After lunch and a movie my friend and I headed to one of her favorite cafes which is a board game cafe. It’s called 명보드게임 2호점( Myeong board game store 2). The shop works in a way so that you pay by the amount of time you spend playing. 1 hour of playing board games is 2,4000 won. 3 hours is 5,000 won. They also have a snack and drink menu which is mostly bagged snacks or drinks in cans. My friend ordered a Dr. Pepper and I ordered a peach iced tea which came in a fun mason jar (3,000 won). When you arrive you’re given a laminated overwhelming menu which has the food and board games inside. It’s pretty much all in Korean but there are pictures for the games at least. Since it was overwhelming and my friend’s been so often that the staff knows her and she’s friends with the owner I asked her to pick the game. She placed our game order and our drink orders with one of the staff members.
She picked Splendor, a somewhat easy game that I probably should’ve read the instructions on because I didn’t fully understand the tiny cards or the yellow chips and my friend wasn’t sure at least on the yellow chips. From my understanding you could collect a certain amount of gems per turn and then trade those in for cards. At the end of the game you wanted to tally up the numbers on the cards and the person with the highest amount won. This however according to the instructions I found online isn’t exactly how you play, which is whoever gets to 15 points first wins and you can reserve a card to keep your opponent from getting it which earns you one of the yellow tokens or “joker” pieces which can be swapped out for any gem color. (Which would’ve been useful since we kept running out of certain colors). Lesson from this is to read the instructions.
The staff gave us some free chips and we played one round of the game before leaving. I loved the atmosphere and the large amount of games available. I spotted at least one other that I really wanted a closer look at. I really miss playing games with my friends so I’m hoping to either go back or find another one a bit closer to where I live. When we finished we put the game back in it’s box and checked out. The total for my peach iced tea and one hour of Splendor was 5,400 won and they even gave us each a cookie as we left.
명보드게임 2호점 is on the third floor and is open from 1pm until 11pm.