Snakes & Lattes, the Toronto board game cafe, is developing a comedy web series to be released this September. The cafe has partnered with Bell Local, a group of community channels owned by Bell Canada, and independent film and television production company Really Awesome Days Productions. The show’s name is The Show.

The Show is set within a fictionalized version of Snakes & Lattes featuring estranged friends Max and James coming together to possibly make the cafe become wildly successful or rocket Max’s company “straight into the ground”.

Snakes & Lattes opened doors in 2010 and is owned by Ben Castanie and Aurelia Peynet. The cafe became a model for other boardgame cafes and bars over the past several years. The Show is the first fiction series offered by Snakes & Lattes, who also produce a podcast (“The Snakescast”), a game review video series, and a video series about starting your own board game cafe (“How to Snakes”).

Image courtesy Snakes & Lattes’ Instagram feed.

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With “a constant stream” of people contacting Toronto’s Snakes & Lattes boardgame cafe about how to start up similar ventures in other towns, Curator and head Game Guru Steve Tassie says the boardgame cafe will be releasing a series of videos over the next couple of months under the title “How to Snakes”. The series is focused on providing advice to other start-up boardgame owners. Although Mr. Tassie states he is not “a business person”, he expresses hope that the series will get game cafe developers to consider some elements of their plans that may not be readily apparent.

In the first video, Location, Mr. Tassie walks potential store owners through a few simple questions to answer about where to look in a city for your location and if your city is a good place to start. “Toronto is a big enough city that we actually had a number of different neighborhoods that we could have put down roots in,” he says. “And in fact, a number of those neighborhoods all have game cafes of their own now.”

The launch of the series was delayed by a month after the cafe’s video equipment was stolen. Hopefully, that won’t delay the release of the rest of the series.

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