Providing entertainment

First Start-up Port Hawkesbury business to open doors

The first of the businesses from the Start-Up Port Hawkesbury contest is set to open today.

Island Enigmas will be Port Hawkesbury’s newest entertainment venue, comprised of two escape rooms along with a storefront specializing in tabletop games and providing a venue for play.

Escape rooms are live-action, team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms to accomplish a specific goal — usually to escape the room — in a specific period of time. The tabletop games section will carry unique board games and card-based games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering and Pokemon.

Island Enigmas is located at 305 Granville St. in Port Hawkesbury. The business is owned and operated by Liam Brophy who was one of three finalists in the startup contest.

Contest partners, including the Town of Port Hawkesbury, InRich CBDC, and the Eastern Strait Regional Enterprise Network, have all worked with Brophy to help him achieve his goal.

“There was a really fast turnaround from both InRich and the town to help me get in the space and get started with construction,” Brophy said in a news release.

The Start-up Port Hawkesbury contest was a “Dragon’s Den” style contest that was launched last year and held its finale in November.

The judges selected Michele Tabensky, who pitched the idea of opening a doggy daycare, as the overall winner.

The Eastern Strait network, InRich CBDC and the Town of Port Hawkesbury are working with Tabensky to get her business “That Dog Place” opened in Port Hawkesbury.

The winner was awarded a prize package including two years of rent-free space in Port Hawkesbury, a $20,000 business loan, pro-bono legal services, graphic design services, a one-year Strait Area Chamber of Commerce membership and ongoing support and training from the contest partners.

John Beaton CEO with Eastern Strait network, said they are seeking expressions of interest from partner municipalities for the next round of the startup program and have also received requests for information on the project from outside the region.

Misty MacDonald, Eastern Strait network’s economic development officer for the Port Hawkesbury region, has worked closely with the finalists and is happy to see them implementing their business plans and turning their ideas into reality.

Twenty submissions were received in the first round of Startup Port Hawkesbury which required entrants to submit a 90-second video pitching their business idea.

The 10 contestants who advanced to the second round were required to further refine their idea through a concept paper and a two-minute pitch before the judging panel and then three finalists were chosen.

In the final round, contestants submitted business plans to the judges and delivered a final pitch to judges during an event at the Port Hawkesbury Civic Centre.

Island Enigmas is currently taking bookings. The Dragon’s Lair is the feature room which takes about one hour to complete with a team of four to eight players. Further details can be found on its Facebook page: https://www. facebook.com/islandenigmas/.

“There was a really fast turn-around from both InRich and the town to help me get in the space …” Business owner Liam Brophy