These days, you can throw a dart and hit a Pokémon. The mofos are everywhere. But what started as an innocent game has mutated into a global frenzy, namely with the cards. Right now, somewhere in America, grown men are fistfighting outside Pokémon vending machines at grocery stores. People are committing literal crimes for cardboard.
And yet, at the outer edges of the CID, there’s a place that could be considered a real-life Pokémon gym, one that’s pumping out dozens of champions at official Pokémon tournaments around the world. Once just a neighborhood card shop, Tabletop Village has quietly evolved over the past decade into one of the most feared Pokémon training grounds on the planet.
Since opening in 2017, this single room has produced dozens of top-eight finishers and more than 20 official championship titles, including the 2025 Pokémon International Finals where Tabletop siblings Annabelle and Kenji Oono faced off for a $7,000 purse.
Tabletop Village is a sprawling open room that rejects the cramped chaos of most card shops. Painted Pokémon murals line the walls. Instant noodle dispensers stocked with Shin Bowls keep players fueled for the long haul. Only a small corner is actually for retail. The rest belongs to long utilitarian rows of tables that make the place feel less like a store and more like a classroom with the energy of a boxing gym.
This dojo is for everyone, provided you’re willing to put in the work. The game is simple enough: two players (“Trainers”) face off head-to-head, each using 60-card decks of Pokémon and supplemental cards to knock out their opponent’s team. Brian Myers, the man behind Tabletop Village, has a simple strategy for sharpening skills: “The players learn to play against the best from day one.” On any given night, Juniors (younger players, some of whom are barely tall enough to see over the play mats) play against established Masters, and somehow both players often walk away having learned something new.
When Myers bought the business—at the time, “Tabletop Village” was simply a guy selling Pokémon cards out of his trunk—he saw a vision for its namesake. “I told him I liked how it says ‘village,’” he explains. “Because it really does take a village. And that’s what we have.”
Before Tabletop, Myers was on the path to becoming a social worker. He spent the early 2000s as a youth counselor in White Center during what he calls “the banging days.” Myers was the guy trying to keep kids off the street by giving them somewhere to be. He realized trading cards were an effective Trojan horse for emotional regulation and mentorship.
For him, Tabletop Village is an act of community stewardship, cloaked as retail. “I also needed a village to be a part of,” he admits. In the CID, that sense of belonging is as historical as it is sentimental. Myers is Filipino and Native American, an intersection of heritage that carries a long history of displacement in the Pacific Northwest. His presence in the neighborhood feels like a cosmic echo of the late Seattle activist Uncle Bob Santos, the leader once known as the unofficial Mayor of the CID, who coincidentally was also Filipino Native American.
Myers jokes that he’s the “Uncle Bob of Pokémon.” Where Bob used cardboard protest signs, Myers is using cardboard cards, but the mission is the same: community. With Uncle Bob on his shoulder, Myers is teaching his players how to hold a seat at a table the rest of the world is constantly trying to flip over.
Myers has currently exported the “village” ideology to 40 after-school programs, stretching from the CID to Title I schools in South Seattle, and as far as Florida and New Jersey. “The former occupant, Master Li, used to teach tae kwon do where Tabletop Village lives today,” Myers says, “but kids weren’t into tae kwon do anymore. Video games were taking over.” So Myers simply swapped the martial arts mats for card mats, using the game as a delivery system for the kind of community-building the modern world often ignores.
Parents who can’t clear their schedules for the demanding tournament circuit don’t pull their kids from the roster, they simply trust the Village to ferry their children across the world. “I’ve sent my son several times with other parents,” Myers says. “I’ve sent my son to Melbourne without us.”
It’s the manifestation of Myers’s original dream: a place where the group’s well-being fuels individual excellence. It’s why winners come from Tabletop. Without the fear of falling, the players are free to fly.
During one such high-pressure tournament, a young player had his entire competitive deck stolen, a loss that usually ends a season on the spot. “The community didn’t even hesitate,” Myers recalls. “Many people came together and were like, ‘What’s the deck list?’” In 20 minutes, while the kid was still in shock, the traveling Tabletop community was already pulling rare cards from their collections and rebuilding the deck from scratch so a competitor, and teammate, wouldn’t have to stand there alone. “That kid is going to remember that for the rest of their life,” Myers reflects. “That everybody rallied behind them so they could keep playing… even without knowing if the cards would ever come back. But they would do it anyway, for each other.”
In a moment when shiny cardboard is turning neighbors into enemies, this little Pokémon gym at the edge of the CID knows that the real game is learning how to sit across from another person, shuffle up, lose with grace, and try again. It’s a room full of people ready to have your back when the world takes your deck away.
Getting better doesn’t just mean beating everyone else. It means bringing them with you.