I've had a LOT of good conversations with people about Spielbound and our different approach to a board game cafe. One aspect that has been the hardest to explain without having our cafe doors open is our memberships.
Why memberships?
First, as a reminder, anyone will be able to enter the Spielbound Board Game Cafe and join friends, order coffee, or just hang out. But in order to help pay some of our many costs of maintaining a huge and quality board game library, we do need to have a fee for being able to play games from our library. This also helps encourage that the games should be treated well or at least better than those you may find thrown in the corner of a pub or up high in your friend's closet.
For reference, most of the world's popular board game cafes have a $5 or higher fee to enter. In East Asia many places have a membership model where you pay to become a member and then have the right to pay for each hour of play similar to places here where you pay to play billiards.
I visited 6 board game cafes/clubs in Taiwan last year including this one in Chiayi
Well, we will have the $5 one-day pass, and we will also have monthly and annual memberships. We felt that having a membership would help create a better sense of community support and also help remove any barriers toward coming in and playing a game in the library. If you wanted to play a game over your lunch hour, you may not want to pay $5 but if you had a membership, you don't have to think about it. You may also feel more free to try games you've never heard of if you didn't feel like you had a new cost associated with it. With over a thousand games to choose from, we want you to feel comfortable trying new games a lot!
We also know that each member's use of the games will differ. This is similar to getting a zoo membership. Some people use it and attend the zoo a lot during the year and save money for doing so while others just feel good supporting the zoo, being kept on top of zoo events, and comfortable knowing they can enter any time without paying anything.
Membership costs & benefits
In our Kickstarter reward levels, we have two types of memberships, single and family, at two different periods, monthly and annual. Let's quickly review what you get with a membership:
- unlimited access to the game library
- 2 one-day passes per month ($10/month value)
- invitations to member-only events and sales
- the ability to reserve tables
If you get a $150 annual membership, it pays for itself after attending only 6 times! assuming you use the day-passes on others. From other cafes, we have also learned that the ability to reserve tables is a very valuable privilege especially on busy evenings when getting the perfect-sized table for your group and/or game can be challenging.