Meet Michele and Aaron Potter | Board game evangelists

We had the good fortune of connecting with Michele and Aaron Potter and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Michele and Aaron, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
We entered the pandemic with a personal collection of about 350 board games. By the time the general quarantine was lifted, that had grown to almost 500. Our kids threatened to turn us in as hoarders unless we finally opened up the board game cafe we’d been talking about for years.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
If there is such a thing as too diverse an artistic portfolio, our team has it. Aaron has been disappearing into games and books since he could read, and began writing his own board games and adventures at age 10. He recently found a high-school notebook, and the margins of every page of class notes were filled with sketches. Michele is the visionary. She has the ability to look at blank walls and see what should cover them, to see empty shelves and envision libraries. Aaron’s job is to translate that into paint and carpentry.
And then there are the kids: Aiden is a mechanical engineer, Riley an actor and student in computer science, and Felix, a performer who can pilot total strangers through a game of Mysterium so convincingly they’ll shriek with delight.
Together, the family has been making unique haunted houses every Halloween for almost twenty years, spending weeks in construction and decoration, fashioning animatronic props and recording sound effects and music tracks, plotting scenes and writing dialog, all for a single night of performance in which they bring magic into the lives of hundreds of neighbors and community members. The Nevermore Game Club is in some ways the next step, crafting a place for magical experiences outside of their everyday routine.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Riverside sometimes feels like a great secret. It has a reputation as a relatively quiet community, without the flashy allure of Orange County or Los Angeles. But there are magical experiences hidden all over it. Every Holiday season, the Mission Inn and downtown neighborhood are covered with literally millions of lights in an annual celebration. Every Halloween, local high schools and the Riverside Ballet put on the Ghostwalk, a walking tour during which actors tell haunting stories. Tio’s Tacos is decorated with absolutely insane junk sculptures, fountains made of discarded barbie dolls, a chapel made of old bottles, concrete lizards with bottle-cap eyes, and skeletal angels made from old car parts which tower three stories into the air. At the other end of the spectrum, cozy venues like Cellar Door Books make you feel like you’ve fallen into a fine Victorian novel. And of course there is Nevermore Game Club.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
This goes out to all the members of our Riverside community who have told us when they walked in the door “this place is magical. We needed this.”

Website: nevermoregameclub.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nevermoregameclub/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevermoreGameC

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nevermoregameclub

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/nevermore-game-club-riverside

Image Credits
Nevermore Game Club