And why Gen Z is filling board game cafés to find one
By Richard MacRae, President and Publisher, Analog Game Studios | 23 June 2026
Walk into any board game café on a Friday night and you will notice something. The people playing are not the people most advertisers would have predicted. They’re in their twenties and early thirties. They’re Gen Z and younger Millennials. They’re the generation that grew up with a smartphone in their pocket, a screen in every room and the entire digital world available at all times. And they’ve chosen, deliberately, to put the phone face down on the table and play a board game with the people sitting across from them.
Understanding why they’re doing that is the key to understanding the fastest growing segment in the board game market right now: social games.
A Definition Worth Having
The term social game gets used loosely, so it’s worth being precise. A social game is not simply a game you play with other people. Chess is played with other people. A jigsaw puzzle can be assembled with other people. Neither is a social game in the sense that matters here.
A social game is one where the interaction between players is the mechanic. The game isn’t the backdrop to the social experience. The game generates the social experience. Laughter, unexpected revelation, friendly tension, the moment when someone gives an answer nobody anticipated and suddenly the whole room understands something about that person they never knew; these are not side effects, they’re the point.
This distinguishes social games clearly from strategy games, which reward individual planning and execution; from war games, which simulate conflict; from legacy games, which build narrative over multiple sessions. Social games are designed first and foremost to create genuine human moments between the people in the room. Everything else – theme, components, rules – serves that purpose.
In a social game, the interaction between players is not the backdrop to the experience. It‘s the mechanic.
Why Gen Z Is Driving This
Nearly half of all regular board game players today are aged 18 to 34. That statistic, from multiple independent market research sources, reflects a genuine behavioural shift that researchers and industry analysts are now documenting in detail.
Gen Z averages over six hours of daily phone screen time, the highest of any generation. Seventy-three percent report feeling digitally exhausted. Fifty-five percent took a social media detox in the past year. These are not abstract statistics. They describe a generation that is acutely aware of what constant digital connectivity costs them in terms of genuine human presence, even if most would not reach for that specific phrase to describe what they’re missing.
What they reach for instead is a board game café. The global board game café market was valued at 1.3 billion dollars in 2024 and is projected to reach 3.1 billion by 2033, growing at just over 10 percent annually. The research is unambiguous about who is driving that growth: Millennials and Gen Z, seeking what the analysts describe as unique, screen-free social experiences and real-world connections. The board game café is not a nostalgia trip for people who grew up before smartphones. It’s a deliberate choice by the generation that grew up inside them.
The board game café is not a nostalgia trip. It’s a deliberate choice by the generation that grew up inside smartphones.
The Presence Deficit Connection
We wrote earlier this year about what we called Presence Deficit: the condition of being physically with people you care about while being genuinely present with none of them. Digital Drift, the slow evening-by-evening migration of attention toward devices, is what produces it. The research connecting social isolation to serious health outcomes is substantial and increasingly well known.
What is less often articulated is that Gen Z, whatever label gets applied to their behaviour, is responding to exactly this dynamic. They’re not anti-technology. They’re pro-presence. They want the specific quality of connection that only happens in the same room, in real time, with the unpredictability and immediacy that no digital interaction can fully replicate. Social games deliver this more reliably than almost any other consumer product available, because delivering it’s what they’re structurally designed to do.
Where Analog Game Studios Sits in This
Analog Game Studios has published eleven titles across what we’ve traditionally called family games, party games, strategy games, and gateway games. All of these sit comfortably under a single more accurate heading: social games. Every one of them was built to generate genuine face-to-face interaction, fits within a realistic evening window, and creates the kind of shared moments that only happen when people are fully in the room with each other.
We call this standard “Presence by Design” and it’s been the foundation of every publishing decision we’ve made since our first title. The social games category, now validated by Asmodee’s €180 million acquisition of French social game publisher ATM Gaming and by every major market research projection for the decade ahead, is where we have been building all along.
The generation filling board game cafés on Friday nights is looking for exactly what we make. We just did not always have the right word for it. Social games. That’s what they are. That’s what they have always been.