As Munzee has grown over the years, the game has evolved in so many more ways than any of the co-founders could have imagined. We’ve certainly had our fair share of growing pains, but in its essence Munzee has tried to stick to its core goal of getting people out into the world. No one knows this better than those players who have been with us since the beginning. This week’s Player of the Week is Rob Lines (OBXGeek).
Who are you?
OBXGeek aka Rob Lines (Or Rob Smith on Facebook)
OBX is short for Outer Banks which is an area on the coast of North Carolina, a place I vacation often, and Geek because I am one.
Where in the world do you live?
I live in Leesburg, Virginia, USA. It is about 40 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. along the Potomac River.
How long have you played Munzee?
I signed up for my account July 13, 2011 and was user 679. My first two munzee deploys were July 27th, 2011, but I didn’t cap my first munzee until November 2011.
How did you find Munzee?
flyingmoose posted about a new smartphone based location game on the NoVAGO forums, and I signed up as he was planning to hide a few locally and I enjoyed his caches, so I wanted to see what he would come with. With so few in the area, it wasn’t until we had a handful of new players start up in early 2013 that things took off. Once we had more local players and one of them decided to start deploying ~200 points worth of munzees a day, things really started rolling. New deploys available to cap all the time led to other people going out and filling in the holes causing a snowball effect. Now, there is somewhere north of 5000 greenies within 10 miles of home and enough total munzees that my browser hangs if I try to zoom the map out all of the way.
What do you most enjoy about Munzee?
I love my clan Maryland Munzee Militia. Being part of a supportive group that likes to get together and have fun capping and deploying is great. The new friends I have made through the game and the old acquaintances from caching who have now become good friends due to the increased interaction of munzeeing has been fun for me.
What is on your wish list?
I want to make it back out to the MHQ Bash as well as Munzee Madness at some point. I also really would love to visit Europe and munzee my way across though I would have to plan a doule length trip because I would need time to go everywhere with my wife to be a tourist and then go back though capping all the munzees.
Tell us about yourself!
In my day-to-day life, I work in Scientific Computing for a large non-profit medical research facility. I take care of the large, high performance computer cluster and the petabytes of storage that my researchers house their data on for processing. It is an amazing place to work as I have the chance to work with nobel laureates in my day-to-day life.
I enjoy going out and munzeeing because I can spend an hour after work and walk a couple of miles 50 feet at a time and never realize how far I have walked, or I can spend an afternoon with a bunch of good friends powering our way through a new area carpeting the area with new munzees and chatting away while we do it.
I also enjoy coming up with new events to make people go “wow” when they attend. My Hearts in DC event was an amazing experience, and even with the weather, everyone had so much fun. Then hosting Forging Community in May, coachV let me push the bounds of what could be done for an event and 146 people had the chance to take part in the fun. Now my challenge is to figure out how to top those events with something even cooler.
Other hobbies include:
I enjoy caching. I use a number of listing sites to hide and find caches and many of my travels are for munzeeing and caching trips. I also enjoy kayaking, especially when I can overlap it with location games, though I have yet to do paddle-munzees. I just don’t trust myself not to drop my phone in the water even if it is in a floating drybag. I am also a board game fan. I love to play them and have a wall filled with them, and some of my powergaming of board games spills over into my munzeeing. Finding the most efficient way to get the highest score in the smallest amount of time.
OBXGeek also included some socials (one of which is on the Header Image), so cap away!
