The Future of Going Out Is Being Reshaped by Board Games and Social Clubs Across America
Loneliness is hitting younger Americans hard, and the cure keeps showing up in the same setting. Around folding tables holding chessboards, mahjong sets and stacks of cards, people in their 20s and 30s are choosing slow, screen-free hangs over another night at the bar.
As digital fatigue and a steady drift away from drinking reshape young adult social life, board games are quietly becoming the social ritual of a generation.
Why millennials and Gen Z are choosing board games
The U.S. Surgeon General has warned of a loneliness epidemic, with time spent in-person with friends falling from 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 hours in 2020. The decline hit hardest among people ages 15 to 24. Many young adults already swapped doomscrolling for pickleball and running clubs, but organizers say the games stored in grandparents’ attics are now drawing crowds of millennials and Gen Z who want a quieter form of connection.
“A running club sounds like absolute torture to me. I have found that it’s easier to connect with someone when I’m not trying to catch my breath or covered in sweat,” Victoria Newton, host of the Knightcap Chess Club in Austin, Texas, told The New York Times.
Award-winning tabletop game designer Geoff Engelstein framed the appeal in longer terms. “Games go back thousands and thousands of years. The earliest tombs that they’ve found have dice in them. They very rarely find any kind of archaeological excavation without some kind of game playing. It’s really just part of the human experience,” he told The New York Times.
How the board games revival is growing
Board game events organized through Partiful quadrupled over the past year, the company told the Times. Board-game groups on Meetup grew about 10% per year from 2021 to 2023, and the momentum has stuck well past lockdown.
There may be cognitive perks too. A study in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement found that older adults with mild cognitive impairment who took part in cognitively stimulating hobbies showed better memory, attention and processing speed than peers who did not.
What it means for drinking and screen time
Gen Z is drinking less than previous generations, according to Gallup. Board game nights fit neatly into that shift, giving young people a reason to gather without alcohol at the center.
“It is becoming clear that, for whatever reasons, today’s younger generations are just less interested in alcohol and are more likely than older generations to see it as risky for their health and to participate in periods of abstinence like Dry January,” George F. Koob of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism said in a statement to Time.
Koob also pointed to a related thread. “Alcohol tends to be a social drug, even for young people, so part of the decline in underage drinking could be related to less in-person socializing,” he told Time.
Sybil Marsh, a physician specializing in family medicine and addiction, told Time the cultural signals around drinking have changed. “There was a time where drinking some alcohol was a badge of maturity and was sophisticated. But now, it’s only one out of a whole range of ways that people can relax or show sophistication and so on.”
Millennials introduced the idea of a digital detox. Gen Z, raised with unparalleled access to technology, has pushed back harder against what many call brain rot, looking for tactile, screen-free time together. Combined with a post-pandemic yearning for socializing, board games have landed in exactly the right cultural moment, offering something slow, analog and built for the kind of face-to-face time their generation says it has been missing.
This article was created by content specialists using various tools, including AI.
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