Culture & Community | Downtown | Elm City Games | Arts & Culture | Youth Arts Journalism Initiative
Julia Belyung and friends at Elm City Games. Keira Anderson Photos.
When Julia Belyung moved to Westbrook five months ago, she worried that she would have trouble finding community. Then she stumbled on Elm City Games while leisurely strolling downtown New Haven. At once, everything clicked into place.
On a recent Sunday, Belyung was one of many patrons who gathered to vanquish dragons, defeat enemies, and seize victory in the board and card games offered at the Orange Street storefront. Four months after she first discovered the space, it’s become one of her frequent and beloved haunts.
Opened in February of 2016, Elm City Games is an open space for people to explore a wide variety of card and tabletop games. Nine years ago, co-owners Matt Fantastic and Trish Loter created the shop as a communal space for like-minded people to gather. Originally, it operated as a gaming meet up out of Agora (formerly The Grove) and the Happiness Lab, a short-lived coffee shop on Chapel Street. It moved to its current spot at 71 Orange St. in 2019.
“We had the idea, you know,” Fantastic said. “Game cafes are kind of a thing that’s starting to be more popular. What if we move my game collection into the back of the coffee shop and start people to come play it?”
That was almost a decade ago, and Fantastic had a sense that there was a community need. When 600 people showed up on their opening, he and Loter quickly realized that Elm City Games was going to be a lot bigger than they originally thought. Loter, who had been helping out since the beginning, officially came on as a co-owner.
“She took on running the shop day to day and Elm City Games never would have moved beyond just being some games in the back of a coffee shop without her leading the charge,” Fantastic said.
Diem Delgado and friends. Keira Anderson Photos.
The two were on to something. Almost ten years after that chilly, hundreds-of-people-deep meet up, the shop has grown into a beloved “Third Space,” with weekly game nights, paint and jigsaw puzzle clubs, evenings dedicated to Star Wars and more. Recently, Fantastic said, the business renewed its lease, meaning that it isn’t going anywhere.
“Third Space” is a term coined by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, meaning a space that is neither one’s home nor their job, where they can interact with other people. Fantastic said he thinks about the meaning of that theory, particularly as people become increasingly siloed, a lot.
“We really wanted to create the sort of environment that was not, you know, not just a transactional business experience,” he said. “But more of a community that people could come be a part of.”
Diem Delgado, another attendant of the recent Sunday afternoon event, learned about the shop through his family members. The magic of Elm City Games is, in his family, generational: his grandfather told his father about the spot.
“He wanted me and him to go take a walk to go see this place,” Delgado said. “And it turned out pretty cool.”
Despite it only being his first time in the shop, he expressed interest in coming back another time. He likes playing table top games, which he jokingly called “time killers,” with friends and family, as an antidote to boredom.
Aimee Toms. Keira Anderson Photo.
While the staff is small, meanwhile—just seven employees, including the co-owners—it is filled with heart. Aimee Toms, a clerk at Elm City Games, has been working at the shop for four years and was offered the job by the co-owners.
“They’ve known me since I was a kid, actually,” said Toms.
“They reached out to me and, you know, they knew that I played a lot of games and stuff like that. And so they offered me a job and I was very excited to accept it,” she said. She added that her favorite part is being able to sell someone a game that they end up falling in love with.
Longtime employee Greg Matta echoed that sentiment.
“This is very much a communal gathering space,” said Matta. “For like-minded nerds, like-minded people who like to play board games, role playing games, any kind of social entertainment.”
Working at the store for nine years, he’s watched it come together virtually since the beginning. The community has kept him coming back to it over and over again.
That community—and its steady, sustained growth—is part of Fantastic’s goal. In addition to near-nightly events, Elm City Games has a membership program to encourage people to continue to come back and a discord server that is used to coordinate events among both staff and members.
“I think my favorite part,” said Fantastic, “is that I get to make the place that if I was 12, I would have lost my mind with how cool it is.”
This article comes from the 2025 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). YAJI is a program in which New Haven, Hamden and West Haven Public Schools high school students pitch, write, edit and publish articles through the Arts Paper. This year, YAJI advisors include Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and reporter and YAJI alum Abiba Biao. Keira Anderson is a rising senior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, where she studies creative writing.