Ten years later, Matt Fantastic Loter is still very much in the game. Specifically, he remains in the game-selling business. His store, Elm City Games, celebrates its 10th anniversary as a mainstay of the Ninth Square with a day-long board game-playing party Saturday paired with suds from Armada Brewing and on-site tattoos from the folks at Hope Gallery. Loter’s business grew out of a separate board game-design coop studio he started called Forever Stoked Creative. It began with game nights at the Happiness Lab at the old Grove coworking space on Chapel Street. The events and the games caught on and found a home at 71 Orange St., where a seven-person staff hosts 300 monthly in-store game-playing members and sells shelves worths of competitive and cooperative fun. (Forever Stoked has space in the back.) Since then Loter has defied trends that have ended the runs of other retailers, from the pandemic to rising rents. During the Covid shutdown, for instance, Elm City pivoted to online games as well as a pivot to retail sales that maintained momentum years later. Our need for fun  —  for diversion, for communal connection —  helps explain the demand to keep Elm City Games in the retail game, Loter said during a conversation Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”  “I think it’s even more important in times like these, when the regular world can be so bleak and depressive. It’s really easy to fall into that. So having a place where you can go and just be among friendly people and see your friends, [you can] fall into some fantasy world or fall into thinking about this game and  let off a little steam emotionally.” During the “Dateline” conversation, Loter challenged me to a round of his board game called “How Many What?!” Players write down their guesses for answers to questions in the game. I was way off guessing how many wine bottles tall Danny DeVito is (correct answer: 4.8) and how many unsharpened number-two pencils wide match the wingspan of an albatross (16). The game would of course have gone on longer, and be more fun, with a bigger group in a living room … or board game night at Elm City Games, which Loter refers to as a classic “third place” every community needs. Depending on the day (or night), you can find people playing Magic: The Gathering or Commander or Heroscape at the store. Meanwhile, Loter is rolling with whatever unexpected obstacles pop up on his entrepreneurial path. This past year’s tariffs, for instance, required a price hike. On the upside, hundreds of new families (and potential customers) are moving into new apartments within blocks of his store (from the former Coliseum site to the corner of Chapel and State to four separate developments just over the railroad tracks by Olive and Chapel and Fair streets). Business remains strong enough that, as he celebrates this week’s 10-year anniversary, Loter just signed a five-year extension to his new lease. Which means a 20-year party could well be in the cards as well. Click on the video below to watch the full conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” with Elm City Games and Forever Stoked Creative’s Matt Fantastic Loter, including his side gig as a justice of peace conducting more than 1,500 marriages to date (including a recent one of a couple who met through an Elm City Games session). Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” The post Let The Games Roll On! appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less