Chez Geek

Overall score:

Chez Geek is a non-collectable, Beer and Pretzels card game from Steve Jackson Games. The storyline is rudimentary, but for the target audience of University level Geeks, rather close to home. Basically, each of the players is a geek, and all the geeks have moved into the same share house. The ultimate goal is to be the slackest geek in the house, by acquiring the most awesome stuff.

Chez Geek comes in a smallish box, but has two expansions, the second coming with a larger box for all the cards. The game is also compatible with several other similar games: Chez Goth, Chez Grunt, Chez Dork, and probably a couple I’m missing. My experiences with the game are based on Chez Geek and its two expansions. The art is by John Kovalic of Dork Tower comic fame. It is simplistic, but keeps to a style and looks good. The cards are fairly small, but decent enough quality.

To start, each player is randomly dealt a job card. This card, aside from a humorous and imaginative theme (Pizza Delivery Boy, Professional Test Subject) gives the player the target slack total they must reach, a “Free Time” (The limit on how many cards can be played a turn) and income (How much money can be spent a turn). The card may also have special rules that can be a drawback or an advantage.

Each player gets dealt five cards. Cards come in five types. “Anytime” cards can be played at any time, and have all manner of effects, from the annoying to the more annoying. (Like forcing every player to give their hand to the player on the left.) "Person" cards can be played for free, and generally give a small amount of slack. There’s no guarantee they’ll come though, except for cats. Some people can backfire on you by moving to another player’s room, while some particularly annoying people are detrimental, and so players play hot potato, trying to pass the character around to each other. The player who gets the “lock” card, giving them the ability to lock the door, tends to get much hate bared toward them.

Stuff cards are played during a shopping trip, an event that takes one free time but allows purchases up to the maximum income. Items typically give slack, and tend to have a type, allowing them to interact with other cards. Typically, if the players are the aforementioned immature University students the game is aimed at, the purchase of any “booze” card will lead to chants of “Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!” while the purchase of any “weed” card will have the player’s mimicking the action of smoking a bong. Then again, these are the same players who came up with a theme song for the “Justifiable Homicide” card. (See Boxout)

Then, there’s event cards. Event cards are slack giving cards that take a free time to play, and many have interactions with other cards. Most notable are “nookie” cards, which turn the aforementioned immature players into fits of giggles every time. These give a random, but usually high amount of slack, which can be made more reliable through the use of a “Significant Other”. At least until someone pulls a “Justifiable Homicide”, that is. Of course, there’s always TV cards to contend with – these give only one slack, but can be played on an opponent to cancel any activity (including a shopping trip) they were going to play, usually resulting in overall else slack. After all, what geek can resist the allure of Sloths on TV? If there’s nothing better to do, you can always play a sleep card.

I can’t forget to mention the Couch card either. Play it in the centre of the table, and give all players one slack. Whichever player finds the couch is always the most popular guy, ensuring chants of “Whoooo! He got us a couch!”

If you’re willing to get really into the spirit of things (something not at all hard to do, given the theme, cheesy art, and lack of real thought required) you can have a lot of fun with Chez Geek. It’s probably my favourite of the Beer and Pretzel card games, and, though games are short, can easily be played for hours on end.

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Written by JamPaladin on October 07th, 2004