What it is
Snakes & Lattes is a board-game café, which in 2010, when Ben Castanie and Aurelia Peynet opened the first one on Bloor Street in Toronto, was a new idea in North America and is now a small industry. The Tempe store, opened in October 2018 in a former restaurant on Sixth Street a few steps west of Mill Avenue, is the chain’s Arizona outpost and one of its American flagships. The format is the one invented in Toronto: you pay a flat game fee, about six dollars a person for as long as you stay, and the walls of more than a thousand board and card games are yours. Staff the company calls game gurus ask your group size, your time and your tolerance for rules, pull something off the shelf and teach it at the table. Then they come back and do it again when you finish.
Around that is a real café and bar: about a dozen draft beers, most from Arizona breweries, cocktails, coffee, a kitchen of shareable things, and a brunch from Friday to Sunday until two. The room is big and loud in the right way, communal tables and booths and high-tops, with a patio for the months that allow one.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s night out is a bar, and our Old Town nightlife note is honest about it. Snakes & Lattes is the evening for the group that includes a cousin who does not drink, a teenager, a grandparent and two people who hate loud music, all of whom will be happy at a table of eight with a drink and a game somebody else explained. It is also the answer to a July afternoon or a rare rainy one: indoors, cheap, three hours long, and nobody checks a phone. Nothing in Scottsdale does this at this scale.
The practical version
Eighteen minutes from Old Town, no traffic: Scottsdale Road south into Rural, west on University, north on Mill, west on Sixth. Downtown Tempe garages or the lot behind the building. Open daily from eleven, ten on brunch days, until ten most nights and midnight Friday and Saturday. Tables are mostly first come, and weekend nights after eight mean a wait. Budget the game fee plus a bar tab; dinner here is fine, dinner at Culinary Dropout around the corner first is better.
When to go
Weeknights are the café at its best: a table on arrival, a guru with time, the students at a reasonable volume. Weekend afternoons, from the end of brunch to about seven, are the family and teenager hours and the best time for a first visit. Friday and Saturday after eight are the crowd, the wait and the noise, which is also fun if that is what you came for. Summer afternoons are the secret: Tempe empties when the university does, and a 2 PM game on a 110-degree day is the smartest thing to do in the East Valley. October brings themed horror-franchise nights, and trivia runs weekly.
What to do
Trust the guru. The library is far too big to browse usefully, and the staff’s job is to match a game to a party; tell them the truth about how many of you there are, how long you have and who refuses to read a rulebook. A good evening is three games of increasing weight: a ten-minute party game to settle in, a forty-minute gateway game like Ticket to Ride or Catan, and something the guru is excited about. Order food in waves and drinks with each game. Happy hour lowers the game fee and the drafts; brunch until two on Friday to Sunday is the way to get a large table without a wait.
With kids
Daytime, yes, and well. The children’s shelf is deep, the gurus are patient with eight-year-olds, and the format suits a family better than a restaurant because the waiting is the game. Evenings after nine on weekends are for the students. Our Scottsdale with kids note has it as the hot-afternoon plan in Tempe.
The neighborhood
Sixth and Mill is the center of downtown Tempe: Mill Avenue’s bars and restaurants begin at the corner, the lake and Tempe Beach Park are three blocks north, the campus three blocks south. The Yard on Farmer Avenue, with Culinary Dropout, is two blocks west. Our late-night food note covers what is open on Mill after the games end.
The story
Snakes & Lattes was a Toronto invention. Ben Castanie and Aurelia Peynet, who had moved to Canada from France four years earlier, opened the first one on Bloor Street West on August 30, 2010, with about 1,200 games and the idea that a café could charge for the table rather than the coffee. It worked immediately and was copied everywhere; by 2015 the Bloor store had about 3,000 games and the company had opened a second Toronto location, and the model had spread to cities across North America. The United States came next, and Tempe, a college town with a dense downtown and a year-round need for air-conditioned evenings, was an obvious market.
The Tempe store took a large former restaurant space at Sixth Street and Mill Avenue, began construction in May 2018 and opened that October with more than a thousand games, a full bar and the gurus. It has since become one of the chain’s busiest stores and calls itself the largest board-game bar and café in Arizona, with a weekly calendar of trivia, puzzle-race tournaments and themed nights that make it as much a venue as a café.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale has a small board-game scene in its shops and a few bars with a shelf of games, but no board-game café of this size, and the city’s nightlife is built around drinking and music. Snakes & Lattes fills a gap in a Scottsdale visit that nothing in the city does: the sober-friendly, all-ages, indoor evening, which is also the evening for a bachelorette party’s second night or a family reunion’s teenagers. It appears in our nightlife and kids notes for that reason.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south from Old Town; it becomes Rural Road at the Tempe line. West on University Drive, north on Mill Avenue, west on Sixth Street; the café is on the right. About eighteen minutes with no traffic. Park in the downtown Tempe garages or the lot behind the block. The Valley Metro streetcar stops on Mill a block away and connects to the light rail; our getting around note has the rideshare math, and on a weekend night it is the right call.