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The board game cafe on Clement St in SF still has the same worn-out copy of Ticket to Ride from 2006
Went back to a game cafe I used to hit up around 2009 and the shelf of beaten-up classics hit me harder than I expected. The Ticket to Ride box has a taped corner and a route card with someone's name in pen, and the Catan set is missing two road pieces that got replaced with blue ones. What got me was a little index card taped inside the lid that says "please no food on the hexes" in faded marker. Twenty years ago everyone was learning these for the first time, and now the same copy has taught maybe hundreds of people. I keep thinking about how nobody owns these games, they just live at the cafe and pass around. Does anyone else have a local spot with a shelf copy that looks like it's been through a war?
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skylerw878d ago
I used to think worn-out game boxes were just sad, like the cafe was too cheap to buy new ones. Then I played a beat-up copy of Catan at a hostel and saw a whole table of strangers laughing over missing pieces, and it clicked. A fresh box is just cardboard and plastic. A beat-up one has a history, and the taped corners are proof that people actually sat down and played together. That index card you found is basically a tiny piece of everyone who ever argued over wheat and sheep there. My local spot has a Risk board with a hand-drawn map on the back because someone got bored mid-game, and it's honestly the best part of the whole shelf.
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