games on their menus and chennaiites seem to have been making the most of it these cafes sort of helped me gain more interest in board games admits manish whos into brand management adding while in school i used to play monopoly that was the only board game i knew incidentally a friend once took me to one of these boardroom cafes and since then im hooked arjun and chithra who run one such caf in adyar tell us they did not expect the concept to pick up we are avid board gamers and have been buying these games since 2011 we were also part of a group on facebook which comprised other such enthusiasts we met for the first time in 2015 for a game and continue to play even todaythe love and energy at these meetups prompted us to think if there was space for something like that in chennai they recall we started small and turned a part of our place into a caf we thought wed get people visiting us on weekends and during weekdays we could go about doing our work but when we shared the fliers on social media it went viral and we had almost 5060 people turn up to play board games on the first dayvarun shravan and sriram who got together through a boardgames club started their own such caf in mylapore a year before the pandemic hit us hard shravan and i ran a boardgames club in 201718 we met sriram at a tournament we hosted and got talking about taking out a space to start a games caf in six months we realised there was a huge market for this says varunnithya a market analyst in the financial sector says she became a regular at these cafs after the pandemic in the first year while being holed up at home my son and i started playing paramapadham and pallanguzhi he then started playing them online i stumbled upon this caf in egmore recently when i had gone there with my colleagues my son enjoys exploring new games every week and it also helps build his concentration strategic thinking abilities and problemsolving skills she saysdhivya sundar a homemaker recalls i used to hang out with friends at a caf where they had traditional board games unfortunately the place shut because of logistic reasons somewhere in 20142015 cut to now there are so many options in the city for board gaming enthusiasts and it is a lot of funthese cafes are quite a hit with kids say senthil and subhadra who quit their corporate job in 2019 to start a puzzles place in teynampet they