Lancaster Board and Sword is a board game café, selling tea, cake, coffee and board games! Open almost every day, we have regular events throughout the week including a D&D night, more than one card gaming league, wargamers and board gamers. The biggest thing is our huge library of board games which can be played in store, letting people try out new and wonderful things!

I got back into board gaming with my partner several years ago at the now sadly defunct Dice and Donuts in Preston. Like most I had played a few games as a kid, but mostly just things like Risk or Monopoly. Seeing a huge library of games and playing things, like Splendor (the only game I consider to be perfect!) made me fall in love with the hobby. Fast forward a few years and some less pleasant jobs and I decided to try and work for myself and built up a small board game store!

Somehow, despite the current situation, we expanded. We moved down the street, and took over the former Sunbury Coffee House, expanding our offering significantly and becoming a board game café. Since doing so our library has more than doubled, our space has doubled, our community has pretty much doubled and our workload has definitely at least tripled! It is absolutely amazing and I cannot wait to see what 2022 brings for us.

First off we need to finish giving out the rewards to everyone who backed us on Kickstarter and made the move possible. After that it’s sorting out an upstairs room so it can go from storage into another gaming space, which is a hell of a job. Then it’s redo the outdoor seating somewhat, although nothing we can do would make it so you could game outside in the changeable Lancastrian weather! After that, the largest project we want to have done by the end of 2022 is to spin up the kitchen and start doing more than just cake (even if the cake we have is absolutely fantastic!).