The cult favourite Unwind Café brings its game-happy avatar to the Zabeel area to make a new group of Dubai residents fall in love with it, says Ipshita Sharma.
Looking for a fun place for date night? Or for a nice little place to get together with friends? Or a place to hang out with colleagues for some downtime or even for a spot of team-building?
The answer to all of these is the fantastic Unwind Café, the first installment of which is at Hessa Street and is much-loved. We head out to this café’s newest avatar next to Zabeel Park to check out everything that’s on offer. Unwind specialises in board games from all around the world as well as activity and strategy games as well.
We start off the evening having a chat with the games master, Justine. This lovely lady has an amazing understanding of various games and what would be a good fit based on your likes, dislikes, game play options and board game history. After a nice little chat with us, she brought out Okiya, Jaipur, Sleeping Queens and Ubongo.
Okiya is a little tile and strategy game that was a great mix of brains and fun, Jaipur is a card-based trading game that was quite complicated but so very interesting once we caught on, Sleeping Queens was very very fun and so different from anything else we’ve ever played before and then came the best that we kept for last – Ubongo. Ubongo is a fast-paced, addictive, and easy-to-learn geometric puzzle game that we were actually tempted to buy for ourselves!
While the game fun was going on, we ordered some coffees and food. And as the food arrived, we didn’t know what was more amazing. We got fish n’ chips and a margherita pizza with a few appetisers and across the board, everything was fantastic, fresh, hot and well-made.
We soon lost track of time as the games took over and our competitive spirit made an appearance. We kept people all around us slamming down to play games or ringing buzzers or yelling in triumph or frustration.
Then my friend thought of a game and described it to the games master and of course she had kept it aside for us already! Called Tsuro, it is a deceptively beautiful and simple game of laying a tile before a token to make it continue its path. Try it to fall in love with it – which is easily what we think about Unwind Café also!
Good: Easily one of the fun and different things to try out.
Bad: The Zabeel brand is not easy to find and has some issues with parking.
Trendy: The food is great, the vibe is great, the drinks are great and the games are even better!