YESSSSSSS. thank you @garrison!!! i can see the page. i can seee the light!
after some random googling around how tables 'n lists are supposed to look like, i’ve got this working in the index.html.heex and show.html.heex files:
# added the col(umns) to the top of the table body
<.table id="games" rows={@games} row_click={&JS.navigate(~p"/games/#{&1}")}>
<:col :let={game} label="id"><%= game.id %></:col>
<:col :let={game} label="title"><%= game.title %></:col>
# ...
# this list was previously empty!
<.list>
<:item title="id"><%= @game.id %></:item>
<:item title="title"><%= @game.title %></:item>
<:item title="alt_title"><%= @game.alt_titles %></:item>
<:item title="makers"><%= @game.makers %></:item>
# ...
</.list>
it was working for a whole minute, until it wasn’t:
no "index" html template defined for GameArchiveWeb.GameHTML (the module does not exist)
lol, on to the next error. thanks again tho!
edit: fixed the last error by removing the _build folder.. 
(no code was changed)
