Adepticon 2025

Jim Owczarski, 31 March 2025

So that was Adepticon.

Technically, it is not over. The rumble of dice and arguments over rules, not to mention the unmistakable scent of nachos and body odor, may still be vaguely discerned from Milwaukee’s Baird Center, some dozen miles from where I write this.

But for me it is over.

Final numbers will not be out for a bit, but the story is they sold 8,000 badges and pushed more than 15,000 people through the turnstiles. Adepticon, unlike some of its bigger brothers, does NOT require you to buy a badge just to walk around and shop.

I have wanted a major convention back in my hometown since GenCon picked up sticks so long ago. I had never been to Adepticon. How did it go?

Animadversion #1: Wargaming — You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Adepticon advertises itself as the premiere wargaming convention. This claim is plausible, presuming your definition of wargaming is sufficiently broad. I will confess I have long struggled with accepting Age of Sigmar, Warhammer 40k, Star Wars Legion, and nigh-innumerable other miniature skirmish games as “wargames” or playing them as “miniatures wargaming”. Like a lot of other things in this life, though, the world drove past me and fast. There were many thousands of people milling about Adepticon who would have listened to my objections, shaken their heads sadly as one does with a daft older relative, and shuffled along.

And when I say thousands, I really do mean thousands. Warhammer 40k and both Star Wars Legion and Shatterpoint were tent-pole offerings, flanking the show floor to either side. Their events were consistently well attended.

click images to enlarge

There were dozens of other miniatures wargame systems including the ever-popular Battletech which roiled its online community with the announcement of an alternative timeline featuring arcane-looking bio-mechs in a world to be called Battletech: Gothic. There were plenty of mainline Battletech products on offer, but the only sign of gothic things were in a display case.

Spooky robots!

Even old friends had events scheduled with a room full people people playing Warmaster, Epic: Armageddon, and Battlefleet: Gothic. I could not help but wonder how many other conventions had events for any one of these, much less all three.

Animadversion #2 — Tournaments do not have to be poisonous, evil, rubbish, but they certainly can be.

If you know anything of my views on such things, you know that I loathe most tournament play. It brings out the absolute worst in people, encourages dreadful min/maxing, and fires players and judges off on a chimerical quest for “balance”. Only this quest could create table after table of terrain like this.

This is particularly grievous when you consider the effort the players put into acquiring, building, and painting their miniatures. The terrain makes no sense save as a tool of the tournament and it led one unschooled observer to wonder why they just did not place a number of the boxes the miniatures came in up on the table.

Not all tables were so, however. Downstairs from the main Warhammer hall, there was another large room given over to narrative play and even, yes, narrative tournaments; though I have yet to full wrap my head around the latter. Here the gifts of both the figure and the terrain modeller could be seen. Some of the creators seemed even to have had an awful lot of fun building their grimdark forces.

In fairness, I watched a good many games in both areas and, with very few exceptions, I saw a great deal of competitiveness, but also good sportsmanship and a good spirit of play.

Animadversion #3 — Warhammer is a cult and, if you are planning to take a piece of out it, you are probably going to fail.

Anyone reading this must surely know the global reach of the grimdark. There is something a bit special, though, about seeing it in all its mad glory. The main store was regularly swarmed with people buying model kits, accessories, t-shirts, source books, and the like. Many came to admire the absurd modelling skills of the folks who make display pieces like this one:

Others queued up many deep to view the miniatures submitted to the Golden Demon competition.

Some, naturally enough, came dressed as the favorite orks, please note clan affiliation.

And many just admired the big fellow behind them.

Scattered throughout the convention are those games and companies that either wanted or still want a shot at Games Workshop’s crown. Each is a fascinating story. I, for one, spent time building armies for Warzone some decades ago before it passed through many hands and is now, it would seem, a small-scale skirmish game with a near pocket-sized rule book. More recently, One Page Rules has made an honest attempt to provide an alternative to Warhammer 40k and a few of the other GW systems. I am a fan of their work, but their reach is evidently as small as their booth — which was staffed with delightful people.

It seems I have barely started and have yet to speak a work about historical gaming.

More next time, then?

Adepticon 2025
PART ONE ~ PART TWO ~ PART THREE

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