It all started in 2005 with the first Geekway to the West, run by Jay Little. The event only had 20 attendees, but Play and Win was there at the start.
The idea is that the convention organizers curate a selection of board games that attendees can check out, play, and return for others to enjoy as well. At the end of the convention, all of those games are given away to someone who played them throughout the event.
When you only have 20 attendees and a handful of games to give away, the process is relatively painless. Several buckets and piles of hand written entry slips lasted Geekway to the West for longer than we’d like to admit.
I started attending in 2012, and with 400 attendees and 100 games to give away it had become quite the production. Even then I had begun thinking about how to improve the process. By the time I had come on the Geekway Board of Directors in 2017, Geekway had begun using a suite of tools written by Jon Henderson. Those lasted until 2023, when I began the effort of modernizing our platform. Over the next six months I rewrote the entire backend from scratch in Node with Nest.JS with the help of Libby Swanger.
We released the new backend in January of 2024 at our Geekway Mini event, and rolled it out to our main convention later that year.
Since 2024 we have added a whole suite of tools and features onto that core application. In particular, the library and attendee administration tool has been completely rewritten using Next.JS to be mobile and tablet friendly. Since the debut of the Rules Lawyer backend software in 2024 we’ve tracked over 50,000 library checkouts in seven unique Geekway events with over 10,000 attendees.