Witnessing Adepticon from the wargame event horizon

Adepticon is a giant gathering of tabletop nerds in the desolate, cold wastes of the American Midwest. Since my initiation into “the hobby,” it has been dangled in front of me as an important pilgrimage: go to the promised land, my son, and all will be revealed to you. So, I hopped on a plane to check out Adepticon 2025 at its new host site at the Baird Center in beautiful Milwaukee. I traveled light with the intent to source everything I could need or desire on-site, sort of like a miniature-oriented special forces operative out of a 1988 technothriller. Armed with a coat and a hat, I landed on Thursday, and I braced myself for the weekend.

Adepticon is a creature that finds itself stuck between two forms. One is its most natural: a niche event for people who like the almost-ontologically niche hobby of playing war games with painted miniatures. Another is one that it has adopted simply by virtue of existing within capitalism: a commercial convention where people come to hawk their wares. The mutant zone between those two impulses leaves Adepticon feeling both hypertargeted at a specific group of people while also bombarding that group with commercial novelty.