Houston’s first board-game-themed cafe and bar is set to move into the long-mostly-vacant strip center near the White Oak hike-and-bike trail off T.C. Jester just east of Ella Blvd. next February. King’s Bierhaus (pictured above) took up residence last year on the opposite end of the same center (which is behind Restaurant Depot and SSQQ) — on the other side of the iCycle Bike Shop. The photo at top shows 2 businesses that have since left the strip; Tea & Victory and its lending library of 500 board games will go into the 3,300 sq.-ft. space formerly occupied by City Nails and Skincare. A first storefront for cake and cupcake vendor AshleyCakes will be moving in next to the game cafe.
$5 will cover an all-access pass for customers to play as many games as they want, including the ones shown in this photo snapped at a Tea & Victory pop-up event in May:
“Anything zoomed out to the neighborhood scale post-Harvey impact-wise waters down the data so much as to be useless. In the Knollwood-Woodside area where homes are “up ~3%,†it’s a mix of ~$800k newbuilds that mostly didn’t flood and ~$400-500k 1950s houses, some of which flooded and many-most that didn’t. That means any additional newbuild sale immediately skews the pricing average. What has already hit the market lately are mostly original homes that flooded, being sold as-is as teardowns (continuing the trend of the neighborhood), with lot-value on an upswing. I guess I presume all of Knollwood will be new construction in the near future, and almost all of ‘greater Braeswood’ being new construction soon, with everything getting higher elevations . . .” [
Dwight Silverman explores the tech offerings at products-from-startups-showcase b8ta, which opened in the Galleria last month a couple doors down from the new Saks Fifth Avenue: “The stores are also bristling with cameras, which is common in modern retail stores. However, these cameras — 170 of them in the Galleria store — don’t necessarily capture video. [b8ta CEO Vibhu] Norby said they turn images of individuals into data, and then track them as they move about the store.’ We are not tracking the person’s face, we are tracking the geometry of their face,’ he said. ‘We hash it, then we watch the hash as it’s interacting with products. There’s no identification information; this is just a blob doing these behaviors.’ 
A statement from the Houston Housing Authority yesterday says it “i
