The Dungeons and Dragons tavern

The Arcadia tavern is down a side street off the Strand in London, opposite the gothic gates of the Royal Courts of Justice. You could easily miss it, because it’s surrounded by actual taverns: the George, the Edgar Wallace, the Cheshire Cheese. If you push open the heavy wooden door, you’ll find a four-storey building with a bar, a kitchen and 14 rooms, all of them devoted to playing the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. 

This is initially disconcerting. I first played D&D as a spotty teenager. Entering the Arcadia tavern feels like discovering that the weird indie band you never admitted to liking is suddenly playing the O2. (And in fact D&D is playing the O2 – live on stage in August.) 

Arcadia is not the only tavern. Similar venues are opening from Aberdeen and Edinburgh to Leeds and Bristol. D&D also has friends in high places.

It was the childhood pastime of Silicon Valley billionaires Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Jeff Bezos has been rumoured to have a basement set aside for the game.

Arcadia Games, which includes the tavern, was opened just over a year ago by Adrianna Ryn, who came to the UK from New York in 2022 to study for a postgrad at Goldsmiths college. Her parents had met at a D&D table, so she visited a drop-in game “to get to know people without that pressure of having to maintain conversation”. “You can tell why it appeals to people who are neurodivergent or socially awkward,” she says. “It’s a wonderful third space to exist in.”

The original D&D was invented by Wisconsin tabletop wargamers Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. Its rules were rooted in the Chainmail medieval warfare game, which had winners and losers; characters were archetypes from Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian. But D&D has changed. In 2024, there was a revamp of the rules. Previously, players had chosen their “race”, which bestowed certain qualities – and because of, for example, Tolkien’s description of orcs as “brutal, squat, flat-nose, sallow-skinned, resembling repulsive versions of… least lovely Mongol-types,” these felt outdated and, well, racist. Since the 2024 update, abilities are influenced by a character’s role not their species. D&D has left its wargame roots and become a story written by you and your friends in real time, using improvisation and dice. 

However, early devotees of the game, known as grognards, remain largely unimpressed by the changes. In 2024, Elon Musk fumed on X against “woke D&D” and toyed with buying its owner, Hasbro. Grognards type “go woke, go broke” in online forums, predicting doom. They’ve been proved wrong. Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary which owns D&D, had a record-breaking 2025, providing 88% of Hasbro’s profits. 

Adrianna Ryn’s first game of D&D in Britain was old-school grognard – and she realised immediately that “there was a very large contingency of femme people and queer people who were looking for a space that was safe, had guarantees, and felt like it was for them”. D&D’s new wave of players, she suggests, are looking for the chance to inhabit other bodies, to be astonishing. This is especially appealing, says Ryn, “if you want to express yourself in a way that you can’t in your real life.”

In the upstairs rooms at Arcadia I find a game that has little to do with the one I played as a teenager. I can help solve a murder mystery in Mr Katorium’s Literary Emporium, where the characters from Sleepy Hollow and dark Russian fairytales have escaped their books to cause chaos and horror, or I can help a merchant reclaim his stolen ship from psychic pirates who buried it in the sand. 

But one thing hasn’t changed: trying to describe a D&D game is still like retelling a dream. Most of it takes place inside the player’s head. And that’s when I understood the point of a tavern wholly devoted to playing D&D. As one player told me, if you’re playing in your dreams, you don’t want a pub downstairs, or a rugby club between you and the toilet. The walls of the Arcadia tavern are there to keep the real world out while people briefly become heroes.

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Illustration Oscar Ingham