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Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c61b9a42-0eb5-11e0-9ec3-00144feabdc0.html

Board game cafés break internet monopoly

By Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai

Published: December 23 2010 17:14 | Last updated: December 23 2010 17:14

China has more online gamers than anywhere on earth – not to mention more internet addicts – but recently an entirely healthier gaming trend has gone viral in China: the board game café, where young Chinese can take an internet break over the Monopoly board.

“Online games are not healthy. They are bad for your eyes,” says Wang Yuxin, 22, as he watches friends play a game of Killers of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguosha), China’s most popular board game.

With his distinctive orange-striped glasses’ frames, Mr Wang clearly is an early adopter of fashion trends: the latest fad for his age group is spending hours bent over a piece of cardboard or a stack of playing cards in one of Shanghai’s ubiquitous board game cafés.

The Shanghai board game craze, which appears to have spread from Korea and Hong Kong to the mainland, like most Asian fashions, took off last year and accelerated until the city of 20m people sported more than 500 games cafés. Opened by games aficionados rather than businessmen, many were tiny affairs and have since closed.

But larger cafés – much more viable as profitable businesses – are thriving. Games experts estimate there are now 100-200 such cafés battling for dominance of a market that they say has a large untapped potential.

The urge to congregate over a game is nothing new in China: every urban green space, however small, sports a cohort of old men playing Chinese chess. The grandmothers of China prefer majiang, known in the west as mah-jong.   

But for 20-something Chinese, raised on a solitary diet of homework and World of Warcraft, board games offer not just an eye break but a rare chance to socialise.

“Young Chinese are very lonely because of the one-child policy, so they are looking for more face-to-face interaction with friends,” says Shaun Rein, of China Market Research in Shanghai, who notes that hosting board games parties at home is not an option because flats are too small.  

“We cannot live alone,” says Leonard Gu, games director for Huijia Board Game Cafés, which has 30 per cent of the Shanghai board game market, with 17 branches serving 30,000 to 40,000 customers a month. “Everybody needs to see more people, not just screens.”  

Lei Li, of Renmin University’s psychology department, an expert on youth problems in China, says today’s youth have “more time to enjoy life” than their elders, and moving to high-rise apartment buildings from traditional, more communal neighbourhoods has left them without anywhere to socialise.  

“MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] like World of Warcraft may seem like a social activity ... but you normally don’t know the people you play with, and most of them you will never meet in real life,” says Marc van der Chijs, chief executive of Spil Games Asia, an online game development company.

“I think people only realised their need to play with real friends when social networks like Kaixin and Renren started to offer social games such as Happy Farm, where you play with your real-life friends instead of with people that you only know online.”

Shanghai’s board game scene is very competitive, operators say: in one commercial building alone in central Shanghai there are 18 cafés.

Most offer only the most basic of decor and amenities: a few wood veneer tables, a scattering of leather-covered sofas, a coffee machine, some orange squash and a few (often fake) games, and they are in business.

Cafés charge Rmb10-Rmb25 ($1.50-$3.75) per person on weekdays, Rmb30-Rmb35 on weekends, for unlimited gaming and drinks, and many of them stay open 24 hours a day.

Annie Shen, who co-manages Qiqi’s Board Game Café with her son, says the patrons are too busy playing to do more than sip at their drinks. She admits to buying all her games from Chinese counterfeiters who have built a vigorous new industry supplying the cafés with translated copies of foreign games.

Ma Zheng, manager of the Huijia board game chain, which stocks only authentic games, says China can offer global board game makers an all new market.

“Overseas, people only buy board games. In China, they don’t want only to own their games, they want to play them – or at least try lots of different kinds,” he says.

Chinese games are most popular in his café, but foreign games such as Settlers of Catan and old standbys such as Uno and Rummikub are also favoured.

But that western capitalist favourite Monopoly is viewed as “a little old”.  

Additional reporting by Shirley Chen

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