Arrow Wood Games

Arrow Wood Games is a specialty retail store featuring a curated selection of board and card games, as well as puzzles, books, and hobby supplies. Our dedicated Games Room is a vibrant hub hosting events including game nights, puzzle competitions and swaps, holiday parties, team building events, after school programs, and birthday parties.

Before opening our doors, we established our foundational values: Wellbeing, Extraordinary Respect, and Creativity. We wanted a business that was intentionally built on these from day one. Recognizing that work takes up so much of our lives, we're committed to a workplace culture and environment that is a genuinely positive, enriching experience, where staff don't need to feel guilty about taking care of any aspect of their personal lives.

Three years in, these core values reflect in the everyday habits of our team. Our staff show up daily as meaningful contributors who genuinely care about the success of the business, our community, and each other.

Wellbeing: We cultivate a positive and fulfilling work environment centred on opportunities for joy, work-life balance, personal and professional growth, recognition and appreciation, and a supportive culture. We support our team with extended health benefits for staff working half-time or more, and generous employee discounts including kids' programs for staff with families. We offer flexible scheduling for tasks not directly tied to fixed store or event hours, which allows us to employ people across diverse circumstances, including stay-at-home parents, people balancing second jobs, or those with extended family commitments requiring travel.

Extraordinary respect: We extend deep respect to each other, our customers, our families, our space, and our community, centering trust as an integral part of our day to day activities. We practice transparent decisions-making, so staff understand the “why” and are empowered to make their own choices. We back them on judgment calls they make independently, even when their approach differs from our own. We prioritize workplace safety by providing training in conflict management and de-escalation, alongside developing a working-alone policy.

Creativity: We celebrate, nurture and embed creativity in everything we do. We encourage and provide a safe space for people to think outside the box, explore new ideas, and challenge the status quo. We invest directly in our people's growth through ongoing training opportunities, such as funding and providing time for travel to conferences. To build genuine culture and connection, we run staff social events (turns out we all really like to play games together!), and we celebrate wins of all types with our employee-favourite "Good Things Happened Box", We've even begun to gamify onboarding, where new hires "level up" as a Dungeons & Dragons character as they train.

Two of the most compelling signs of these values

• Our recent creation of a path to ownership, bringing two employees on as owners - a change that has also diversified our ownership team.
• Of our original three employees, all stayed for over a year and two are still with the business.

We're honoured that our employees nominated Arrow Wood Games for this award!