Board Game Café

My friend Gabe and I grabbed dinner at Congee Queen at Centerpoint Mall last weekend. It's a newer location that I've never been to before. I thought I'd try it because I was planning on going there with the guys from hockey the following week.

Like the rest of the chain, the restaurant looked nice inside. Service is decent and the food comes pretty quickly. Since there were only two of us we didn't order much. Just a plate of soft-shell crab fried rice and rice rolls. I was hoping for the beef rice rolls, but we got plain ones.

After dinner my friend wanted to try out a board game café. He found one called, For The Win, located on Yonge, a bit north of Lawrence. So we drove down there to have a look.

Even though we got there fairly late, being a Saturday night it was full. Still, we waited less than 10 minutes for a table.

It's kind of like a library inside. But, instead of books, the walls are lined with board games. The tables are in the back half of the café, while the area where they sell coffee and snacks is at the front. You can also purchase games from a selection up by the entrance too.

Gabe picked a couple of games from the back - Guillotine and Jaipur. Out of the two, we only played Guillotine. It's a pretty simple card game where you have to collect different valued cards (out of 15 lined up on the table) in three rounds. Each player is give action cards which enables them to manipulate the order of the cards on the table. The player with the highest total value of their cards at the end wins.

I then went to the back and found a game that looked all right - Word on the Street. To set up the game, seventeen letter tiles (all the consonants in English other than j, q, x, and z) are placed in a strip down the centre of the game board – the median strip of the street, if you will, which has two "traffic lanes" on either side of it.

On a turn, one player/team is presented with a category such as "types of fruit" or "something a player is wearing", and that team has thirty seconds to come up with an answer in that category, then move the letters in that word toward their side of the game board. Any letters in the word that are not on the game board are skipped. If the answer were "pineapple", for example, the team would move P, N, P, P and L.

If a player/team moves a letter off the game board, it has claimed that letter and that tile will not move for the remainder of the game. The first team to claim eight letter tiles wins.

It was pretty fun. Most tables had at least four people. I think you have more options with the games the more people you have.

It cost $5 per person (no in and out privileges). The have beverages and snacks. We had an Americano (coffee) for around $3 which tasted awful. I also bought a board game that I had tried previously and liked - Code Names. I really enjoy it.