When Michelle Kong started a chess club last year, hoping to meet other players in their 20s, attendance was so meager that she needed only one chessboard. She posted about the club on social media until a tattooed cross section of young people in Los Angeles began showing up to exchange pawns and phone numbers.
Before long, boxes of triple-weighted bishops and rooks were piling up in the back seat of Ms. Kong’s sedan. Last December she upgraded the club’s home base from a cozy jazz bar to a warehouse that was barely large enough to accommodate the 500 people who attended the Thursday night meetings of the group, LA Chess Club, this summer.
“It kind of blew up,” said Ms. Kong, 27, who is in urgent need of a place to store 200 chessboards.
Staring down an epidemic of loneliness, people in their 20s and 30s are gathering to play chess, backgammon and mahjong in hopes that old-fashioned game clubs might help ease the isolation and digital overload that weigh heavily on their generation.
Many have already been experimenting with more physical alternatives to doomscrolling like pickleball and running clubs. But organizers like Ms. Kong say that the kind of board games stored in their grandparents’ attics are hot among Gen Z-ers and millennials hungry for less athletic modes of socialization.
“A running club sounds like absolute torture to me,” said Victoria Newton, 35, who has been hosting Knightcap Chess Club events in Austin, Texas, since July. “I have found that it’s easier to connect with someone when I’m not trying to catch my breath or covered in sweat.”
Board game sales in the United States surged more than 30 percent from 2019 to 2020, fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic, said Juli Lennett, a toy industry adviser for Circana, a market research firm. Stuck at home and starved for social interaction, many Americans were able to “rediscover the love of gameplay,” she said.
The habit appears to have made it out of lockdown: The number of board game events organized using the invitation service Partiful quadrupled in the past year, the company said. The number of groups related to board games on Meetup increased roughly 10 percent per year from 2021 to 2023.
Espresso martinis in hand, this wave of players seems eager to dispel the nerdy, stuffy or ultracompetitive reputations of game clubs past.
Eduardo Rojer, 30, attracts players to his free Rummikub meet-ups in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn through a colorful Instagram page where he posts memes about the tile game involving Charli XCX and Paris Hilton. The monthly club has drawn around 80 people to each meeting since Mr. Rojer started it in July, after having learned the game from a friend and her mother during the early months of the pandemic.
“From what I hear, it’s something you used to play with your grandma,” Mr. Rojer said. “I wanted to make this game kind of hot and relevant.”
Back to Basics
Young people are only several thousand years late to the board game boom.
Tabletop games are about as old as civilization itself, said Zachary Horton, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies games. But they may be especially attractive to a generation that is fully saturated by digital media, he said, and living in an acrimonious political era in which it can feel like different groups are playing by their own rules.
“The analog game stubbornly insists on its own presence,” Professor Horton said.
Formal clubs devoted to board games gained steam in the United States in the 19th century, when wealthy men could meet for competitive play at the Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club in San Francisco and the Manhattan Chess Club in New York. As different game styles became more popular, gatherings shifted too, Professor Horton said. Role-playing games of the 1970s gave rise to Dungeons & Dragons groups, and board game cafes and bars proliferated in the early 2000s, catering to players of elaborate strategy games like Catan.
But with more games to choose from than ever before — including video games — many young players are drawn to the classics. Among Gen Z, Professor Horton said, “it couldn’t be a clearer or stronger movement toward analog play.”
Remington Davenport thinks that a sense of nostalgia is part of the draw of NYC Backgammon Club, the group she started last year for young people to play a 5,000-year-old game many attendees learned from parents and grandparents. Ms. Davenport, 35, said she had felt out of place at the existing backgammon events that she had been able to find in New York City.
“I was really disappointed with the lack of women at these events, and the lack of people in their 20s and 30s,” she said.
More than 3,500 people in all have come to the frequent meet-ups that NYC Backgammon Club holds at restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Ms. Davenport said. (Admission is about $10 per event.) In April, she left her job in sales to focus on backgammon full time.
Other board game groups aim to help young people connect to the history of those who played before them. Green Tile Social Club in New York and Mahjong Mistress in Los Angeles are aiming to help the next generation learn to play mahjong, a tile game that is believed to have originated in China in the 19th century but has long been played throughout Asia.
Mahjong Mistress — made up of Angie Lin, 33; Abby Wu, 27; Susan Kounlavongsa, 38; and Zoé Blue, 30 — holds meet-ups every couple of months that cost $15 to $25 and often draw hundreds of people. The hosts organize Lunar New Year parties and mahjong matchmaking nights where enthusiasts can flirt while discussing the specifics of riichi versus Taiwanese mahjong.
“People are looking for wholesome activities,” Ms. Lin said, pointing to data that Gen Z is consuming less alcohol than older generations. Well, mostly wholesome: “Our first singles night, we had two people making out at the end of it.”
‘People Are Dancing Here’
On a drizzly Tuesday evening in December, a line of creative types huddled under umbrellas on Canal Street in Manhattan. They were waiting to climb five flights of stairs to the apartment where a chess club was underway.
Paradoxically, several of the city’s liveliest game groups are dedicated to perhaps the fustiest game of all: chess. Its popularity has spiked among adolescents in recent years, fueled by a combination of the pandemic, the 2020 Netflix mini-series “The Queen’s Gambit” and a campaign to target young people by Chess.com, an app and website for online chess. (The game’s status was reinforced when Sally Rooney, 33, one of her generation’s buzziest authors, released the chess-forward novel “Intermezzo” in September.)
There seems to be a chess club for practically every scene in New York City, where players have long frequented the Marshall Club in Greenwich Village or the open-air tables in Washington Square Park. Now, they might try Queers Gambit, which describes itself on social media as the “queerest anti-imperialist chess club on earth,” or Club Chess, which has hosted chess nights at Le Bain and New York Fashion Week parties with Maison Margiela.
A.L. Bahta, 30, an artist and musician, and Corrine Ciani, 28, a writer and event producer, had nightlife in mind when they started Club Chess last year. “There’s a lot of traditional chess clubs in New York, and that’s sort of not the angle we’ve ever went in,” Ms. Ciani said. “We’ve had people play chess in front of D.J. booths — like, on the floor — and we’ve had to be like, ‘Sorry, people are dancing here.’”
This particular line was for Pawn Chess Club, a beginner-friendly group that cycles through wine bars and restaurants in Lower Manhattan. Its founders, Isabel Münter, 32, and Simone Robert, 29, co-workers at a design studio, bustled around the candlelit apartment, where guests crowded around two long tables of chessboards and sipped sake from boxes with straws.
“People are just so eager to meet other people,” Ms. Münter said. “There’s something very nice about a chessboard, where you can sit in total silence with a stranger across from you because you’re focusing, or it can be a totally chatty game.”
The group’s pay-what-you-want events have been held every two or three weeks since the spring of 2023 and regularly draw more than 100 guests. An unscientific poll of attendees yielded wide-ranging reasons for attendance: Some were there to play chess, others to watch. A few were on dates. Several wanted a night out that would not leave them exhausted or hung over.
Linsen Chai, 29, an exhibition designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said he had loathed chess when his father had encouraged him to learn the game as a child. But he was surprised by how much he enjoyed playing in the relaxed environment of the chess club.
“I’m trying to make it part of my life again, which is very full circle,” he said. “When I told my dad I was going to a chess club, he outright laughed.”
He returned to the room where a throng of people were watching Anya Biggs, a chess tutor and member of several of the city’s chess clubs, advance her knight. When it looked as if the game might be reaching its conclusion, a man turned to the strangers standing on either side of him.
“Anyone want to play?” he asked.
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