November 9 & 10, 2024 • Seattle, WA
For those of you who love to play all kinds of games when attending a Con, I have some great news for you! This year the game floor at GeekGirlCon will be expanding! We will be featuring both video games and tabletop games on the third floor of the convention center.
GeekGirlCon 2016 at Washington State Conference Center in Seattle, Washington. October 2016. Photo by James McDaniel.
Every year GeekGirlCon’s gaming team puts together an entire floor of wonder during our convention in downtown Seattle’s core.
But our passion for games doesn’t stop at just a weekend, and for all you tabletop lovers out there, we know the same goes for you.
GeekGirlCon partners with Girl Scouts of Western Washington throughout the year to run monthly events and. Gaming Event Coordinator Andy talked to several GeekGirlScout game masters about how you can level up roleplaying at your regular tabletop game.
Written by guest blogger and GeekGirlCon Social Media Manager Kristine Hassell
When you think about the Girl Scouts, what immediately pops into your head? Let’s be honest… you think cookies, right? I mean, who doesn’t love those decadent Samoas or addictive Thin Mints?
Image source: Daniel Kissinger
Hopefully when the Girl Scouts come to mind, you also think about their long tradition of confidence building and their efforts to help girls make the world into a better place. So an alliance between the Girl Scouts and GeekGirlCon makes total sense, right? That’s what we thought too. The Girl Scouts of Western Washington participated in previous GeekGirlCon conventions, both in our Exhibitor Hall and in the GeekGirlConnections room. Building on that, some smart folks had another idea…
Back in November of 2014, our Gaming Events Coordinator, Andy Munich, was invited to represent GeekGirlCon in a 24-hour D&D marathon hosted by Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC) to benefit Extra Life. During his eight-hour gaming stint, he struck up a conversation with Tammie Treibley Thompson, wife of WotC Senior Game Designer Rodney Thompson. During their conversation, Andy learned that Tammie was a troop leader and as they continued to talk, they quickly realized that there was some synchronicity in their ideas–and the GeekGirlScouts were born!
Written by GeekGirlCon copywriter JC Lau
I didn’t self-identify as a geek for a very long time. As a child, I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the 80s, but that wasn’t particularly geeky, because all kids my age liked the Turtles. In a third grade spelling test we were told to spell the longest word we knew, and I managed to get out “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, not because I was an academic overachiever, but because I thought that Mary Poppins was an awesome movie. I liked reading, but I was much more drawn to writers like Roald Dahl and, later, Jeffrey Archer and Michael Crichton, than Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman. I didn’t even touch a Marvel or DC comic until I was about 20.
But the reason I’m writing about my unassumed geekiness is because I was once presented with the question, “but what kind of geek are you?” and I was speechless. That question left me stumped for days. How on earth do you answer something like that? I’ve had geeky interests my whole life, but they just haven’t presented themselves to me as geeky per se. I just thought that they were interests that everyone had. Everyone likes Ninja Turtles, right? Everyone wants to be a superhero, right? Wouldn’t that make everyone a geek?
Written by GeekGirlCon Manager of Editorial Services Winter Downs.
Dead Scare, which at the time of writing has hit 86% of its Kickstarter goal, is “a tabletop RPG where you play the women and children fending for themselves against zombies and the McCarthy regime in 1950s America.”
It’s written by women and non-binary game designers, about women, children, and other marginalized people fending off zombies in McCarthy-era America. Russian spies unleash a bio-weapon in an attempt to assassinate President Truman, turning everyone who was out in the streets and other public places into flesh-eating zombies. As a result, the only human survivors are people who were excluded from the public sphere–women, children, and people with disabilities.
The game is based on Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker, a versatile system that’s been adapted for many genres and settings.
GeekGirlCon had the opportunity to talk to Elsa S. Henry, the writer of Dead Scare, and ask her a few questions.
