r Pawn Chess Club, a beginner-friendly group that cycles through wine bars and restaurants in Lower Manhattan. Its founders, Isabel Münter, 32, and Simone Robert, 29, co-workers at a design studio, bustled around the candlelit apartment, where guests crowded around two long tables of chessboards and sipped sake from boxes with straws.

Tabletop games are about as old as civilization itself, said Zachary Horton, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies games. But they may be especially attractive to a generation that is fully saturated by digital media, he said, and living in an acrimonious political era in which it can feel like different groups are... See more

Many have already been experimenting with more physical alternatives to doomscrolling like pickleball and running clubs. But organizers like Ms. Kong say that the kind of board games stored in their grandparents’ attics are hot among Gen Z-ers and millennials hungry for less athletic modes of socialization.