These were the group at college with the collective smell playing Magic: The Gathering. I suppose mild autism, or what used to be called Aspergers. Never disliked them, but they were certainly different. I’m likely somewhere on the spectrum, and not just because “it’s a spectrum”, but it didn’t quite manifest like that for me.
I used to play MTG and can confirm the places I played almost always had that stale sweat smell.
You know, I always associated dirty, smelly degenerates with magic until I started playing - (I validated that by being the dirty smelly degenerate 😉) it was interesting finding out that potentially due to the high cost of the decks, a good part of the playerbase actually really had their shit together. We’re talking engineers, pediatricians, lawyers etc. who could afford to throw $500 down on cardboard. Enough folks were married that my wife started calling the place “husband daycare”
Of course the smelly smell still made an appearance, I was able to determine if a particular person was in the local game store (LGS) by smell alone, the moment I walked into the store.
Are you saying they were oddballs who happened to play magic, or oddballs because they played magic?