Chance & Counters is the brainchild of three pals: Luke, Steve and Richard. Luke got bitten by the board game bug whilst studying at university, then selfishly spread the cardboard contagion among his friends. One of whom was Steve. All it took was a sunny weekend in Salcombe and a copy of Settlers of Catan and he was hooked too. Fast-forward a couple of years to Moseley, Birmingham. Luke and Steve were juggling postgraduate studies with a burgeoning addiction to board games – made worse by the corruptive influence of a certain Dicky Duerden (now Head of Games at our little café).
As Luke and Steve finally wrapped up their studies, conversation turned to their grim career prospects. Opening a board game café had been a fun thing to talk about while drunk, but set against a slow dribble of crap job offers it genuinely started to seem like a good idea. Planning began in earnest after Alex – a school friend of Luke’s and owner of KONK! – generously offered to invest in Luke and Steve’s lofty vision. The pair were starting to put together a business plan, when a chance encounter (!) on Reddit led to an exciting development.
A certain ‘Kwansu’ was putting together a huge survey about board game cafés, as part of his MBA studies. Luke arranged to meet up for a chat about what he’d found. As it transpired, Kwansu was a man called Richard, who was not only a massive board game fan but also a ruddy good chap with ambitions in the board game café direction. After another meet-up in a dingy pub in Fishponds, Richard was onboard. The next three months were a blur of Skype meetings, legal wrangling and frantic googling. The end result was a fully-fledged business plan and a Kickstarter campaign, which launched in January 2016.
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