It was Grandma, in the café with a Scrabble tile: Game cafés are big holiday business

It's the holidays, which means for many across the Prairies, there's no better time to get locked in a dungeon with a dragon.

Or smoke out Colonel Mustard in the billiard room with the revolver.

Or — in the case of Janet Gutierrez and Katy Cadman — lay that magical X tile on a triple-letter score.

"It's the human contact," Gutierrez said, lifting her head from a recent lunchtime Scrabble battle with Cadman at D6 Tabletop Café in Calgary.

"We spend time and I know her interests and she knows mine … You don't find this very often, right?"

Between rounds, the two can stare up at more than three walls of 650 games advertised in brightly coloured titles, divided into young adult, family-friendly, first-timer and experienced gamer categories.

"It's just a nice atmosphere," said Gutierrez. "It isn't noisy and they have food available that you can buy and stay the whole day."

Cadman said she normally plays video games, but sometimes likes a change of pace.

"We're regulars here," Cadman added. "We come just to play games. Just to kill time."

Board gaming and the board gaming business tend to peak as families and friends gather for the holidays. But, like everything else, it's at the mercy of economic and geopolitical peaks and troughs.

Solomon Kwan, 30, who opened D6 Tabletop Café with his older brother Michael, said he and his family have always played board games, especially when public gatherings were cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"During the isolation, I played a lot of board games with my parents. We had a lot of time and funnily enough my mom said, 'If you're going to buy another game you'd better turn it into a business,'" Kwan said with a laugh.

"So we did.

"We just wanted to bring people together, especially after the isolation, and board games was the perfect way to do it."