Ask a Sheffielder where to spend a Tuesday night that isn’t a pub, and there’s a decent chance they’ll point you to a board game cafe, an arcade, or a bar built entirely around axe throwing. That wasn’t really an option a decade ago. Now the city has three dedicated board game venues running at once, plus a growing run of arcades and battle bars, and none of them look to be running out of custom.
Three Cafes Built the Reputation
The Treehouse started it in 2017, opened by Ruth Haigh and her husband Andy after they noticed board games had, in Haigh’s words, started “dominating” their own social lives. Gamers Guide Cafe followed near the Cathedral in 2024, and Dice Box, the newest of the three, opened on Shepherd Street in 2025.
A BBC feature on the scene, published this January, found all three thriving simultaneously rather than fighting over the same customers, something Haigh puts down to there being enough “space” in the city for all of them. Jim Freeman, who has run games shop Patriot Games since it was a market stall more than thirty years ago, told the BBC the wider hobby has gone “much more mainstream” in recent years, everyone chasing the same goal: “we want more people playing more games.”
That Same Instinct Extends to How People Play Online
The habit behind all three cafes is the same one: choosing a game worth spending an evening on, and doing a bit of comparing before committing to it. That doesn’t stop at board games and battle bars. It stretches to the games people play from a sofa too, and increasingly, to how carefully they pick where to play them. A rundown of new online casino sites in the UK, published by The Independent’s games desk, applies that exact comparison mindset to the online side of things, rating newer platforms against established ones on the size of their game libraries and how quickly they actually pay out, rather than which one shouts loudest about a sign-up offer.
It’s a smaller-scale version of the same question a Dice Box regular asks before booking a table: is this actually going to be worth the evening.
The Arcades and Battle Bars Followed
Board games were only the start. Boom Battle Bar arrived on The Moor in 2022, a 12,000 square foot venue built entirely around competitive activities, axe throwing, shuffleboard, karaoke and ice curling among them, and it hasn’t slowed down since. Retrodome, a family-run retro arcade already established in Barnsley, won its licence this July to open a second site on Allen Street in Shalesmoor, bringing pinball, air hockey and classic cabinets to Kelham Island. Director Phil Thompson has been clear the venue targets families as much as adults, and that none of the machines involve gambling or prizes, just games people pay a flat entry fee to play for as long as they like.
None of this is unique to Sheffield, but the city is one of the clearer examples of something happening nationally. Mintel’s research into what it calls competitive socialising found 71% of UK consumers have now taken part in some form of it, up from 58% just a few years earlier.
Where to Go When You Want All of It in One Place
Sylvester Street’s Church – Temple of Fun has taken the broadest approach of all. Eight years into occupying the Grade II-listed Osborn Works, it now mixes a fully vegan menu, regular live music and interactive darts lanes that can host up to twelve players at once, on top of a private events space added earlier this year. For anyone wanting a single venue that covers most of the bases at once, food, live music and a proper arcade floor included, our look inside Church – Temple of Fun is a decent place to start before deciding which corner of the city’s games boom is worth an evening.
