Justin: Twin Cities board game nights are anything but boring

Meeting new people in Minnesota can be tough. It can be a lot easier when you're battling for control of the galaxy.

Board game nights, once intimate enough to take place in coffee shops and church basements, have graduated to Minnesota community centers and microbreweries where strangers bond over their mutual love of dice, cards and wordplay.

Christina Horn, a mother of two who moved to Minneapolis from Texas last year, didn't know a soul at the Richfield Community Center where she turned up on a recent Saturday for its monthly game gathering. She was quickly welcomed by regulars, eager to introduce her to games like Diatoms in which competitors build mosaics out of microscopic algae cells.

"It's hard to meet new people, especially as an adult," said Horn, who contributed a jumbo bag of chips to a snack table that eventually included strawberries, pistachios and pretzels. "We've just now settled in enough where we go on outings like this to find friends. That's the goal."

At St. Paul's Bad Weather Brewery, which hosts game nights every other Tuesday, newcomers blend in with veterans like John Vestrum, who boasted that his teenage daughter did her senior project on how board games are the perfect icebreakers for people who are socially awkward or on the spectrum.

"It gives them an excuse to interact with people, but with rules and regulations," said Vestrum, who works for IT at Minnesota Public Radio. "It's not like walking into a bar. You know what you're going to do."

Places like Bad Weather are eager to fill their ample spaces with more than pub quizzes and stand-up comedy. They're surfing a wave that's been rising since the pandemic, which forced families to raid their closets and pull out dust-covered boxes of Monopoly and Scrabble.

According to Fortune Business Insights, the tabletop market was worth around $13 billion last year, a number expected to jump to $32 billion by 2032.

The Richfield Community Center took note. It started adding monthly get-togethers in 2023. Nina's Coffee Cafe in St. Paul will mostly likely add board game nights if it follows through on plans to extend operating hours into the evening.

St. Paul already has a lot of opportunities to play thanks to Vito Sauro, who hosts eight events a month. At Bad Weather, he worked the room like a cruise director, making sure all of roughly 60 guests had seats and Kit Kats.

"People think about board game nights as something you do at someone's house, but that's kind of insular," said Sauro, who works as a marketer. "These social events are a different animal. If you're not a social person, it's an incredible way to meet people. If you're having a rough go at small talk, you can just play the game."

On a recent Tuesday, Sauro bounced from table to table, lingering over games that were new or unique, like Condottiere, a land-grab battle set in Renaissance Italy that's been out of commission for some time. The guest who brought it said it fell out of the back of a truck, then changed the subject.

Sauro hovered over Azul, a game in which competitors build ornate palace walls. "You just want to eat this stuff," he said, admiring the colorful tiles.

Keeping track of who's ahead is considered bad behavior.

"The next day, nobody remembers who won what," said Rosie O'Loughlin, who helps run the Richfield events. "It's more about the game."

If you want to score points with this crowd, bring an obscure game like Secret Hitler, in which players must identify who among them is the evil dictator before he or she gets elected chancellor.

In Richfield, Nadine Sehnert and Mike Tangedal popped by to chat about other oddities. The couple, who have traveled as far away as Germany for gaming conventions, keep more than 4,000 titles in their basement. But they seemed a little envious when a friend described his copy of Do the Urkel!, in which contestants don cardboard glasses and simulate the "Family Matters" character's dance with their fingers.

Sehnert, who helps run the Twin Cities Board Games Meetup group, said tastes are changing.

"Vampires, ogres and dragons are still out there, but the new games aren't about killing people," she said. "Strategy games are now more about saving the environment. If you bring a big game on the table that's dark and dingy, it may be hard to get new people. But if you put out a game with beautiful cards of birds, that's attractive."

Lindsay Lake, a 30-year-old book designer from St. Paul, is typical of a new generation of fans who see board game nights as a more productive alternative to bar hopping and dating apps.

"I'd rather play a game than be cold talking to someone," she said while slowly learning the rules to Apiary, a hive-building race in outer space. "There's no way I'm going to win this game, but it's fun to work my brain in a different way."

Georgia Ross, a senior at St. Paul Academy, contributed to this story.