Food/Games: 4/10 -- Value: 5/10 -- Service: 4/10 -- Ambiance/Décor: 5/10
This isn't a very good board game cafe.
It fails for me because there are too few games and too few good games.
Half of them were foreign and didn't look remotely interesting. Some of the games in English were missing instructions or pieces. There were a few popular English games, but most of the other ones seemed like variations of Apples to Apples. They just weren't fun. It's easy to buy small board games to pad your numbers, but are these actually quality games?
It fails for me because of the atmosphere.
Lots of really loud yelling in Mandarin. Every surface is sticky. There's not enough ventilation (and the weather is cooler these days!) and it's hot and stuffy inside.
It fails for me because of the service.
You just feel very rushed by employees who are counting down the minutes to three hours so that they can ask you to buy something else. Each person has to buy one thing every three hours. And good luck flagging anyone down after they've taken your order.
The food was perfectly fine; at least we can give them that. And they're super expensive because they expect you to be there for a while. We had popcorn chicken, green tea with honey, mango slush, strawberry yogurt drink, and house special milk tea with tapioca. The strawberry yogurt was room temperature, which was really weird. The house special was $7.50. You don't even pay $7.50 for something good at Cha Time.
This place may be the biggest board game cafe in Markham (their claim; I didn't fact check this) but it is nothing compared to any of the locations downtown. I would rather plan a day downtown to attend Snakes & Lattes than come back to Utopia. Staff there actually make game recommendations and I prefer the food there.