Unionizing NYC’s Board Game Cafés
Following the lead of Starbucks workers, employees at board game cafés across New York City unionized in 2023 as Tabletop Workers United. After impressive shows of customer support and a credible strike threat, TWU has just won its first tentative agreement.
A dungeon master and teen patron play Dungeons & Dragons at a game café on November 26, 2019, in New York. (Steve Pfost / Newsday RM via Getty Images)
For good or for ill, there is without a doubt more Magic (The Gathering) in the world than ever before: more Magic sets released each year; more forums for crafting decks; more tournaments; more card drops; an ever-present opponent to play against thanks to the digital version of the game, Magic: The Gathering Arena; and more Magic nights at local game shops.
As Hasbro and its subsidiary Wizards of the Coast bring in record-breaking revenue through continuously expanding the commodification of our hobbies, workers at New York City’s local game shops have taken a stand by unionizing. In doing so, they are fighting the persistent anti-union narrative that to do work one is passionate about is adequate compensation unto itself.
In mid-2023, workers at the Upper East Side location of Hex&Co. approached management with a list of concerns: baristas were still paid only the minimum tipped wage, employees faced abuse from managers, and safety issues were often neglected. Management dismissed these concerns and jokingly told employees that they should “unionize if they wanted to be heard so badly.” Soon after, with the help of Workers United and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, they did just that, forming Tabletop Workers United (TWU).
That tabletop game workers would unionize in the same parent union as Starbucks workers seems natural. As customer-facing service industry jobs, they are traditionally associated with low pay and paltry raises, often lazily dismissed as summer jobs for students or “dead ends.” But in the postindustrial United States, these sorts of jobs are becoming increasingly common.
Instead of situating these struggles within the long history of labor organizing, mainstream narratives sometimes insinuate that such workers are less deserving of a union. The New York Times, reporting on the TWU in December of 2023, wrote that “teaching board games is a far cry from swinging a miner’s pick or working numbing hours on an assembly line. In fact, many of the cafe workers said they hung out at their workplaces in their off hours.” When asked about this attempt to sharply distinguish their organizing from those of more traditional union settings, TWU representatives Lore Feichter and Sophie Greenway replied:
Recently one of our representatives was discussing that even on those shop floors in manufacturing the jobs were not originally seen as providing guaranteed stability. They were jobs where you got chewed up and spit out. They were transient. Our first impulse should be to stick up for ourselves. . . . We’re building a culture from scratch. and we’re building an approach to unionizing for a very specific and niche industry that hasn’t really been done before.
After being denied voluntary recognition by Hex&Co owners Greg May and Jon Freeman, TWU spread its efforts throughout the city, successfully connecting all Hex&Co locations, along with The Uncommons (owned just by May) and Brooklyn Strategist (owned by Freeman). In the year and a half since, workers have faced anti-union tactics both old and familiar, like owners failing to appear at bargaining sessions, and some odd, such as a fake email they suspect originated with management.
“We’ve still been organizing throughout the process of bargaining to keep our community and workforce engaged beyond the table,” Feichter and Greenway told Jacobin. “Early on we saw a lot of sandbagging, an unwillingness to move, an unwillingness to come to the table, and their legal representation acted a little bit like bullies. They called us ‘low-class disgusting morons’ at the first session. So we were talking to a brick wall for a while there, until we walked out at all five of our locations.”
The TWU finally secured its first tentative agreement this May, but not without numerous walkouts, a strike authorization in April, and a strong display of community support.
Tabletop Solidarity
Since lighting the beacons a year and a half ago, they’ve found allies in the Tabletop Solidarity Committee (TSC), a group of customers turned comrades who organize events to fundraise for the strike fund and inform the community of the union’s struggles. “After all of the shouting matches that the legal team at the bargaining table has put us through, seeing people who are excited about what we do and the things that we make and the things that we share — that’s the best part of this by far,” said TWU. “Not only are we becoming a stronger labor force, but we’re also becoming a stronger community.”
Drawing inspiration from both Jane McAlevey and Gary Gygax, the TWU and TSC have deployed union fundamentals as well as Warhammer, Magic, and Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in the union effort. For these hobbyists, many foundational organizing skills were already second nature. As anyone who has attempted to run a D&D campaign can attest, nothing will sharpen communication and time-management skills like marshalling a group for a consistent session.
Gabor Fu, a tenant organizer in Sunset Park, saw the store’s Magic nights as a natural bridge for building community solidarity:
The people who really keep the stores going are . . . the people who show up to play Magic twice a week, every week, for the whole year. The carrot being dangled here is, hey, there’s so much Magic happening in this city, and so much of it could be happening at these unionized stores. I could be hosting Cube [a Magic format] at the store every week, but I’m not going to do that until the union contract is signed.
Anticipating a strike, the beginning of 2025 saw the TWU and TSC ramp up their community outreach and efforts to build a strong hardship fund. On January 30, the TSC organized a draft of the 100 Ornithopters Cube Magic format. Fu worked with other TSC members to transport the cards from Baltimore. From there, they brought on other well-known pros and a member from the bargaining committee to play while conducting interviews with TWU members to discuss their bargaining efforts and what joining a union meant to them.
In March, the TSC hosted a Wargaming Hobby Day, soon followed by a walkout at The Uncommons, the smallest of the five stores. According to TWU representatives, the shop’s owner, May, was relatively absent from the business and from bargaining, often disappearing on extended trips: “When we had a break-in a few months ago, he had just landed in Europe, and we couldn’t really get a hold of him.” Another impetus for the walkout hinged on his failure to provide a breakdown of the store’s expenditures and income, even as such data arrived from the four other locations.
“We brought all of this to his attention in October or November, but it’s been like pulling teeth to get him to sit down and tell us when we can expect an answer,” TWU representatives said. “We gave him a deadline to commit to these three things: financial data, the tipping situation [wherein managers were added to the tipping pool with other employees], and attendance at bargaining. When he didn’t respond, we walked out. Within ten minutes, he arrived at the store and asked what he could do to convince us to go back to work.”
“I was actually still on my way to the store by the time he left, and everyone had already returned to work,” added Feichter. “It just goes to show you that a walkout can really work.”
Building to Win
Throughout these efforts, the solidarity committee and union also conducted in-person and digital outreach at all five stores, ultimately polling over 450 customers, of whom 98.1 percent affirmed that they were more likely to support a store with a unionized workforce. Sam LeDoux, another TSC member, made clear that these responses contradict a recent push from management to prohibit displays of support for the union at the stores. “They cited some statistic that customers actually don’t want to hear about unions, that they’re less likely to come if they hear about [one]. We’re finding that very much not to be the case.”
In conjunction with this survey, the solidarity committee coordinated a strike support letter with over 1,700 signatures. This letter was read aloud at the five stores by TSC members, voicing their commitment to not cross a future picket line, to financially support workers should a strike be called, and to “leverage [their] collective power in support of the workers and ensure that these spaces continue to uphold the values [they] want [their] community to embody: safety, respect, equity, and justice.”
Individual comments accompanied the letter, often stating the frequency of the customer’s visits to the store, their commitment to a boycott, and the importance of these spaces and workers within their communities. From the hundreds of comments, one customer voiced puzzlement at the anti-union position since “TTRPG [tabletop role-playing games] culture doesn’t exist without community organizing,” while a parent near Hex&Co West wrote that “Hex&Co are invaluable dedicated workers whom we entrusted with the afterschool care of our child for many years. Our son loves Hex&Co because of the passion and dedication of its workers. They have the right to bargain and fully deserve a fair work contract.”
These after-school programs have been central to TWU’s contract negotiations and their preparation for a potential strike. Given that the TSC membership skews younger, they made concerted efforts to reach parents whose childcare alternatives at the game shops might be disrupted by a strike. “We want to make sure that parents are aware and that they’re feeling supported by the union and solidarity committee,” said Fu. “This is not the union members giving up on your kids, by any means. In fact, this is going to make it better for the workers that are spending so much time with them every day.”
On April 23, the TWU announced that a strike had been authorized with 89 percent approval and that it was making formal preparations. Just a week later, due to “intransigence and delays” from management, the union invited community members to attend practice pickets throughout the city. Then on May 30, the practice pickets were canceled, and a tentative agreement was announced.
Economic wins include substantive and immediate raises at all five locations, holiday pay, and bereavement and bankable sick leave. “Some of the coolest wins pertain to dungeon masters [DMs] and role-playing games [RPGs],” said Feichter. “When they roll out a new standard edition of Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, DMs have been expected to study the new campaigns, take copious amounts of notes in preparation, all without pay. We’ve won some guaranteed paid training for required RPG learning and then the option for people to request training if they want to run a new program.”
Other language centered on receiving additional hours and pay for working beyond one’s job description, as well as protections against discrimination. “A lot of the folks who work at the stores are non-cis or otherwise gender non-conforming, so having protections for people who are transitioning, or who change their name or pronouns, was a huge priority for us,” added Feichter. The contract now includes a clause wherein employees undergoing gender transition can request support from the employer and union to provide a safe work environment, help communicate changes to one’s name or pronouns, and ensure that employees can use whichever restroom they feel is most consistent with their gender identity.
With a tentative agreement in hand, the union is reflecting on what it has achieved and how others in the industry might learn from its efforts. “I think being open and vulnerable and honest about the work that we do and how much it matters to us and why we do it, I think people resonate with that,” said Greenway. “They appreciate that from the individuals they share spaces with, especially when those spaces are so core and central to their identity, their hobbies, their interests.”