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Someone approached him and said he looked lost. Porter said, yeah, he didn’t know what he was doing. And the other guy said, “Why don’t you play this game with us?”

Just like that, he was accepted into the open and welcoming world of board games. And he’s still in touch today with the stranger who invited him to play that first game.

This year’s four-day Geekway to the West event begins May 15 at the St. Charles Convention Center. It has been sold out for weeks — a lot of people like to play board games.

But it isn’t just the games themselves. There is a social aspect to the event that is equally enticing, says Andrew Grover, 54, who lives in Denver and will be coming for the sixth or seventh time.

“It’s an opportunity to spend four days playing board games with friends and new-to-me friends,” he says.

Board games are inherently social activities anyway — though some are meant to be played by one person — but Geekway makes it especially easy to meet new people, Grover says. If you need more people for your game, you can put out a little sign that says “players wanted,” or if you want to learn how to play something new, there is a sign that says “teachers wanted.”

“It’s very open, very friendly. It’s pretty easy to get into a game, whether you have friends with you or not,” Grover says.

Geekway to the West began in 2005, when board game designer Jay Little invited around 15 people he had met on the internet to come play board games for a weekend in his Olivette basement.

They had such a good time that they decided to do it again the next year, in Wapelhorst Park in St. Charles. Around 100 people attended that year, and the event has only grown since then. It now attracts 3,000 people, the maximum number that can fit inside the St. Charles Convention Center, with many more clamoring for unavailable tickets.

Even so, Geekway to the West is not the largest such gathering in the country. One annual event in Indianapolis attracts 80,000, says Jay Moore, president of Geekway.

“I don’t think I want to be like that. That sounds like a nightmare — although I go every year. I love it, I just don’t want to run it.”

Moore was one of the attendees of the original Geekway to the West in Little’s Olivette basement and took over after Little moved to Minneapolis. He says the world of board games has undergone an immense expansion since the days of Clue and Scrabble.

“There are many, many designer games that come out each year. We’re not talking about Monopoly or Checkers.

“Maybe people have played the Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride. These are more like those,” he says.

Even so, it’s possible to find people playing some old-school games at the event. But Moore thinks they’re missing out on something.

“Once you play a modern board game that is really fun, you see the problems with a game like Monopoly,” he says.

Such as?

“You know in the first 30 minutes that you’re not going to win. But you can’t quit, because you don’t want to be a sore loser.

“It leads to fights at Thanksgiving, and Lord knows we have enough other things to fight about at Thanksgiving,” he says.

With so many new board games coming out every year, Geekway gives its attendees the chance to try some they have never played before. The organization brings its full library of 2,500 games to the event that players can check out and play for free.

Perhaps the biggest draw is a promotion called Play and Win, which the organizers consider their signature event. The idea is that Geekway has six copies each of 135 new games. These games — more than 800 in all — are raffled off to the people who played them.

The more times someone plays the game, the more times he is entered into the raffle for that game. The players can win a game that they like, and the game publishers can get immediate feedback from consumers.

It’s such a popular promotion that the organizers actually have to limit the scale of the raffle.

“There are so many games out there, and they are not all a great quality, so we curate it. And I think that is one reason it is so popular. These are things that people have heard of and look interesting, and they may be things that people want to play,” says Moore.

One such game in the Play and Win promotion is a dice and card game called Kraken Skulls!, in which the players move pirate ships around a table while fighting a navy and a giant sea creature called a kraken.

It was co-designed and co-published by Porter, the first-timer who was invited to play a game when he walked into his first Geekfest. Porter, 34, lives in Memphis; his day job is in advertising and branding, but he also co-owns the game publishing company Chris Couch Games.

Kraken Skulls! is its first game, and it will have another one, Holiday Hills, coming out in December. It will have a vendor booth at Geekway, where people can play Kraken Skulls! — it only takes about 30 minutes — before deciding if they want to buy it.

Porter is coming to this year’s event as both a vendor and a participant. He will be helping to man their booth and spread the word about their games, but he also plans to be out on the floor and playing games.

“I love really thematic games, games where every turn feels like I have a role to play within the world of the game,” he says.

“I also like cooperative games; games where you work together are fun, even when it’s team against team.”

Porter played soccer in college at the University of Memphis, and still plays a few games a week.

“It challenges my body, and what I love about board games is that it challenges my brain,” he says.

But he was not even interested in board games until COVID. His friend (and now business partner) Chris Clyburn had always enjoyed games, and with public activities limited by the pandemic, they started playing board games together.

When Porter was best man at Clyburn’s wedding, he and some other friends marked the event by creating a board game based on the characters in Marvel comics.

“On the way back from that, we said, ‘What if we started a real company?’”

Along with their own Kraken Skulls! and the upcoming Holiday Hills, they have agreed to release their first game designed by another creator, Jingle Bell Roll.

“I’m Black and the designer of that game is Black. There are not a lot of Black designers out there. That doesn’t happen in this industry. It is definitely a proud moment for me,” Porter says.

Though board games are increasing in popularity, this year’s Geekway event comes at a difficult time for game publishers, says Moore, the event’s organizer.

“The tariffs are killing them, along with a lot of other businesses,” he says.

“They have games that are on ships that are headed for the U.S. that (game publishers) are going to have to write a check to pay for them.”

One of the most successful publishers of board games, Stonemaier Games, is based in ӣ����Ƶ. It is known for its wildly popular Wingspan game and has followed up with other games such as Viticulture and Scythe. Last month, it joined a lawsuit against the current administration to try to fight the 145% tariffs it has to pay on its games that are manufactured and stored in China.

As that fight plays out in the courts, thousands of board-game fans will be engaged in smaller battles of their own over dice and game pieces and boards at the St. Charles Convention Center.

These skirmishes may be smaller, but no less intense. And they can be over any type of board game.

“If someone broke out a chess game, I wouldn’t kick them out,” says Moore.