The extremely offline joy of the board game club

When Ms Michelle Kong started a chess club in 2023, hoping to meet other players in their 20s, attendance was so meagre that she needed only one chessboard.

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She posted about the club on social media until a tattooed cross-section of young people in Los Angeles began showing up to exchange pawns and phone numbers.

Before long, boxes of triple-weighted bishops and rooks were piling up in the back seat of Ms Kong's sedan. Last December, she upgraded the club's home base from a cosy jazz bar to a warehouse that was barely large enough to accommodate the 500 people who attended the Thursday night meetings of the group, LA Chess Club, this summer.

"It kind of blew up," said Ms Kong, 27, who is in urgent need of a place to store 200 chessboards.

Staring down an epidemic of loneliness, people in their 20s and 30s are gathering to play chess, backgammon and mahjong in the hope that old-fashioned game clubs might help ease the isolation and digital overload that weigh heavily on their generation.

Many have already been experimenting with more physical alternatives to doomscrolling like pickleball and running clubs. But organisers like Ms Kong say that the kind of board games stored in their grandparents' attics are hot among Gen Zers and millennials hungry for less athletic modes of socialisation.

"A running club sounds like absolute torture to me," said Ms Victoria Newton, 35, who has been hosting Knightcap Chess Club events in Austin, Texas, since July. "I have found that it's easier to connect with someone when I'm not trying to catch my breath or covered in sweat."

Board game sales in the United States surged more than 30 per cent from 2019 to 2020, fuelled by the Covid-19 pandemic, said Ms Juli Lennett, a toy industry adviser for Circana, a market research firm. Stuck at home and starved for social interaction, many Americans were able to rediscover the love of gameplay, she added.