The dominant economic, profit-normative, and business-centered narrative has failed to empower diverse community groups to pluralistically participate fully in local rural life in Canada. This highlights the need for new approaches to community engagement, safety and trust. One such approach that can be used to envision alternative ways of co-creating value through citizen engagement is the use of serious games and collaborative game making workshops as a safe and risk-free innovation thirdspace. In this paper, we present work on how a game-making methodology organically emerged through the reflective facilitation of a series of iterative sessions in different domains aimed at helping rural community intermediary organizations prototype and co-create mission driven value alongside diverse social and culture groups. This paper details the process and initial insights from how rural community nonprofit and public institutional intermediaries can unlock their regional social and political capital, using game making approaches to better address current challenges faced by the marginalized groups they service. Through outputs and insights from this work, the goal is to help develop participatory tools for community-driven innovations that enable flourishing in rural communities in Canada.