Labo Coffee's bulletin board connects adventurers with side quests

A Whyte Avenue coffee shop has launched a quest board to help young people connect with each other while avoiding pressure to monetize their skills.

"It's meant to be a very low-stakes way to get to know somebody, to get help for something that's been on your list for a while," Atty Vohra, co-founder of Labo Coffee, told Taproot. "That's what a side quest fundamentally is. It's not a main quest, it's not something that's so pivotal to life that it's make-or-break."

A side quest in a video game is an optional, secondary mission outside of the main storyline. "Side quests in real life" have been a trend on social media for a few years now; they've been described as "small, spontaneous adventures that take place outside normal routines."

The idea to add the side quest board to the café came, in part, from a chat Vohra had with a customer who wanted to attend the University of Alberta's library sciences program. Vohra's friend had just gotten into the program, so he connected the two, and the customer was ultimately successful in their own application.

"That happened as a direct consequence of me in that moment serving as a touchpoint for two people, and the quest board is meant to systematize a little bit more," Vohra said.

Vohra was a game designer before opening Labo, and elements of game design have gone into the quest board. Adventurers are those who accept quests, and they earn XP (experience points) for successfully completing them, just like a player would in Skyrim or Fortnite.

When he was in the game industry, Vohra built systems for tracking progress; in other words, a record of effort. Gamification works "because it's fun, it's interesting for people to see their number go up — that's just fundamentally a fun thing for a lot of people to see," he said. But it also allows the café to identify adventurers who have shown they can be trusted or have a track record of taking on a certain type of quest, he said.

So far, quests have included help for the LSAT and other study tips — it is near the university, after all. One that "flew off the board" was a witch's request for herbs in exchange for a tarot card reading. One of the fundamental rules of the board is that the exchange is non-monetary, Vohra said.

Participants must first sign the Labo Adventurer's Guild Membership Covenant via a Google form. To post a quest, adventurers fill out a template with the quest's details, rank requirement, and reward. They can post it on the pinboard for up to two weeks. Those looking to take a quest must confirm they meet the minimum requirement, after which they have two weeks to complete the quest. Adventurers earn one XP per quest completed.

To Vohra, there is a link between video games and a public gathering space like a café. When he got burnt out and quit the game industry, he said he asked himself why he wanted to make video games in the first place.

"When I was growing up, games brought something very special to me, which was connection — I was able to connect a lot of people around me through board games, through MMOs," he said, referring to massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, for example. The café allows him to foster that sense of community in a different way, he said.

Labo holds events in the evenings, such as Let Me Explain, where people give "low-stakes hot take presentations" on anything they find interesting. There are also recurring board game nights and crafting events.

"My goal with this space a lot of the time has always been to make it about connection and community and play," Vohra said. "We've seen friendships form over the course of the last two years, and I think looking back on those as tangible evidence that I have that this space contributed to people's lives in a positive way … that itself made the last two years of pain worth it."