Story and Photos by JoAnna Daemmrich • Additional photography by Laura Wiegmann
Chess, classic board games, and, yes, Dungeons & Dragons are seeing a renewed interest locally
As the boys around him shouted “doom,” Jakob Miller leaned over a medieval battle map, trying to figure out his next move. Would a lightning bolt save them—or just singe their hair?
Luckily, a librarian had the answer. Glancing at her notes, Gabriella Norton laughed a little and said, “Go ahead, roll again.”
Outside the room, the Annapolis library was quiet. Inside, Jakob and a half-dozen other boys talked over each other, arguing and joking through a Dungeons & Dragons battle. They traded claims of greatness as freely as d20 dice (a special 20-sided dice used in the game) and mini-cookies. Phones stayed buried in backpacks.
“I kind of let my imagination run wild,” said Jakob, 13, who lives in Crofton and rushed from Boy Scouts to the “high point” of his day. “It’s looser, so you can be yourself.”
For the iPad kids, pencil-and-paper games no longer seem just nerdy or niche. Lately, the same teenagers who obsess over TikTok and YouTube are also dusting off classic board games, from chess and backgammon to Scrabble and Risk, all offscreen and unscripted.
Much of the revival can be traced to the pandemic, when families were stuck at home looking for something to do. Sales of puzzles and board games jumped 30 percent in 2020, according to market research, and have been brisk ever since. Online chess surged, too: Chess.com monthly users climbed in the past five years from about 8 million to over 57 million today. Meanwhile, in-person game nights continue to multiply across the country.
In New York and Los Angeles, chess clubs that once fit around a few tables are drawing cocktail-sipping crowds of 20-somethings to studios and warehouses. Here in Anne Arundel County and on the Eastern Shore, though, it’s less a nightlife than a low-key suburban scene.
Local high schools have newly energized chess clubs. Neighborhood stores like Games and Stuff in Glen Burnie and Edgewater’s Token host game nights. And public libraries, long past the “shh” era, now fill their calendars with everything from anime screenings to mahjong meetups.
“There’s definitely more interest,” says Norton, who is 33 and doubles as the “dungeon master” at the Michael E. Busch Annapolis Library, leading teen and adult D&D games. “Once you start talking their language, and they see you’re invested, they get more and more engaged.”
Perhaps the hottest tabletop game right now is the patriarch of them all—chess, first played in India over 1,500 years ago. Boosted by the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, chess has shed its once-stodgy image, with top players streaming games and analysis to global audiences.
For Greg Acholonu, the crowds and new clubs recall the chess fever after Bobby Fischer’s 1972 world championship, which inspired him as a boy. A national master, Acholonu has taught hundreds of Annapolis-area schoolchildren the basics over the past 25 years. Around town, everyone knows him as “Mr. A.” Though he worries AI is changing the way the game is played, Acholonu says even first-graders still want to sit down, concentrate, and play face to face.
“The charm of chess has always been what you get out of it,” Acholonu says. He has coached some students to tournaments but mostly focuses on “getting them to love the game.” “As you increase your skill level, it keeps opening new portals and vistas. Hopefully, it will go on.”
At the Broadneck library, 16-year-old Michael Dunn has started monthly chess sessions for younger kids (and the occasional retiree). He keeps matches to 10 minutes, easy to reset if a kid gets discouraged, capped by a lightning round. As president of Broadneck High School’s chess club, Dunn takes the same relaxed approach. “The best part?” he says. “We reject absolutely no one.”
Fourth-grade soccer teammates Drew Winner and Vince Skretch come often. One December afternoon, Drew arrived beaming. “Look at my shoes!” he said, showing off his red-and-white checkerboard Vans. Within minutes, he had scooped up Vince’s queen. But two moves later, Drew slumped in his chair and sighed, “This is impossible! I lose to him every time.”
Both boys love a challenge: Vince looks to “attack early,” while Drew wants to “beat any player who has more experience than me.” Just as often, they’re moving from table to table, making new friends. “It’s a lot of fun meeting people here,” Vince said.
Moments later, Drew jumped up to find his favorite partner: his mom. At home, Orian Moss Winner said, he’s been teaching her “all the very good strategies” he first learned from Mr. A. Eager to play more, Drew even tried chess on his tablet, she said, but it wasn’t the same.
“One of the big things we talk about in our house is balance,” says Winner, who lives with her family in Annapolis and encourages them to take regular screen breaks. “We try to go outside and run around, or find time to read, or get out a board game.”
Many families are making similar choices, notes Christine Feldmann, spokeswoman for the 16-branch county library system. Since the pandemic, they’ve flocked to libraries, not just for books but for teen craft nights, resume help, tax prep, and even line dancing. Digital fatigue after so much time online, she said, has left more people “looking for a place of belonging really.”
In a corner of the Glen Burnie library, light pop music played as several families settled around a stack of board games on a Monday night. Two moms chatted with their little girls between turns at Connect 4. Nearby, Trey Fraser challenged his 11-year-old son, Nathan, to a round of “War.”
“It’s been years since I played an actual card game,” admitted Fraser, 42, chuckling as Nathan swept up four more cards. Though they play online together, Fraser said he limits Nathan’s iPad time and looks for evenings like this, saying, “It’s good to get out.”
“Growing up, I used to go to the music store and buy CDs. I’d look who the producer was, what the mixing was,” he added. “Now everything is on Apple, and you get it right away, but you don’t get the same feel for it. It’s readily accessible, but somehow less tangible.”
For younger fans, that’s often the appeal of old-school games, whether it’s lining up knights and rooks or flipping through an illustrated monster book. Like Drew with his chess app, Jakob and his friends have checked out online D&D games. But they missed rolling their quirky, multi-sided dice with friends and keeping score by hand.
“It’s a lot more rewarding on paper than on the computer,” says Jakob, who gets a kick out of the character he invented—a gloomy college grad, wandering among the “happy adventurers” played by fellow middle schoolers. “Plus, you actually get to see people.”
Other teens and tweens welcome a break from tightly structured days. Luke Bates, a 15-year-old freshman at Broadneck High, plays trombone in the marching band and studies Taekwondo, every note and step rehearsed. In D&D, he said, it’s different.
“You can do what you want just by imagining it, the way you can’t with other things,” he explains. “There are still rules with D&D, but they don’t restrict you. It’s more about being able to talk to other people and choose the way the story goes.”
First released in 1974, the medieval-inspired fantasy game became a staple of 1980s rec rooms and still draws devoted fans. More recently, it’s caught on with the Minecraft generation growing up on role-play video games. County libraries started hosting D&D clubs in 2018, Feldmann said, and now offer about a half-dozen—free, though spots fill fast.
“If you’re a geek,” Luke quips, “it’s considered very cool.” At the library table, he looked serious, if half-amused, as the younger boys debated fire, wind—or maybe an arrow—when Norton’s dragon unleashed a “cone of doom.” Some players hung over the battle map, while others quickly tallied hit points. One minute, the group feared no weapon would work; the next, a 12-year-old declared, “I’m the world’s greatest swordsman.”
After three years of running D&D games in Annapolis, Norton has heard just about every wild plan. Both storyteller and referee, she’s fielded all kinds of questions—could a druid shape-shift, or a bear squeeze through a window? “Solid,” she said after one well-timed blow, then teased the group about shrinking their giant characters to dodge Jakob’s lightning strike.
Toward the end of the Saturday afternoon, their spells suddenly clicked. One player after another struck—a dart flying, a battleax swinging—until the dragon crumpled. Luke grinned and reached for his stick of dynamite. “Just a nasty smell of sulfur and a screech,” Norton said, wrapping up the game in a cloud of smoke and laughter.
Gathering up their dice, the boys said quick goodbyes. A few were already on their phones. As the last of the D&D faithful headed for the door, Norton called after them:
“Same time next month!”
