Board Game: Geeks: The Convention

It's a card game, actually, but y'know.

The Game: Geeks: The Convention

The Publisher: Torchlight Games, and I have no idea if they're still in business because if you Google "torchlight games" you get a bunch of video game stuff

Time: 25+ minutes, depending on how the cards fall

Players: Me, Morgan, Jon, Donovan

Game Play: In Geeks, you're controlling a busload of geeks attending a convention. You start with 8 of them, and through play you lose them to the Bus Depot, at which point they go home. The winner is the last one with a geek in their bus. Easy enough. 

Behold, my bus.

Each geek falls into one of four categories: Annoying, Revolting, Frightening, or Boring. On your turn, you can play a game, an Uh-Oh, or a Geek Break. Geek Breaks generally let you get more geeks from the bus depot, Uh-Oh's usually force one or more players to lose geeks. Games are exactly that. They've got parodies of RPGs on them (Crudlands, Bloodsuck: The Mad Parade, Borehammer) and they fall into the same categories as geeks. To avoid losing a geek to a game, you play a convention card matching the category. 

So, if Borehammer is a Boring game (which it is), then you play a Boring card, or you lose a geek. And then into the mix, these cards often have secondary effects. 

Donovan's bus is longer and skinnier.

Some cards break the flow a bit; Geek Fight lets you basically rock-paper-scissors with the types of geeks, while Dawn makes everyone lose two geeks unless they have the Zotz Cola card. Some cards can "spam" other cards, which not only prevent the spammer from losing geeks but take the turn away from the player. 

Jon and Donovan facing off as the last two players.

Opinions: I've actually played Geeks a lot, but it's been a while. I bought it at a convention a loooong time ago, and it was a standard time-waster for years. Revisiting it now with the benefit of years, I have a couple of thoughts.

First of all, the underlying premise is great. Folks who frequent conventions know that there's a whole bunch of funny stuff that happens there, and there are gamer "types" that you see all the time. That's fine. 

And like, the self-deprecation of the thing (revolting, boring, etc.) is OK. Geeks are just as deserving of that as any other group, and it winds up feeling mostly like it's punching sideways, if not exactly up. There are a few cards that are kinda problematic (some of art featuring women is kinda cheesecake), but it's not as bad as I remembered. 

The instructions could be a little clearer in places; we wound up having to do a little more interpretation than I'd like. This is especially true with regards to how spamming works. We also felt that the symbols denoting geeks by type should have been color-coded or something, because as it is they're tiny face emoji-things, and it's hard to tell them apart.

Overall, though, I think it's a fun game. I think it's also ripe for a revision/update, given that convention dynamics have changed somewhat over the years. 

Jon won, because of course he did. 

Keep? Sure.