A significant portion of the bookings at Cardboard & Cider on Friday and Saturday evenings are couples. Some are regulars who come in every week with a specific game in mind. Others are on a first or second date and have no idea what to ask for. Both groups leave happy if they get the right game, and the wrong game can make a two-hour evening feel much longer.
The most common thing people say when they walk into Cardboard & Cider for the first time is some version of 'I don't know where to start.' Six hundred games on a shelf is a lot to look at. But picking the right game for a group is actually a fairly short conversation once you know what questions to ask.
Campaign board games, the kind that tell a story across six, ten, or even twenty sessions, are some of the most rewarding things in the hobby. They're also the most logistically complicated, especially when your group can only meet once a week and life has a habit of getting in the way. At Cardboard & Cider, we've hosted a number of ongoing campaign groups and have learned a few things about what keeps them going.
When we opened in 2019, the plan was always to pour Ontario cider rather than whatever the big distributors were pushing. Ontario has a genuine cider culture, particularly in the apple-growing regions around the Niagara Peninsula and the counties east of Toronto, and the difference between a well-made local cider and a mass-produced one is significant enough to be worth explaining.
Cooperative board games, where all players work together to beat the game rather than each other, have become one of the most popular categories in the hobby over the past decade. At Cardboard & Cider, they're consistently what we recommend to groups with mixed experience levels, and for good reason.
The private room at Cardboard & Cider gets booked for birthday parties fairly regularly, and over seven years of hosting them Martin has noticed a few things that make the difference between a party that works and one that quietly falls apart by the second hour.
Every game in the Cardboard & Cider library is sleeved. All six hundred of them. This is not something most customers notice until they've visited a cafe where it isn't done and come back to tell us about the difference. Sleeving is the single most time-consuming maintenance task in running a games library, and also the most important.
Good games, cold cider, real company.. Write to us
Learn more about what we do.
Read more AboutMeet the people behind the work.
Read more ContactCome visit, or drop us a line.
Read more PrivacyLearn more about what we do.
Read more TermsLearn more about what we do.
Read more