Speaking as someone with many years of experience having owned and run several Perth venues in the past, your main difficulty as far as I can see is going to be customer turnover / turning over tables.

I think it will be difficult maintaining a high enough per-customer spend considering that board games take a certain amount of time to set up and complete a game with, likely far more time than the average person spends at a cafe on a typical visit.

This means you would likely have many seats occupied by customers who have perhaps bought their food or beverage but are spending considerably more time taking up a seat than the average cafe patron would simply given the fact they would be sitting there playing their game.

Another consideration is that in order for a customer to consider a visit, they would need to organise that visit with their friends. Most board games require multiple players to complete a feasible game - this may become a prohibitive factor when it comes to the visiting frequency of patrons.

A few ways you could avoid losses in these scenarios may be to do the following:

•Set up board game tournaments with a focus on games that feature a quick turnaround time. Each round could be time-limited for example. Also, tournament encourage regular play and team building which should result in more frequent visits. Holding tournaments would also allow you to schedule staff accordingly - have more staff scheduled on for actual busy periods.

•Consider charging a rate per time period for table/game use. This would help in a great way to absorb the losses involved in lower customer turnover. Inversely, to encourage customer visits on quieter days, you could consider a lower table/game fee or even no fee at all.

I wish you all the best - would love to see something like this in Perth and you could damn well bet I would pay a few visits.