Our story
Three blokes, a Kickstarter and one working toilet. Ten years on, here is how the whole thing actually happened.
The cardboard contagion
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, who'd go on to become our first Head of Games.
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.
A chance encounter
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.
292 strangers
Within two weeks, thanks to the generosity and support of some fantastic people, we smashed through our target.
- 292 backers
- £13,192 pledged
- 4 week campaign
The people below are the unsung heroes of the Chance & Counters story; without them we simply wouldn't have been able to make it a reality.
All 292 of them Have a look for your name
- Reuben
- James Clark
- Felix Tillyard
- Mikiko
- Martin Griffiths
- Tony Williams
- K Abson
- Matt Scarsbrook
- The City of Kings
- Sam Morrison
- Ogre
- Jamilla Ives
- Joe Brown
- Travis
- Geoff Scarsbrook
- Elaine Scarsbrook
- Karen Fielding
- Parisa haghighat
- Sam Bazzard
- LudiCreations
- Miles Ratcliffe
- KimStebel
- Joe Berger
- Daniel Breeze
- Jonathan Whitfield
- Beth Marriott
- Tom Fox
- Alex Holding
- David Ford
- Tim Fothergill
- Alexander "Xan" Kashev
- Steve Shaw
- Seolin Chung
- Gavin Dickie
- Aaron George Elvis Brown
- Gemma
- Rebecca Chui
- Ivy Thomas
- Skean
- Tania Qoura
- Jimmigee
- Gavin Bloemen
- LemOnLine
- Andrew Endersby
- Anthony Hurford
- Connor
- Olly Broom
- Andrew
- Ollie Organ
- Kim Mantas
- Jenny Gaudion
- Katharine Wall
- Philip Doyle
- jillcownie
- Graham Cownie
- Terry White
- NotaBrick
- Bruce Stedman
- Rebecca Strickland
- Henry Fosdike
- Tom Beach
- David Wild
- Mark Lockett
- Iffie Opene
- Hazel Doughty
- Russell Cox
- Augustin Warner
- Michael
- Michelle Barrett
- Nathan Wong
- Jon Lean
- Tony Fung
- Alex Harman
- Simon Hoare
- David Norman
- Lewis Trinh
- Siôn TheSheep Jones
- Peter Kimball-Evans
- Joeyjojo
- Henry Osadzinski
- Ray Taylor
- Stephen Brown
- Mark Sierens
- Heidi kent
- Tammy Miller-Cheevers
- Julie Ward
- James Davies
- Mykola Yankovskyy
- Sensible Object
- Jeff Boardman
- Matthew Hutson
- Katie Foxall
- Richard Wallis
- Rob Talbot
- Ellie Netto
- Jon Dowling
- Matthew Walker
- Chris Boreham
- Jack Kenyon
- Tom Gran
- tim short
- Nathan Cavin
- Matthew Ramcharan
- Nicholas Rogers
- Chris Taylor
- Amanda
- Neil Wilson
- Kyle Gammon
- Joseph Jackson
- Chris Swain
- Nich Angell
- Alice White
- Paul
- Matt Wigley
- Alex White
- Sam Hobday
- Oliver Henry Gibson
- Katie Gatens
- Chris Houlden
- James Smith
- Filip van der Pol
- Paul Vinten
- Hannah Rutherford
- Silas Adekunle
- Timon Singh
- Marcus Symonds
- Michael Fleming
- talkie_tim
- Jessica Vallentine
- Pootsy
- emily anderton
- Elliot Long
- Amy Webb
- Cat
- Sam Marshall Evans
- Nathalie
- Joshua Portway
- Nathan
- Jordan hayes
- Lorry symington
- Carol Whitworth
- Jack Johnston
- Judith Lorton
- Peter
- Katie McQuin-Roberts
- Max Shepherd
- Hågen Landsem
- Daisy Spiers
- Coen de Groot
- Tay Sparks
- Samir Hazlehurst
- Jim Ashby
- Tam Duncan
- Jack Thomas O'Brien
- Mark Butt
- Ben Pickard
- Steve Temple
- Gary
- Alexi Drew
- Neal Marriott
- Jamie England
- Felicity Marriott
- Tom Conneely
- Brain Games USA
- Jack Smith
- Boxuan Jiang
- Jack Ready
- Chris Lock
- Mark Donnell
- James Haddock
- Owain
- Saul
- Lindsay Meyer-Nicholas
- AJ Nicholls
- Jesse Soares
- Cord Slatton-Valle
- John Belgrove
- Graham Devine
- Amanda Kear
- Richard C
- john moroz
- Andy Edgell
- Eddie Cochrane
- Warren Rumsey
- DarkerLink
- mark keedwell
- James Curran
- CS
- Matthew Gilliard
- George Pickup
- Luke Tarnowski
- Jack Armitage
- Fiona Wilson
- Sam
- Nicholas J Higgins
- Evan Daley
- Joseph Ford
- Catherine Shuttleworth
- Andrew Guard
- Tony Morgan
- Tom Faraday
- Joe Hedinger
- Edward Bertram
- Jennifer Cownie
- Sam Cardy
- Martin Killen
- Hannah Brown
- Will Hay
- Dean Jones
- Laird Thaddeus
- Alex Crook
- david barrett
- Darren Morrissey
- Ali Drysdale
- Norhan Nabeeh
- Linda Dawson
- Mike Serritella
- Kimberly Grey
- James Morgan
- Holly Hocks
- Rachael Clarke
- Craig Robertson
- Kieran Connolly
- Francesca Foster
- Mrs F Chetwynd
- Emma stone
- Siona Tebbutt
- The High Frontier
- Two Guys and a Giant
- Lara Finan
- Andy Parsons
- Ben Spratt
- Form Forge
- Wesley Voshell
- Zoe Williams
- Will McConnell Simpson
- James Charlick
- Matt L
- Neil Mounter
- Olivia carmichael
- Colin Bassett
- Michael Champion
- Jake Eason
- Guppy
- Dan Batson
- Michael Jones
- Pedro Quinta
- Chris Jones
- Ed Osborn
- Ashley Pittman
- Kenny
- Mark Nicholas Wales
- Angus Abranson / Chronicle City
- Nathan FitzPatrick
- Triple Ace Games Ltd
- Chloe Goument
- Sweet Lemon Publishing
- Arun Shankar
- Brett "DJ Archangel" Strassner
- Samuel Dalby
- Anthony Smith
- Chaoseisor
- Adam
- Laurence O'Brien
- Timothy Dafydd Gadd
- Alex Ratcliffe
- Scott Mellors
- Alex Bransby-Williams
- David Gray
- Harvey Bull
- Graham & Sue Parkinson
- Tom Hutson
- Kiss.starter
- Craig Shaw
- Shaun Tiley
- Toby Watkin-Jones
- Craig Taphorn
- Taliesin Bendell
- Jerold Chu
- Kiaran Jay
- Julian Horne
- Andy Bate
- JF
- Pat McKenna
- Jon
- Bradley Leek
And to everyone who backed anonymously, or chipped in some other way: thank you.
Doors open
On May 20th 2016, we opened to the public in Bristol. There was still dry plaster on the skirting boards, only one working toilet and nowhere near enough air conditioning.
But the kind people of Bristol saw past our little imperfections and stuck with us while we got our act together.
Within six months we were booked up on weekends, climbing the TripAdvisor rankings and discussing inflation on BBC Radio 5Live. Totally surreal and totally amazing.
Thinking bigger
After a year of ironing out the creases in Bristol, Luke, Steve and Richard decided it was time to start thinking bigger. In the summer of 2017 we began to hand over the reins in Bristol to an amazing group of managers and staff, to focus on taking Chance & Counters to the next level.
Cue another 6 to 8 month blur of Skyping, bank meetings, location scouting, knockbacks, wild celebrations and such.
In spring 2018 we found our next home: a beautiful Victorian building on the High Street in Cardiff. We opened that August, and the Welsh capital took to us far quicker than Bristol had. Turns out having done it once before helps enormously.
Going large
Emboldened, we went again. In November 2019 we opened in Birmingham, in Digbeth's Custard Factory. At 2,500 square feet it was more than double the size of anything we'd attempted before: outside seats, a river view (kind of), ten draught lines and our most ambitious food menu yet. Things went almost too well.
- 2,500square feet
- 10draught lines
- 1river view
We had about four months to enjoy it.
Then March 2020 happened
We spent that spring huddled round news briefings and firing texts at each other, trying to work out what any of it meant for three cafés built entirely on people sitting shoulder to shoulder, sharing the same boxes of cardboard. The furlough scheme, when it came, was a lifesaver. It meant we kept nearly all of our staff, which at the time felt like the only thing we could actually control.
We thought about game rentals. We thought about a lot of things. In the end we decided to bunker down, close completely and take no risks at all. We didn't trade a single day. It was the right call, though it certainly didn't feel like it at three in the morning.
Cardiff was the one that couldn't take it. It was the first to feel the squeeze and the hardest hit, and in early 2020 we made the miserable decision to close it for good. That one hurt. It was our second home, the site that proved we could do it twice.
What followed was over a year of false starts: opening, closing, reopening, deciphering pages of guidance to work out what we were and weren't allowed to do. When we finally got the doors open again we did it one site at a time, with cleaning protocols so rigorous they now seem faintly unhinged. But we made it work, and people came back.
Cardiff, again
What we hadn't reckoned on was Cardiff. The outpouring from people who wanted it back made it very clear we'd underestimated what the place meant to them.
As it turned out, the answer was already working for us. Rhys had been assistant manager at our Birmingham café and had designs on running something of his own, so we did a deal: he came on as co-owner of the Cardiff site and reopened the doors himself.
He did it on the 20th of May 2021 which, entirely by accident, was five years to the day since we first opened on Christmas Steps. He has done a quite extraordinary job with it, and the continued success of Cardiff is so amazing to see.
The biggest raise
We came out of the pandemic determined that it wasn't going to be the thing that decided how big we got.
So we did the biggest raise in our history. Some of it came from people who'd backed us before, some from new faces, including the Yogscast, the Bristol YouTube and media lot we'd long admired. And some came from much closer to home: Kit, who'd been with us for years as a manager, bought in and joined the board as a director.
There's something quite right about people who've worked the floor ending up owning a piece of the place.
That raise bought us two cafés in quick succession. Gloucester Road in Bristol arrived in 2023, a proper neighbourhood site in a part of town we'd loved for years. Nine months later we took over the old Yard & Coop on Merrion Street in Leeds: our fifth venue, and our first in the north.
Ten years on
So here we are, ten years on. Five busy, bustling cafés, nearly a hundred people on the team, and a library none of us can honestly claim to have played our way through.
- 10years
- 5cafés
- ~100on the team
This May we threw tenth birthday parties across all five sites, which was as much a celebration of everything we'd got through as everything we'd built. Ten years ago we were three blokes with a Kickstarter and one working toilet.
And we're not finished. We've started franchising, which might be the most exciting chapter yet: handing over everything we've learned to new owners and operators who want to build a Chance & Counters of their own. The dream has always been brilliant board gaming venues all over the UK, and this is how we get there.
We still get people through the door who've never played anything more complicated than Monopoly and leave three hours later arguing about Catan. That was the whole point in 2016, and it's still the whole point now.
Fancy running one?
We're looking for people to open Chance & Counters cafés of their own.
Have a word