Co-Owner Matt Fantastic: "There is sort of an inherent human need to interact with other humans, and sitting in a room around a table is a very different experience than just looking at a screen." Lucy Gellman Photos.
Just off Orange Street, Elm City Games was still waking up. Sunlight streamed through the front windows. On the shelves, board and card games sat snugly packed beside each other. Tote bags and bright posters seemed to say hello from the walls, with graffiti art and glitter-covered canvases waiting patiently in the back rooms. On tables and racks throughout the space, plushies of all shapes and sizes looked out at their surroundings.
This beloved “third space,” which started off as a closet of a Chapel Street coffee shop, is Elm City Games, a fixture on Orange Street that asks patrons to stop scrolling, look up, and interact with each other. Rooted in the idea of creating and maintaining community in New Haven, the shop uses all manner of analog games—board games, card games, tabletop miniatures—to bring people together. This year, it celebrates its first decade in downtown New Haven.
In an age of constant, often mindless scrolling, it’s an analogue success story: Elm City Games has built its success on people who want to connect in the real world. The shop currently has over 300 monthly members and gives out over 2,000 day passes each month. It is open to anyone, with a full schedule of programming each week .
The current storefront is located at 71 Orange St. and is open from Sunday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. to midnight.
“There is sort of an inherent human need to interact with other humans, and sitting in a room around a table is a very different experience than just looking at a screen,” said co-owner Matt Fantastic, who runs the space with fellow co-owner Trish Loter and a dedicated staff of eight full- and part-time employees. “Even if you’re sitting with friends playing a video game. It becomes a vehicle for hanging out.”
The story of Elm City Games started long before the Orange Street storefront that New Haveners know today. As a kid growing up in Stamford, Fantastic belonged to a family that loved gaming, including an MIT-educated uncle who “had played D&D [Dungeons & Dragons] since before I was born.” As he got older, he started blogging about games, then volunteering at gaming conventions.
“And then one thing leads to another,” and Fantastic was landing paid work to show up at conventions, and teach people about the world of games. Outside of that world, he wore many different hats: he played in a band, earned his teaching certification, taught as a social studies teacher, and took over a rock climbing gym in Newhallville. He never lost his interest in games: it just lived alongside life for several years, as he navigated his way through the professional world.
And then, in 2015, he and Elm City Games co-owner Trish Loter found himself talking to Vishal Patel, who was building a coffee shop on Chapel Street based around building community through both coffee and a radical vision of wealth redistribution. Patel invited him to collaborate, with a small arsenal of games crammed into a closet in the shop. After 600 people showed up to play games at a soft opening, Fantastic had the sense that he was on to something.
Part of that comes from his deep belief in “third space” theory—that a person needs a space that is neither their home nor their workspace, “where we go for community and activity and to do stuff,” Fantastic said. So when Happiness Lab announced it was closing in 2016, Loter and Fantastic knew it was worth fighting for. The duo moved operations to The Grove, a coworking spot on Chapel Street. In that time, Elm City Games’ fan base continued to grow, from people who showed up for weekly game nights to those who dropped in only occasionally.
When the Grove closed in 2019, Elm City Games moved around the corner, subletting from what was then Baobab Tree Studios for a year. And then, when Rev. Kevin Ewing announced that the studio would be leaving its brick-and-mortar home on Orange Street, Fantastic and Loter took over the lease. They had no idea that the Covid-19 pandemic was about to turn their world completely upside down. When it did, they did what they’d been doing for five years: they pivoted, because they understood that it was a way for the small business to stay alive.
“We’re in this part of downtown that is just doing its thing,” Fantastic said. After months of virtual game nights—and as it became both safer and legally permissible to reopen—Elm City Games began to welcome people back with new pandemic-era precautions in place, navigating a new normal as people, hungry for community, found their way back to the shop.
As Fantastic made his way around the space on a recent Tuesday, sunlight spilling through the front windows, a person could see firsthand how the shop, nearly 5,000 square feet of games and playing space, has grown into a fully-fledged hangout for people to forge friendships and vanquish their fantastical foes. Coming in, a patron finds themselves in a long, jam-packed front room, the shelves artfully lined with hundreds of games.
On one, for instance, the game Scout sits just a few boxes away from Love Letters, a card game that transports a player back to a time of knights and castles, where they’re trying to gain the trust of a Princess. On another, crochet patterns for small, plush animals sit beside glossy new graphic novels.
Further back, there’s a game library, the shelves neatly packed, across from a playing room adorned with graffiti art from years ago, when Site Projects held an event called “Art In The Park” at Coogan Pavillion in 2014. Beyond the first library, Fantastic explained, there’s another “Fancy Library” beneath lock and key, for members only. In the same room—once the kitchen of a podcasting studio—Fantastic has hung glitter-piled canvases by the artist Evad, as well as a miniature model of the shop, complete with painstaking detail inside, thanks to a former member.
“Our goal isn’t to make the most money possible, but it’s to have a safe space for people,” Fantastic said. For him, Elm City Games isn’t just a job (although Fantastic lives and breathes games, because he’s also a game designer); the shop is also a way to be in community and take a beat away from the stresses multiplying outside. He loves it so much that “I even come on my days off,” he said with a smile. “Like, I came here on my birthday.”
The love for the shop within the community is strong. Growing up in New Haven, Sam Crumlish first visited the space in 2015, when he was just a kid, and Elm City Games was just getting off the ground. At first, he was a little bit nervous—even in a small space, Elm City Games felt so vast—but felt welcomed as people invited him in. Soon, he and his brothers were meeting new friends and learning to play Dungeons & Dragons.
“That was a lovely experience, it can be a little intimidating, but everyone there was kind and helpful and made it a really positive experience,” said Crumlish, who is now a student at Yale, in a voice memo on Thursday afternoon. He added that he still loves the spot years later (his twin brother, Caleb, helped report the story of the move to Orange Street), so much so that he signed up for a monthly membership in 2024.
“Matt has just been a pillar in our community,” he said in a recent phone call. “I didn’t know that games were so popular!”
When Fantastic started talking about opening a spot where people could play games, Brehon was all ears. In the years since, he’s been amazed to watch the shop gain a steady and enthusiastic following in the community, while supporting fellow downtown businesses all the while (Fantastic also sits on the board of Site Projects, which brings large-scale public art projects to New Haven).
As small businesses owners, “we talk about issues in the [Ninth Square] neighborhood … how do we make it more of a community?” Brehon said. “We are a part of that community and we should all move forward to make it better.”
This article comes to the Arts Paper through New Haven Academy's junior internship program, through which juniors at the school spend three weeks with a host organization. Kwasi Danso is interested in pursuing writing on the university level. Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.