Forge Midwest 2025 Organizer Report

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Forge Midwest 2025 was at a new venue. In 2024 we were at the Clarion Suites, and were due to return again, but about two months ahead of the event we were informed the hotel would be undergoing renovations and would not be available. This left us in an unfortunate position of having to scramble for a replacement venue, the Comfort Inn and Suites on the West side of Madison. I originally had some concerns about the potential quality of the venue, but I am happy to say that they were unfounded. Particularly useful was the option to play in the breakfast area, which offered a quiet alternative. Also the price was extremely competitive. The biggest downside is that the west side of town isn’t super convenient for myself or some of the other organizers.

We collected forty-four signatures in the Forge Midwest Guest Book. This is the first year that we’ve done anything to take a formal headcount. Attendance is roughly the same as last year, but still below pre-Covid levels, and at a level that was comfortable in the space, with some room to grow. I don’t know how practical this space would be if we return to 2019 levels, where we had roughly 70 people.

We’ve experimented with different monetization strategies over the years, and this year we did raffle tickets, getting rid of some of the duplicate games that have accumulated in our collection. I found these easier to count by just looking at the number of tickets sold than trying to count spaces on the grid (for when we’ve done a crowdfunding drawing, which depends on people making their drawing, which I think many people are reluctant to do.) Partly due to the reduced cost of the venue and partly due to the generosity of everyone attending, this is the first year that we fully recouped all of our operating costs: venue, food delivery (the Saturday sub sandwich), and additional beverages/snacks. (In previous years we typically met our housing budget but only part of the additional expenses.) I’m likely to continue the raffle tickets next year for the ease in counting, but its likely to be a novelty prize of some kind, since it will take us several years to purchase another pile of games we already own. Hopefully people will retain the same enthusiasm for supporting the convention.

The biggest lesson this year is that May is not a great weekend for the convention. The nicer the weather the more people want to spend time in the great outdoors. (But worse and people won’t want to travel). April seems to be perfect for people not having to brave blizzards, but probably wanting to spend a weekend indoors.

If you want to stay informed about Forge Midwest, the best way to do so is through the Discord channel.

Hope to see you at the next one!

Forge Midwest 2025

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Forge Midwest is going to be held on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of May. We will be having it this year at the Comfort Inn and Suites on the west side of Madison. If you need to schedule a room, you can call them at 608-836-3033 if you need to schedule a room. Hope to see you there!

Forge Midwest 2024 Organizer Report

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2024 was a year that presented some challenges. We moved to a new con venue. I maybe had food poisoning. Also the world serpent briefly ate the sun.

The Best Western had served Forge quite well for a number of years, but we were beginning to outgrow the space and the quality of the site was decreasing. This made it desirable to look for a new location. After reaching out to many locations, we determined the Clarion most met our needs: relatively-low cost, location (mostly) near food, and willing to put up with us bringing in outside food. We did look at several locations that had more food access, but the prices were either much higher or they would not let us bring in our own food. I feel that people bringing and sharing their drinks and snacks contributes to the essential Forge-Midwest potluck convention atmosphere, and it wouldn’t be the same without it.

The universe played a great April Fools joke on us, because on the 1st both Tim and I had food poisoning. Also we only have one bathroom. The less said about that the better. We were both mostly recovered by the 2nd, but I was left with a lingering sinus issue (possibly stress related) that had me semi-incapacitated for a large chunk of my con preparation time. I don’t know if it was a separate incident or just a long tail, but my stomach really never quite settled through the Forge weekend, and I took the precaution of sleeping in for the Saturday morning slot. Fortunately a bit of stomach discomfort was as bad as you got.

As I continue to gain experience as a con organizer, I continue to learn for things to look of for, to avoid scheduling against, like other game conventions, Easter, or apparently the moon. Its apparently kind of a big deal, and I know that there are people who attended Friday and/or Saturday but skipped Sunday so they could travel, or weren’t able to attend at all because they were preparing for the big moon thing.

Because I have yet to figure out an attendance tracking method that works for me, I didn’t get an exact headcount, but I’d estimate it at around 40-45 unique attendees, the Saturday afternoon and evening sessions each had about 30-35 people around. The space we were in could reasonably accommodate about 50 people, and there’s options in the hotel for expanding. I’m still going to do some more research on other locations, but the Clarion is likely to be our location next year.

So let’s talk about money. Between the sun thing and people still getting back into their pre-Covid routines, attendance is down, which means donations are down. Also the hotel rooms cost more than they used to. Our expenses look like this:

Hotel costs: 1444.23

Food costs: 263.55 (catered subs)

Total costs: 1707.78

(Yes, I rounded up for both categories on the board).

Some people have asked why the food costs are being calculated as a separate item. Shari has decided to take point on making sure food is available for Saturday lunch, and this is her personal comfort level with funding the con. She’d made it very clear that she wants to make sure everything else is fully funded before she gets compensated. I think it’s because she knows I get cranky when hungry.

I think the catered meal on Saturday was pretty much the perfect level of food- we had five slices of sandwich left over, which all got eaten by the end of the con. Last year we had both too much sandwich AND got too much pizza for dinner.

One person drank a soda from the con-supply, not realizing they were $3. Since it was only one, the hotel comped it- free can of soda, nice!

We received donations $1058 in cash and $170 through paypal, for a total of $1228. If you attempted to send any of us money not through paypal, we have not counted it, please reach out to me so I can figure out what’s going on.

This is about $500 short of our collective goal. It’s within our comfort level for spending on the con- we do this to have fun and play games, not to make money. However it does mean that we are disproportionately shouldering the financial burden of making Forge Midwest happen, in addition to all the emotional and physical labor involved. If you are in a position though where you are wanting to contribute more (and it will not be a financial burden for you), you can send us more money. The most reliable way for me is through paypal- willowpalecek@gmail.com , but you can email me or DM me on discord and we can figure something out.

See you all next year!

Forge Midwest 2022: The Return

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Forge Midwest is set to return this year, April 8, 9, and 10 at the Best Western East Towne Suites. We look forward to seeing friends new and old.

You can reserve a hotel room by calling the hotel at (608) 244-2020 and letting them know you are part of the Forge Midwest block. Rooms are $89 per night.

We will be taking precautions to prevent the spread of Covid, including the wearing of masks.

Hope to see you there!

Forge Midwest 2021 Organizer Report

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Having Forge Midwest online this year was something of an experiment. How would the pitch sessions translate to the online environment? What does the play space need to look like? Does a basic Discord server have enough bandwidth to support this? What really goes into making an online con, anyway?

The most important question, which I didn’t really figure out the answer to, was “are people even going to attend?”

It certainly seemed to me that there was support for it, between both anecdotal conversations I had previously had, and that seemed to be backed up by the rising server memberships in the weeks leading up to the convention. There seemed to be a lot of interest, which I took as a good sign… and made me worry that the preparations I had made were enough.

Also on the back of my mind, was whether or not this might serve as a model for a second Forge Midwest going forward, probably in the fall. Numerous people have expressed a desire for more Forge… but also exhaustion at the prospect of everything that goes into attending a con. A second online con seemed like the perfect solution. If this one worked out, maybe we’d keep the model around.

Friday morning rolled around, and we had enough turn out for a single game, which is not uncommon for Friday morning, historically one of the lowest attendance days, because many people are still working or traveling. But as Friday went on and Saturday came around, one thing became crystal clear: I had vastly overestimated the interest in an online Forge convention. Or perhaps had mistook what the actual conversion rate of interest to attendance would be. In any case, attendance was lower than my lowest prediction, which was disheartening as a convention organizer.

Fortunately, I was able to have a good time, playing many enjoyable games. Many thanks to those who attended.

And if you thought about attending and then decided not to, I want to hear from you. What can I do to make Forge Midwest online more attractive to you in the future?

We have some thoughts about ways to utilize this space for online events. Might this be a good way to have smaller “game day” style events? Will there be another Forge Midwest online in the future? Or is this space best used for coordinating in-person events when we are finally on the other side of all of this?

Let us know your thoughts.

Forge Midwest 2021 Play Report

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This is the first time Forge Midwest has gone digital. While I have been doing online gaming since the beginning of the pandemic, this is only my second online convention. Despite some technical setbacks I was able to get in a solid weekend of gaming.

Fri AM: ACTION CASTLE/PUMPKIN TOWN

Finally, ACTION CASTLE as it was always meant to be played: over text. The “Parsley” series of games model 1980s text adventures, meant to be played as a group with a single GM figure. As a GM, the fun is in coming up with smart-ass responses to the prompts you’re given, and narrating death scenes, which I didn’t get to do often, but when I did, I did it with glee. As a player, you’re solving the puzzle, and also setting up smart-ass prompts to give the GM to work with. I’ve mostly ran this as a ‘filler’ game before, but it actually works much better in text. ACTION CASTLE is the first and easiest of the various Parsley games, and our players made it through in just over an hour. They did get to enjoy a brief jaunt into the PUMPKIN TOWN adventure, with a score of 4/13. The simplicity of this game was also nice because I was able to invite my friend Shari, who would not be able to attend the other events do to tech issues, but could come up with bad ideas over the phone with the best of them.

Fri Aft: Ganakagok

Ganakagok is the other other indie game to come out of the 2004 Game Chef competition (the more well known ones being Polaris and The Mountain Witch), and its about building a mythic story for the fictional Nitu people, who live on the island of Ganakagok, which is inspired by the history of the Inuit. Ganakagok involves a tarot card mechanism, of drawing a card and interpreting what it means for the situation, and this is included throughout the game, touching pretty much every aspect of the design. It’s very classic Forge style design, by which I mean narration rights being part of conflict resolution, abstract elements being given mechanical weight, a dice mechanic that has never really been done before, endgame mechanics. Playing it sort of feels like returning to that state of mind.

This was my first time running Ganakagok, and the thing I learned most is that it does not work online over roll20… like at all. I used a couple of clumsy workarounds to get everything to show up in roll20, but it was very clumsy, and Tim couldn’t get somethings to show up at all. Roll20’s poker chip implementation is a cludge, and using those for tokens in this is a cludge of a cludge.

We played through one full “round” of scenes, of each character getting a spotlight scene and a single conflict. Nanurjuk the defiant navigator piloted through a storm to scout out a new island for the Nitu to live on. Ssaborak the generous boat-maker did a long trek through a different storm, out pacing a pack of cannibal ghouls, to arrive back at the village to attend to his pregnant wife. Janaq the unlikable mystic helped deliver Ssaborak’s child into the world as dawn came, heralding a new age. By the guidelines in the book we should have gotten three or four full rounds through in this time, but the interface issues made everything take longer. This is a game I would really like to get a chance to play in person with fist fulls of tokens and moving the individual dice around… and also a game that could use a new edition with some streamlined game mechanics.

Fri Eve: 47 Hags

47 Hags is a playtest by Dave R, presented as a “lineage building game” about detailing and discovery the history of the 47 Hags. Each Hag is more powerful than the one before it, so the 47th Hag will be the one that destroys the world! 47 Hags inverts a lot of trope of Vampire: The Masquerade, which was delightful to explore (the most obvious one being the aforementioned power dynamic.)

For being the first version of the game, it was completely playable. Some of the mechanics were clunky, some of them felt off, and some were missing, but it mostly worked, which is amazing for such an early design; Dave has clearly put a lot of though into this. The tale of our lineage started with the “Boss-Hag,” (everyone has a Hag archetype, or Hagotype; since all the important people in the story are Hags, this makes it really easy to remember who is who), your typical “Karen” personality who had been turned into a Hag by the Tiger-Hag, a tiger mom who needed a supernatural minion to go after her supernatural minions that had gone rogue. Our cast also included the Law-Hag and the Order-Hag, the Luck-Hag, who was the most powerful being in existence for all of seven minutes before another Hag was created, and the super-weird magical polycule Threefold Hag. This was a lot of fun, though it had the struggle that many world-building games do, which is that the fun tends to be spaced out between the procedural bits. (This is true for all games, but in world building games in particular, the “play” portion is shrunk and the “procedure” bits are stretched.)

Sat AM: Swords Without Master

Andy H ran Swords Without Master, a swords and sorcery game. I had played this game before and struggled with it; Swords is about coming up with cool pulp narration. I was going to say ‘mostly’, but that’s really all there is to it, narrating these bits of prose. Sometimes the dice give you a setback, but mostly they just determine whether you narrate your details in a Jovial or Glum tone. When you’re in the mood to narrate a bunch of stuff, this can be a really fun game (as it was this morning.) We had a trio of badasses who probably just stepped out of a Frank Frazetta painting, who infiltrated a cult temple, killed an evil wizard during a magical avalanche, and did some other cool stuff. That’s Swords Without Master, essentially.

Sat Aft: Terraforming Mars, on Tabletop Simulator

Terraforming Mars is one of my favorite games, so satisfying to see your different income ratings push up higher and higher and accumulate more and more cubes, until late in the game you are slinging around fifty or sixty space dollars at a time. It is a super solid engine builder and I absolutely love it. I also didn’t sleep well at all the night before, so it was nice to play a shorter game and then get a nap in.

Sat PM: Forgotten Waters

Forgotten Waters is a board game with an online client, brought by Jim S. Its surprisingly not ideal for playing online, since the board state is not visible to everyone, but we managed a workaround on that. Everyone is a pirate; at each location there is a selection of actions to do and each person gets one to do, and there is a strict time limit in choosing actions. Usually its not an issue, but on a few spots hard choices were made and we lost some points. The game is cooperative but there are some strangely competitive elements, such as the turn order track and being able to steal items from your fellow pirates, which is very on theme for pirates but maybe a bad in a co-op game? The online client had the character sheets which we used, and set of different box-text passages.

Each player has a different pirate archetype, which comes with a madlibs style character backstory, and narrative boxes that are read out as the game progresses. I picked the Safety Pirate… safety is important on the high seas! After my first story milestone, I unlocked my signature item, the Reflective Vest!

This was a pretty fun game casual game about pirates. The weirdest part of the game is who exactly it is for; the colorful images seem themed for a family, but the story contents were a bit more violent that I would be comfortable with playing with kids. It’s not anything they won’t see in Pirates of the Caribbean, but it’s a little different when its narrated that you’re the one running someone through with your sword. But its also so goofy that teens would probably find it lame. It also requires at least four players, which is not always easy, and has a long playtime.

Sun AM: JUNGLE ADVENTURE

Sunday morning I ran the second game in the Parsley saga, JUNGLE ADVENTURE, in which you crash land in the JUNGLE and have an ADVENTURE. This is a big step up in difficulty from ACTION CASTLE, but our players prevailed, with only one death and a solid score of 85/100. Whereas ACTION CASTLE is a typical entry into the text-adventure genre, with only a couple of points of bullshit logic, JUNGLE ADVENTURE seems to delight in the hoops it puts you through. Favorite part was at the beginning, when I told the players they couldn’t put on the backpack or exit the plane (you have to unbuckle your seat belt before doing either), and the excitement of the mad dash at the end to outrun the baddie that was chasing them, made all the more perilous by an added real time constraint.

Sun Aft: Lancer

Sabe ran Lancer, a 4E inspired game of giant robots fighting other giant robots. This was mostly a ‘demo’ with pregenerated mecha and a bunch of bad guys to fight. It was nice to get to flex one’s tactical muscles, and Lancer has enough choices to keep each turn interesting. On the downside sometimes I felt overwhelmed with options, and it did feel like it could drag a lot between turns. We used Roll20- apparently the game’s dedicated app, Comp/Con is much better- and there were some things that were a bit hard to use, like the bonus/penalty dice which didn’t quite seem to work. But blowing stuff up with giant robots is always fun.