Mel Alleyne hadn’t played spades in years. Then her sister called.
“She was like, ‘There’s a tournament [in Brooklyn]. And you’re going to sign up for it and you can’t say no,’” she recalled.
Alleyne, who first learned the game at a lunch table in high school, knew exactly what was at stake at that table — socially, at least.
“It was like you were not cool if you did not know how to play spades,” she said. “It was necessary. It was like you had to know. And you had to be good.”
Last week, Alleyne was one of a roomful of players who gathered at Aunts et Uncles, a Black-owned vegan restaurant in Brooklyn, for The Lunch Room. The spades tournament funneled competitors through a digital qualifier on the Trickster Cards app before bringing the top 16 to a live championship night filled with music, food and the kind of energy many in the Black community have known for years.
“Everybody that you know that’s Black pretty much has played spades, they know about spades,” said Yantise Jenkins, a member of the card club, the DMV Cardtel, who traveled to support the event. “It’s at family reunions. It’s at cookouts. Thanksgiving after everyone eats dinner and cleans up, there’s somebody pulling out the cards to play spades.”
That cultural tradition is exactly what The Lunch Room was designed to honor — especially at a moment when Black history is under attack.
In January 2025, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs across federal agencies and institutions. In recent years, states including Florida, have moved to restrict or eliminate African American studies from public school curricula.
Proposed federal budget cuts have also threatened funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two institutions that have long supported Black cultural programming nationwide. The ongoing theme is hard to ignore: the formal structures designed to protect and legitimize Black cultural life are being dismantled one policy at a time.
What no executive order touches, however, is what gets passed down at the table.
“It’s been done for generations. And different age groups can do it,” said Jenkins. “I was probably 8 years old when I first learned how to play.”
Spades was never taught in a classroom. It spread through kitchen tables, rec centers and lunchrooms where the game stretched well past the bell. It has survived without institutional support because it never needed any — it moved person to person, generation to generation, in the spaces where Black people have always gathered.
Michael Nicholas, co-owner of Aunts et Uncles, knows that story firsthand.
“Some classes were missed and skipped because of spades games,” he laughed, “but I still graduated timely and it was cool.”
That experience is the direct inspiration behind the tournament’s name. The restaurant, which Nicholas owns with his wife Nicole, regularly transforms into its own version of the lunchroom, hosting spades games throughout the year. To Nicholas, the game has always been about more than the cards.
“You learn basically by sitting down and watching the family and friends getting together,” he explained. “So I feel like it’s important for us. It’s just a gathering point and a way to kind of get together, share knowledge, share space. It’s beyond a pastime.”
That gathering point is increasingly rare. As daily life moves further online and in-person community becomes harder to sustain, events like The Lunch Room carry a different kind of weight. The tournament’s structure — starting with a digital qualifier on the Trickster Cards platform before culminating in a live event — was designed to use technology as an on-ramp, not a destination. The point was always the room.
“Because depending on how you play and how your partner plays, you kind of like, know how to talk to each other without speaking to each other,” Nicholas said. “You can read the game, you can read the board, just by the cards.”
For Chevy Wolf, whose agency, The Last Wolves, partnered with Trickster Cards and Aunts et Uncles to produce the event, the cultural stakes were just as clear.
“If you grew up in Black culture, you know, spades is a part of your DNA,” Wolf said. “It’s just genetics.”
Part of that DNA is the trash talk — the loud, sharp, loving kind that sounds like an argument to an outsider but reads as affection to anyone who grew up around it. Wolf wanted the evening to capture that, too.
“You can still compete, but it’s all love at the end of the day. And I think that’s one of the key components we wanted to show everybody.”
The event drew players who hadn’t touched a deck in years. It also brought people determined to make sure the game never skips a generation.
Korey Hines, a Trickster Cards ambassador who learned to play as a kid under his Aunt Helen — a serious card player he describes as a major presence in his life — sees that work as a calling.
“It’s actually a full circle for me,” Hines noted. “Oftentimes, generations get locked into their space and their time, and they don’t pass the torch. I feel that I was given the gift to be able to bring some people together and maybe make those transitions smoother.”
There is something quietly radical about that mission in this particular moment. When the institutions that were supposed to hold Black history and culture are being hollowed out, the people who carry that culture in their hands — literally, in a deck of cards — become the institution.
For the players who walked through the door that night, the significance landed personally.
“It’s kind of nice to be able to come together and see each other and have that community,” Alleyne says.
In a moment when the formal structures built to support and preserve Black cultural life are being systematically dismantled, that community — gathered around a card game, in a Brooklyn restaurant — is holding the line.
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