Have you ever heard of the Treehouse in Sheffield?

It is one of several café bars which are popping up across the country which are dedicated to the people who love playing board games.

In the past, people who wanted to play games such as Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons would gather in pokey back rooms above shops or clubs.

There would often be too many people to do it at someone’s house and so they had to look elsewhere to host their game nights.

I don’t know a lot about board games, but I do know that some such as Dungeons and Dragons can drag on for hours.

And what do people do when they spend hours together?

They eat and drink.

A game night is a social event after all.

Think of a group of guys meeting up for a poker night like the ones you see in the movies.

You can imagine it clearly, all huddled around a table sharing jokes, drinking bottles of beer, downing glasses of whisky, chewing down on nuts and crisps, and possibly waiting for a takeaway pizza or two to arrive.

I imagine that people who meet to play games such as Dungeons and Dragons would take bags of snacks and drinks to enjoy while they played.

The food and drink issue is easy to sort with a trip to the local supermarket but the problem of finding somewhere to host your nights other than using small dingy rooms is not so easy to remedy.

Gamers may meet once a week or maybe just once a month, they don’t want to have to pay a monthly rent for premises where they only meet up every now and then.

So what is the alternative?

If you can’t gather comfortable at a person’s home, you don’t want to or can’t pay a monthly rent to use a decent room now and then, and don’t relish using a pokey and dingy back room above a shop, what can you do instead?

Go to the board game bar and café.

The people behind café bars like Treehouse have realised that there is a need for places where gamers can go and enjoy playing their games in a nicer environment with a better ambience.

Not only that, because people like to eat and drink while they play, places like Treehouse can supply gamers with a steady flow of food and drinks.

Places like Treehouse are appealing because there is no cost to actually going to them and there is food and drink on tap.

Treehouse also doubles up as a co-working space on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays during school term time between 9am and 3.45pm giving students and remote workers who need somewhere to work an office for the day where they can use the Wi-Fi, toilets and the added bonus of being able to order food and drinks.

Treehouse say that they have over 800 board games for people to play with and they also have their own shop dedicated to selling board games.

What I like about this is that it has a similar concept to the sports bar made popular by Wayne Lineker (brother of ex-professional footballer and television pundit Gary Lineker) who opened up the chain Lineker’s.

It is niche specific.

Lineker’s combined watching sports with drinking beer and eating food.

Sports fans across the world love to eat and drink when watching large sporting events.

It made sense to put the two together…

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