"Gamehole 2026 - Madison - historical slight" Topic

Madison, WI, GAMEHOLE 2026 con has its events listings posted and Wish Lists can be completed, for badge purchasers. Game registration for the hoi polloi (i.e., non-VIP, pricey badge holders) isn't until Aug. 29.

Sad to note, the historical events selection is even sparser than usual this year. Barely any minis or boardgames I can find. It's a shame this con has become so dominated by the fantasy and RPG crowd. There isn't much encouragement from the organizers or attendees for historical topics or games, and that tends to feed on itself I've noted in the years I've been going (five). Seems to be a doom loop. As a local, this saddens me, I'd hoped for better when I moved here.

While it has been an uphill climb we are making progress. HMGS-Midwest is running 24 of the 86 miniature games at the convention. I do not know what the situation is for Board Games, but we have a strong showing this year. We could always use more help, so if you are interested in helping run some mini events for 2027, help us "make it so". Thanks!

I'm with kcabai on this one, historical gamers are going to have to run games at GameHoleCon if they want to play historical games. From talking to the HMGS-M representative, CW, who organizes the miniatures gaming and my friends who run games, the onus is on us. GameHoleCon has been very good about giving HMGS-M the space they need to throw games. I will be traveling 800 miles to attend and spending most of my time playing ancients miniatures. Hope to see you there, and you know where to find me. :)

pjm

Yes, I am chastising myself as well; for a few years, I hosted historical events (boardgames, cause hauling in minis looked to be very difficult from a logistics point of view). I have been wanting to host more games but in recent years our housing situation has been in flux and I haven't even known for sure if we'd be living here, let alone committing to hosting events six months out. I have been buying my attendee badge very late, hedging my bets.

I do hope to be able to commit to some historical-theme minis games and/or boardgames for 2027, as our situation is beginning to become more resolved and predictable. And also support Little Wars.

I am local as well and used to attend GameHoleCon but you are right that the support for historicals have gone down year on year. The first few times I went there was a whole section dedicated to historicals but that shrunk and shrunk. I also don't like that Game Hole Con charges for individual events. On top of a pricey badge, you have to pay sometimes fairly high individual fees per event you attend. That strikes me as unusual. As a result, I put more and more focus into Little Wars and just gaming at home.

Gamehole organizers respond that they can only put on games that are submitted by the volunteer GMs, but once the word spreads that a con is dominated by non-historical games, GMs become reluctant to commit their time and energy lest no one is interested; and that just feeds a cycle of "no one puts on historical games" / "there are no historical games on offer" / "people at Gamehole aren't interested in historical games" / "I won't attend a con with only fantasy games".

I think the event charges are higher than they should be (and the cost to get into a game run by a "celebrity" GM are outrageous) but I get that the logic is to limit demand for some limited seats, and also to cut the number of no-shows -- if someone has paid for a seat, they aren't as likely to bail out at the last minute. In theory. No-shows ARE a real problem and headache for GMs to contend with and plan around. Many cons have this problem and no one has fully solved it (probably unsolvable).

I'm also going to put it on the players. I used to run historical minis at Genghiscon, which was always more of an RPG con. My events would always be 'sold out', but it was very rare that I would have a full table without flagging down passersby. Other GMs would have the same problem and we'd often kind of consolidate down to just enough games to have full tables. Not sure what happened to the players who signed up originally, but it was obvious the market had more GMs than players and adding to the glut wasn't worth my time.

Isn't Game-hole more of an rpg con? I haven't been to it even though I'm local because when I first saw it I saw mostly rpgs and I only play certain ones. I think the rpg cons charge more normally and I'm not surprised if they also do per event as having no shows in an rpg can be a bigger problem than minis.