What started as an idea for a standard game store back in 2019 has evolved over the years to become Valhalla Board Game Café, a Norse-inspired gaming venue and eatery in Pelham. The café opened its doors on June 1, and is co-owned by Nick Hammett, a 2016 University of Montevallo graduate, and his business partner and friend, Adam Valentine.
“We were both really into RPGs, board games and card games,” Hammett said. “Game cafes have been seeing a boom in Europe, up north and out toward California, but there’s not really anything like that around here.”
Valhalla features a vast library of games, from easy family classics like Monopoly, to complex fantasy favorites like Dungeons & Dragons. Visitors can take part in pay-to-play and free-to-play games, peruse their selection of games and merchandise for sale, or just come enjoy the atmosphere and the café’s selection of food, coffee, wine and local mead. The café also hosts trivia nights, poker tournaments, cosplay parties and other specialty events.
Hammett, a Bessemer native, transferred to UM from Jefferson State Community College and majored in mass communication because of his interest in cameras and filmmaking. Some of his favorite college memories stemmed from his time in the game studies and design minor and the Montevallo Organization of Gaming.
“Dr. Cathlena Martin and all of them are great,” Hammett said. “They’re the ones that really sparked my interest in board games and RPGs. We probably wouldn’t have the cafe today without them inspiring me to keep moving on.”
Years before opening their physical location, Hammett and Valentine hosted board game events around Birmingham to raise money and get the word out about their new venture. Different cafés, bars and restaurants would pay them to bring their library of games — made up of the duo’s own collection, donations and picks from Asmodee USA, a game distributor they work with — to their locations and set them up for patrons to play for free.
“People would just walk up and grab a game, and we’d talk to them and hand out business cards,” Hammett said. “Eventually, we caught the attention of a handful of investors, and they were really interested in the idea. We had a lot of word-of-mouth success and a sizable social media following before we actually built the cafe.”
The duo had a handful of locations in mind for Valhalla’s brick-and-mortar store, with cost and marketability as their top priorities. They ultimately chose a spot at Campus No. 124 in Pelham, the former Valley Elementary School that has been redeveloped into an entertainment center with restaurants, shops and more.
Since its grand opening, which drew in a huge crowd that overflowed out of the café’s doors and into the school hallway, Valhalla has continued to be a welcoming place for those in search of fun, food and adventure.
“A lot of people treat it as their home away from home, showing up to play almost every day,” Hammett said. “People who don’t play board games a lot will come in and grab Trivial Pursuit or Logos and play with a big group of people. Kids come in and they’ll play Mouse Trap. Then we’ll have hardcore board gamers that’ll bring their own stuff, and they’ll play with any random person that wants to walk up and play. It’s been crazy cool.”
