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The Dealt Hand offers a new way to play board games

October 15, 2019

A new way to play board games is now available for residents in the Des Moines area.

A Des Moines couple—Joseph and Mary Roth—are co-founders of The Dealt Hand, a new organization that hosts pop-up board game events around the Des Moines metro.

“Over the last ten years, we’ve both really enjoyed board games at a casual level. There’s a board game cafe in Omaha called Spielbound that we’ve taken day trips to just to play a bunch of board games and hang out,” said Joseph. “We thought it would be really cool for Des Moines to have something like that and think it’s something this market would support.”

The Dealt Hand offers pop-up board game nights at taprooms, coffee shops and other locations throughout the Des Moines area. Some of the more frequent locations include Firetrucker Brewery, Uptown Garage Brewing and Art Terrarium.

Joseph and Mary Roth, co-founders of The Dealt Hand.

Since holding its first pop-up event in April of this year, the company’s popularity has grown and now holds 2-3 events per week. Last month, because of the growing popularity, Joseph quit his job in order to focus on The Dealt Hand full-time.

The Dealt Hand has a selection of over 200 board games designed to offer a wide variety of game types, including 2-player, group play, medium and long playing games and games for kids.

“We’ve been a huge spread of people interested which has been really nice and exciting,” said Mary. “It’s fun to see something that families can come in and do.”

Right now, the two are working hard to explore future possibilities for The Dealt Hand⁠. “That might be a new business model to open up a permanent location. It might be tweaking the model to continue to operate as a pop-up,” Joseph told Clay & Milk.

“In the perfect world, we open up in one of the outlying metro neighborhoods a permanent cafe space with a membership structure that allows folks to be able to come in and play whenever they want,” Joseph said.

Several pop-up events will be happening over the next few weeks including “The Dealt Hand at Uptown Garage Brewing” tomorrow night, “Boardgames, Botanicals and Beer” at Art Terrarium this Saturday and “Halloween Game Night” at FireTrucker Brewery on the 31st. Click here for a full list of The Dealt Hand’s upcoming events.

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1 Comment

  • Laura Kinnard
    Posted October 15, 2019 at 10:25 am

    I got the chance to meet Joseph! Really cool concept. Love to see this article out about the business.

    0Likes

Comments are closed.

The Dealt Hand offers a new way to play board games | Clay & Milk
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