A destination for strategy, imagination, gaming

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

December 16, 2024

SHEBOYGAN – It’s everyone’s turn to play at The GameBoard as its owner, Lynn Potyen, said she’s spent the last 18 years curating game selections for people of all ages and abilities.

Since opening its first location nearly two decades ago, Potyen said her local game and entertainment store has been through a lot.

“In 2006, we bought a property about 12 blocks from the current one,” she said. “It was a little gas station, and it was hard because we hit the recession right away. (We started) to get our feet back underneath us, and then COVID-19 hits.”

Though initially seen as an inhibitor to The GameBoard’s success, Potyen said the pandemic actually served as the push she needed to move her business into a more suitable building.

“We went from this gas station-looking building to an 1870s jewelry store with beautiful mahogany and glass cabinetry and gorgeous chandeliers,” she said. “When you walk in the store, you understand the rich value of board games because you’re seeing the rich value of the building that you’re standing in.”

Through COVID and Catan

Potyen said The GameBoard was able to remain open for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, crediting the shop’s flexibility in its product offerings to its continued success – even in trying times.

“The tabletop game industry has been on the rise for many, many years, but during COVID, we really saw an acceleration in the play styles – in people coming back to something that was cozy, that was comforting, something that was bringing them back to the table and united them as a family and as friends,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve lost that. I think we’ve actually acquired more of that as it’s progressed.”

With an extensive industry full of different games and products to choose from, Potyen said she and her team of eight employees do an incredible job at continuously revamping The GameBoard’s shelves.

“One of our skills is to be able to adapt and pivot constantly in our business and constantly in the way we look at things,” she said. “We curate a brand-new library of games all the time. We’re constantly finding new stuff.”

Potyen said the products The GameBoard carries often depends on what’s popular with its clientele – and even staff – at the time.

“(In) curating all those games, we also are focusing on, ‘what is our client looking for?’” she said. “What do they want, what do our staff enjoy and what do we as a team feel is best supported by our publishing agents and our distributor chain?”

Also serving as a “third place” for the community of Sheboygan, Potyen said there are many different ways to play at The GameBoard.

“We do have one ADA-compliant play space downstairs, but currently, we are in the throes of trying to finish out the second floor,” she said. “To build out that second floor, which is an 1870s apartment, we’re going to need funding.”

That second-floor space, Potyen said, will also serve as an on-site location for the programs and events she and her staff put on for other businesses in the area.

“We do a lot of team-building programming, but we don’t have a space on our site to do that,” she said. “Once we finish that second floor, we’ll have that space.”

Inspired by family, health

As a mother of three children, Potyen said she was inspired to open The GameBoard after her family discovered how helpful playing games was to one of her sons – who she said has a severe speech delay and neurological writing disorder.

“I was witnessing – as a young mother, a young parent – challenges that my child was going through,” she said. “I wanted to see him be able to accommodate his learning styles and be successful.”

Potyen said interactive and strategic games helped alleviate some of the frustration her son and other kids in speech therapy can often experience.

“When a child has a speech therapy problem, you’re often just sitting there across the table from them and repeating back things,” she said. “We were using the game to help him focus on a different object – we would repeat words and then he would repeat them back to us while we were playing. So he was able to really focus on the game and the strategy, not on the language, and by using that, the language was building and developing.”

One of the taglines for The GameBoard, Potyen said, is “playing for the health of it.”

“We really want people to understand that while (you’re) playing a game, you’re learning… you’re socializing… you’re doing critical thinking and you’re helping to stimulate your brain in a way that you may not have done on a regular, everyday basis,” she said.

Through recognizing the advantages of gameplay for her son, Potyen said she began promoting the health benefits of gameplay for adults – especially for those in cognitive decline.

“We’re looking at older adults with memory loss, we’re looking at people with dementia and Parkinson’s, we’re looking at people with cancer who are fighting things that were isolating them,” she said.

In emphasizing the benefits of strategic gameplay in aging adults, Potyen shared a story of a couple she worked with in which the wife was in the late stages of age-related neurological problems.

“She wouldn’t speak, but she would hum,” she said. “I brought out a game that had rings. It was called Thumbs Up, and it had colored rings. There was red, blue, yellow and green and the whole point was you had the rings on the table, and you tried to put the ring associated with a picture onto (your) thumb.”

Potyen said the couple worked in a pair due to the wife’s cognitive abilities, and that while playing the game, she suddenly stopped humming and said to her husband, “‘Oh, do you remember we used to play games at the cabin?’”

“The tears just flowed out of this man’s face,” Potyen said. “He said to me later, ‘She hasn’t spoken to me in two years.’”

‘Puzzles, games, they’re for everyone’

Potyen said another key goal in starting and continuing to grow The GameBoard was to encourage people of all ages to play, regardless of health, as games have played a part in the rich history of communities across the world.

“Games are old… going back way past Victorian ages,” she said. “It’s crazy what board games (have become) and how the history of board games has (evolved)… board games are what our whole society is built off of.”

In explaining why people “assume that games are for kids,” Potyen pointed to a shift in marketing brought on by the popularity of television.

“In the 1950s, all of a sudden, the TV really became a popular item, and it started being in everybody’s house,” she said. “What did parents do on a Saturday morning? They were exhausted, they turned on the TV, they put on the cartoons and they let their kids watch TV. And during that time period, the toy and game manufacturers went, ‘Huh, this is an opportunity for us to advertise to children.’”

Because adults were witnessing games and toys being marketed toward children, Potyen said people started to believe those products were made exclusively for children – a misunderstanding she said she and her team are working toward undoing.

“We’re having to un-educate those people – to take that information out of their brain and to restart it,” she said. “Because of COVID, we were able to really get a good push on that – really show people (that) puzzles and games, they’re for everybody, not just for children.”

For more information on The GameBoard, visit its website, the-gameboard.com.