By Jack Hunter
Dec. 9, 2021
LEXINGTON— Friday nights in downtown Lexington, Virginia, are mostly dark and quiet. Many businesses have packed up for the weekend, leaving residents or tourists without much to do.
But there’s a light coming through the transparent storefront of Just Games Lexington shortly before 9 p.m., illuminating the intersection of Jefferson and West Nelson streets, where the store is located.
Inside the store, more than a dozen people crowd around the store’s tournament tables, sharing laughs and smiles as they play “Magic: The Gathering.”
“We have to be here when everyone else gets off work and has their free time, which is evenings and weekends,” said Paige Gance, who owns the store with her husband, Zander Tallman.
Just Games Lexington isn’t just a game retailer. Through its events and community outreach, the store is an asset to Lexington, providing residents of all ages with fun experiences, friends and support.
Tallman and Gance, both graduates of nearby Washington and Lee University, opened the store in September 2018. The store sells more than 500 games, ranging from simple party games to dice for “Dungeons and Dragons,” a multiplayer game that takes almost three hours to play.
Since its opening, the store has held a variety of weekly events, including family board game nights and “Magic: The Gathering” tournaments. Gance said the store holds 9-10 weekly events.
Mike Martin said he and his friends were the first players to participate in Just Games’ weekly “Dungeons and Dragons” campaigns shortly after the store opened. He later switched to play in the weekly “Magic: The Gathering” tournaments.
While he has fun playing the games, Martin said the best part about the events isn’t even the games itself.
“It’s definitely the people that come,” said Martin, who is the general manager for The Marketplace, W&L’s main dining hall.
Martin said the events can draw people of all ages and professions.
“It’s probably the biggest range you could think of,” Martin said. “Everyone knows everybody through playing. There’s middle schoolers, there’s people who do construction, there’s a lawyer that comes and plays, there’s dads that bring their kids.”
On the business side, Gance said events on the surface don’t bring the store much revenue. Depending on the game being played, customers pay around $2 to $8 to play. But she said the events have positive effects on the store, including the increased store traffic that events provide.
“I believe that when people are shopping and then they see a tournament going on or they see kids playing games in the backroom, they feel happy about that,” Gance said. “That good feeling is obviously difficult to quantify, but I feel like it does translate into people wanting to support us.”
Just Games Lexington also has events catered toward kids, including after-school game camps and “Dungeons and Dragons” events for both kids and teenagers. The after-school game clubs run when seasonal activities like sports end.
“While the kids camps don’t last all year, the benefits kids take from them do,” said Amelia Fisher, a W&L student who runs games during the after-school kids’ camps. “What I hear from their guardians is that these kids come and learn the games and then share those experiences with their families.”
Fisher, a sophomore, said she is an aspiring teacher, so she knew it was going to be a great opportunity when the store hired her during her first year on campus. She said the camps give kids a great opportunity to grow in a multitude of ways.
“Just Games gives Lexington’s kids a positive environment to play,” Fisher said. “They come in after a long day at school and they have a place where they can be social, and a place to learn in a more unconventional way.”
All of Just Games Lexington’s events came to a halt in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began. While small businesses nationwide closed and online retail and large retail corporations thrived, Just Games went against the trend and upgraded.
In October 2020, the store moved from its original location on South Main Street, where it shared a space called “The Hub” with two other stores, to a more spacious downtown location on West Nelson Street.
Gance said the decision to make a large investment during an unpredictable pandemic was terrifying, but the positives of moving to the store’s current location were too good to pass up.
“Lexington does not have a lot of retail locations that would work for us,” Gance said. This space has been continuously rented for decades, so when it became available, we really couldn’t sleep on that opportunity.”
The increased space has allowed the store to not only have more inventory, but to host simultaneous events, with there being two gaming areas in the current space. Events opened fully back up in the new location in May 2021 after vaccines became widely available.
In the community, Just Games has helped support the growth of the local Rockbridge Disc Golf club. Through selling discs in the store, Club President and Founder Brian Hamelman said Tallman, an avid disc golfer, has introduced new people to the sport and to the club.
“I’m sure he’s been a huge advocate for disc golf in our community,” said Hamelman, who founded the club in 2014. “I would be curious to know how many people that are playing regularly right now in our club were introduced to disc golf just through being in Zander’s store.”
Martin, who recently started playing disc golf, said he wouldn’t have started playing if it weren’t for the store. He bought his first discs from Just Games over the summer.
Outside of the store, Just Games has supported the club by sponsoring T-shirts, bag tags and two holes on W&L’s course on its back campus, where the club calls home.
“I want to try and advocate for Just Games as much as possible because they’ve already helped Rockbridge disc golf grow so much,” Hamelman said.
(This was a feature story I wrote for my news writing class)
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