Help us continue to provide a play space for our community!

Hi everyone,

Giorgi's Game Spot in Elmhurst, IL is a small female family owned little game store with the cute goat mascot that everyone has grown to love. This store has been a staple in this community for years providing board games, card games, role play games, toys, and other items with no video games or electronic devices. Our mission has always been to provide positive gaming experiences to all genders, sexual orientations, and identities as we used to be discriminated against as women. Selling games is not the only thing we find important as we try to make our players and guests feel like they belong to a community or family. We very recently shed the toxic brand and business partners to make a go at our dreams of being sole owners of this shop. Under our previous brand, we had many rules that we had to follow on how this was supposed to be run, and one of these rules was not having a play space. Our goal is to reimplement this very important factor in creating a successful community.

We have a large community of children and adults who want to learn and continue to play Pokémon, board games, Dungeons and Dragons, and be allowed to grow with their peers or join a gaming group. We also have a large family base of customers that want a place where they can learn games without the pressure of having to read and interpret the rules. Our space will also be a place where game makers can come and meet the players, have a place to playtest their games and grow the business as well. Play space is incredibly important for a store like ours to succeed. Our people want to have a space to feel safe, relaxed, and to be able truly enjoy the games they're trying to play without worrying about being in the way of customers or getting interrupted by curious patrons. Unfortunately, our store is too small and real estate is high priced at this location to have in store gaming.

Fortunately, we did find the perfect space. Unfortunately, the perfect space for this project opened up at the same time that we rebranded, causing a strain. We also did not plan on an 8 month delay by the city to get our licenses and inspections to open up for business as we had to continue to pay rent and bills. As we continue to grow this entity, it does not have inventory and is not a self sufficient store, but relies more on the players and community to come and enjoy gaming. Building this back up does take time, but costs do not wait, and we still need to keep the store stocked and running.

We are looking to our community and surrounding areas, anyone that is a game lover or someone just believes in our cause to enable us to continue providing experiences for people who need a place to go. We want to continue to host events, teach people how to play games, allow kids of all ages something to do other than sit in front of a screen and become social again. We have suffered a large hit from Covid and other difficult economic times and just trying to make it through the punches so we can continue to serve the community for years to come.

Please contribute if you are able and share this often to spread the word. Every bit helps us continue to grow both spaces. We have also provided some photos of the play space taken by one of our players.

Thank you so much to anyone who is able to donate anything to our cause!