SHEBOYGAN - Although playing games may often be associated with children, The GameBoard, 621 N. Eighth St., works to provide a space for people of all ages to engage in gameplay.  

Lynn Potyen, The GameBoard owner, said the association with games and kids began around the 1950s when major game players started advertising to kids while they watched Saturday morning cartoons.  

“That’s not real. That's a false narrative that was done by Corporate America,” Potyen said. “So, undoing that narrative, and helping people understand that games are for everybody — I think (that) has grown a lot more in the last 50 years. Since the 1970s, this has been a movement that has been trying to gain momentum.” 

When Potyen’s son, Erik, was diagnosed with a severe speech delay and dysgraphia, a neurological writing disorder, when he was 4 years old, she said she had to “think outside the box” to find different ways of thinking and learning that would work best for him. 

“I had had some experience with a speech therapist who was working with him, but during those therapy sessions, Erik would perform for her,” Potyen said. “And then at the end, he would leave, and she would say, ‘Here, take this game home. You really enjoyed it, play it.’ And he would never play it at home, and I would explain to her that, ‘He's only doing this to perform for you. He's not actually doing it because he wants to do it. We need to figure out a way to make him want to do it.’” 

Potyen learned that Erik responded best to games based on critical thinking rather than chance or luck, like games involving rolling dice. She found that European board and card games helped him connect better with his peers and teachers because they differed from the American game style at the time.  

“Games back in 2000 — and prior to that — for children were very much like your traditional things you see at big box stores. So, you've got Monopolies, and your Candylands, and I mean those things have been invented back in the 1940s,” Potyen said. “It's a very different way of thinking than today's way of thinking. And so over in Europe, games never became like a ‘kid’ thing to do. ... Adults play games all the time, and that’s just a common way of living because it's good for your brain health and it's good to keep your memory sharp and to keep you active.” 

Caitlin Bramm, manager of The GameBoard, has been playing board games for about 10 years, and she had some difficulty finding people to play with in the past.  

“Sometimes it was like pulling teeth to find friend groups to play board games and stuff,” Bramm said. “And then during the pandemic, a lot of people realized there's not much I can do by myself. So, they're looking at one-player, two-player games, and now that we're coming out of it, they're like, ‘I'll play with you.’ ‘Can we play that game?’ And it's just fun seeing it evolve and seeing that there's other options to having fun and strengthening your brain than what people saw before.” 

Some research on the impacts of playing games and improved memory has been mixed when focusing on young and middle-aged adults, but some research focusing on early and late years has shown that engaging in different games can help with memory.  

Researchers at the University of Chicago found that children ages 2-4 who played with puzzles developed better spatial skills when assessed on their ability to rotate and translate shapes.  

Additionally, the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly study found that individuals older than 65 who can be more likely to develop dementia had improved memory when they consistently did visual recognition tasks, word puzzles and memory games.  

From Potyen’s experience of raising a child with a speech delay, she has seen how playing games can help people develop and change, not just in someone’s early life but also in their later years.  

She has helped grow Dementia Friendly Sheboygan County and has trained her staff at The GameBoard on how to recognize and engage with customers who may have dementia.  

“Through that (Dementia Friendly Sheboygan County) I was one of the people who helped to develop and agree upon training for businesses in the area — to learn how to deal with one on one, what was going on as people walked in and how to interact," she said. "Like if you're at a bank and you see somebody who's acting kind of out of the ordinary, what are some good signs to pay attention to? How can you best address that and things like that?” 

An organization or business is considered “dementia friendly” when staff have been trained to best serve the needs of customers who have dementia, according to Dementia Friendly Sheboygan County. 

This process requires an organization’s management and 50% of frontline employees complete Dementia Friendly Community training; a business is willing to add training materials to all new hires and employee orientations; a team leader is designated as a liaison with the Dementia Friendly Community Task Force; the business is open to discussing possible changes to the environment, like a store’s layout or lighting; and the business undergoes an annual on-site visit, follow-up training and/or self-evaluation.  

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, approximately 6.5 million people in America ages 65 and older have Alzheimer’s dementia. In Wisconsin, 120,000 people were reported to have dementia in 2020, and that number is projected to increase to 130,000 by 2025.  

Once an organization or business becomes dementia friendly, a purple angel will show in the front window, distinguishing for customers with dementia that employees are sensitive to their needs.  

Some Sheboygan County groups that are dementia friendly include Paradigm Coffee, Falls Salon & Spa, John Michael Kohler Arts Center and the Mead Public Library.  

The Toy Association nominated Potyen to share her story about how she uses games to help people develop and change. She was one of seven people to be selected to have their stories put in the Library of Congress. 

In addition to selling games, The GameBoard also provides opportunities for people to try different games in and out of the store.  

The GameExperiment, while temporarily on hold, typically provides people the chance to try several different games.  

“I wanted kids to understand that games don't have to be a win or lose,” Potyen said. “It can be an experiment to figure out how much you enjoy or don't enjoy a product or a play style. There are so many different styles of games out there that have so many different aspects. It’s not just a thematic that's on a game, and thematic changes. The way to play changes, the way to win changes, the goals and the descriptions of how you get there change. And so, there's so many different options. We wanted people to be able to experience that.” 

Going to schools and businesses, students and employees would rotate between tables for an hour, learning how to play and playing each game for 15 minutes. Although they wouldn’t get the full game experience, Potyen said that was the point.  

“The whole point (was to teach them) … to crave how to play another style of game, and so I think that's the one thing this world (the GameBoard) has helped with,” Potyen said. “My big thing with my son was always that I wanted him to crave more.” 

Bramm has seen how playing different games in the GameExperiment can help young people work on team building, create a sense of camaraderie and work together toward a goal. 

There is also something to be learned while playing games with people, which Potyen said can involve reading facial expressions and exchanging emotional information.  

“You're being influenced by all those things and being influenced by how your eyes are reacting or how you're not reacting,” Potyen said. “Maybe your shoulders are slumping or maybe you're sitting up real straight and tall. You know those things tell me information about how you're playing the game. And I use that in the game and people don't always understand that.” 

The GameBoard also offers a game rental program, which Potyen said businesses around the world have made use of.  

The GameBoard team members have wide expertise, including a Pokémon professor and a game board guru.  

“All of us play Magic: (The Gathering). Some of us dabble in Flesh and Blood, some of us dabble in Pokémon. So, we have the background of a lot of different games,” Potyen said.  

She said last year they hired a commissioned artist to paint miniatures of people, and a team member is doing portraits of people’s role-playing game, or RPG, characters.  

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Before joining The GameBoard as the manager, Bramm was a customer of the store.  

“Whenever my partner and I would come in, we started talking with Lynn more, and then that branched into more of a friendship,” Bramm said. “She is great friends with a lot of game designers and publishers and stuff, and she was hosting a game night at her house and she's like, ‘I think you and Eric would really like to come over for that.’ I was like, ‘I can meet these people?’ I was like a little fan girl, and then I think that was one of the bigger shining moments of, ‘Yeah, I like that. I want that.’” 

Potyen said she has an amazing staff.  

“I try to make sure that everybody understands my own personal celebrity feelings with my own employees because they are celebrities,” Potyen said. “These people don't just come to work and ring you up. They have so much background knowledge. It's probably over a year of training they go through on the job as they're learning new different pieces to this job because this is a very deep career. It's a lot to learn.” 

Contact Alex Garner at 224-374-2332 or agarner@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @alexx_garner.