The last time my home was the place to hang out, I was on my third failed attempt at bleaching my dark brown hair. The first time, when I was 17, I used bleach. Clorox liquid bleach. It burned and stank, and my scalp turned red and scaly, but my hair didn’t change color, probably because I ran screaming across my backyard to the garden hose 10 seconds after I poured the liquid fire on my head. At least the shirt I was wearing turned a little whiter. The second time – hydrogen peroxide bubbling in my hair on the beach in Honolulu, the sun pounding down on me and the sweat from my brow tasting especially salty – my hair turned orange. The third time, when I was 20 and a sophomore at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I was getting ready for a party my roommates and I were hosting, a superhero-themed party. For some strange reason I can’t recall, I was going to be Aquaman, and I needed to bleach my hair blond. Yes, I looked stupid, with patches of dark brown mixed among the orangish blond. And yes, a superhero party does smack of geekiness, but people still came, dressed as Batman,
Superman, the Punisher, the Flash, you name it. A bunch of the girls who came also took advantage of the situation to create a new superhero, Super Slut, fighting crime one see-through blouse at a time. Ah, to be young again.
Even though the friends who come to my apartment today don’t show off obscene amounts of cleavage and drink all my beer, we still have fun fighting evil-doers and showing the people of Eugene their city doesn’t belong to the criminals and the corrupt. That, and we play board games.
Board games first roused my interest when my kids were born. Suddenly, dinner, drinks and a movie with my wife turned into frozen pizza, soda, Scrabble, I’ll change his diaper when I’m finished with my turn and can you please get her to stop crying so I can figure out where to put this damn Q?
From these benign beginnings, my lust for board games gradually grew. We upgraded from regular Scrabble to the deluxe edition, got other games such as UpWords and Cranium, and, when I enrolled at the University, started hosting game nights. Our friends eagerly embraced the idea of getting together on a Friday night after the kids were in bed (nothing disrupts a game quite like the feral rampage of a 2-year-old) for a friendly game of Apples to Apples or Munchkin. But as the weeks went by, my competitive nature began rising to the surface. My friends show up, chat for a bit, maybe have a drink or confection. Everything is super duper. Then the game is spread out and the competition begins. Affable friends are replaced by arch-enemies. And when a Club Cranium card pops up and the whole group gets a chance to play, you better watch out, for I am Aquaman, your nemesis!
I’m not the only one of my friends who takes board gaming to the next level. I recently received an e-mail with “You’re the worst Taboo player ever” in it. Utter nonsense. It was merely trash-talking drivel designed to get inside my head. But I know better. During the last game we played, I had nine of my Taboo topics guessed correctly during one round. It was the most successful one of the game (beat that, Wonder Woman!)
OK, OK. Board games are geeky. And as vices go, they’re pretty mellow. I can’t remember the last time I was strung out on Balderdash (OK, it was last August – I’m working on coming clean with my problem. One step at a time.) But when you get to be 27, and you’ve got two little kids, it can be a troublesome sign when you plead with your friends to stay at your place for just one more game, even though everyone has made it abundantly clear that game night is over. I’m not ashamed of it, though. I’m a raging board game beast. When I get on a roll in a game, I become something else, something more than a man. I become legend.
Or Super Geek. Either way, I have to constantly remind myself: It’s not who I am underneath, it’s what I do that defines me. Yeah, so I’m a comic book geek, too.

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