Elm City Games Bunks With Baobab Tree

The last time Elm City Games planned a move, it was just one storefront over. This time, the owners are going all the way around the corner.

That’s the latest for the gaming haven, which has migrated from Agora New Haven to 71 Orange St.—better known as home to Baobab Tree Studios—in New Haven’s Ninth Square neighborhood. In a move that Baobab Tree Founder Kevin Ewing called advantageous for both groups, Elm City Games will be taking over much of Baobab’s space, while Baobab retains its recording studio and plans for a new stage of its nascent podcast network.

“The space was just too expensive for me to keep,” he said. “I didn’t need it, I wasn’t using it. The big plans I had for the space never came to fruition, and our business model changed. So it was just the space sitting there. It’s a great move—there’s a lot of synergy between the folks that hang out at Elm City Games and the podcasting milieu, so it’s just a great opportunity.”

After moving into the space last week, Elm City Games Co-Owner Matt Fantastic said that the business is thrilled for its newest chapter (he declined to comment on any falling out with Agora, which he opened with two partners in the old Grove space last year). In its three and a half years in New Haven, the spot’s monthly membership has risen to 120, a number that Fantastic said fluctuates seasonally and with the some of the city’s more transient residents.

Currently, its revenue model comes from a mix of membership, which is $20 per month, day passes and a carefully curated collection of games, some designed by Fantastic's friends and colleagues, that are for sale in a large front room. In addition to co-owners Fantastic and Trish Loter, Elm City Games has two primary employees.

As he walked by a row of neat bookshelves stacked high with games and set of Dungeons & Dragons rule books, Fantastic explained that the first-floor location is better for the gaming spot, because passers-by can see the action up close, and feel invited to come in and check out the space. While that stretch of Orange Street may still struggle to attract foot traffic, the action is literally front and center, with bright board games and tables visible from the building's large glass windows.

“By far, this is the best thing for Elm City Games,” Fantastic said in an interview last Friday at the space, adding that the business’ history has been one of adapting to fit the community’s needs. “It’s an easy shift. So much of what we do is community-oriented, so it’s great to be open to the greater New Haven community. Here, you can see that you’re in the right place.”

He added that the new location is so close to Agora that “most of our members park in the same place they have been” and walk the extra half block without complaint.

While Fantastic described the location as technically in its “soft open” phases, there’s a full schedule of activities for existing members, potential members, and drop-ins, including board game mixers on Friday nights and weekly tutorials on intricate, harder-to-learn games like Magic The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons.

Already, he and Loter have begun collaborating with their neighbors at Barcade just down the street and started a monthly trivia night at The State House, titled the “Island Of Misfit Trivia” and planned for the last Tuesday of every month starting in June. Fantastic said he hopes the night will live up to its name, with quirky trivia on arts, culture, skateboarding and gaming that New Haveners might not get elsewhere in the city.

The move takes place in what Fantastic called “the age of the nerd,” where the first truly digital generation has aged into adulthood, and is excited to both champion the technology they grew up with and keep playing those games. It’s a moment where people are also hungry for physical spaces to connect, in line with the “third place theory” around which he and Loter designed the original concept of Elm City Games. In other words, he said, “there’s your home, there’s your work, and then there’s this third place you go.”

He added that it’s also meant to be a comfortable place for people who like the idea of board games, and want to learn more. As a case study, he called the space an ideal spot for a first date, where a board game can help fill in the awkward silences and stilted moments that unfold between two people who are getting to know each other.

“We’re a welcoming springboard for people who are nerd-curious ” he said, switching on the new Wizards Unite app (pictured above) as he spoke. “We do a really good job of giving that scaffolding, that hand-holding, that entry point to gaming. It might be Dungeons & Dragons, it might be trivia, it might be checkers, and that on-ramping is so important. That’s really what we’re selling.”

As Fantastic and Loter continue to arrange the space, they said they are excited to have a more permanent home. For the two, the new location marks Elm City Games’ fourth (or as Fantastic said, “fourth-and-a-half”) move around the Ninth Square in less than four years. In 2016, the group started “in sort of a closet” in the back of the now-defunct Happiness Lab on Chapel Street, expanding into the back of the space only to be uprooted later that year.

Then they had a spot in The Grove, which became a bigger spot in The Grove, which became Agora. That’s not counting the years Fantastic spent as a free-floating game designer and enthusiast, including at New Haven’s short-lived brewing experiment Luck & Levity on Court Street.

The latest move takes place as the building changes hands from Ninth Square Properties to Boston-based developer Beacon Communities, LLC. Friday, Fantastic said that he and Loter are still working through those details and declined to comment on the specifics.

“Really across the board, it’s been a great thing,” Fantastic said.

The pun wasn't intended. But it landed just the same.

To listen to a podcast on the origins and work of Elm City Games in the community from Youth Arts Journalism Initiative Caleb Crumlish, click on or download the audio above. The Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New Haven Free Public Library; read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag.