Under the Dice keeps tabletop conventions small, local, and human

Disclosure: the Ranged Touch podcast network, which the author co-operates, contributed money for tent rentals in sponsorship of Under The Dice. This did not grant the author any special access or treatment.

In the briefest form, Under The Dice Fest is a small convention made by regular people who are, generally, engaging in a robust process to make a thing happen. Those regular people are a broad collective of folks that cohere under the Hive Scum and New England War Council banners. That thing is playing miniature games and experiencing the culture around them. There is an infinite depth to this experience, given the infinite possible depth of all aesthetic and cultural experience. And so I am here to say that it felt like a whirlwind, and I left drained (and a little dehydrated).

Under The Dice was a Friday through Sunday event at the top of October, so I made my day-job friendly plans to fly there on Thursday and return back to Georgia very early Sunday morning. This was fortuitous because it gave me the opportunity to drop in on the Hive Scum studios and see what the final preparations for the festival looked like, which were generally just a kind of controlled chaos that always looked one inch away from breaking out into pure misery. In no particular order of emergency, I saw Phil painting up a yeti enemy that Shane had made for him to field in his primeval fantasy game Ortlvar. I helped David Hoskins assemble some jet planes for the newest version of his game Thrash, a standout strategy game from the past couple years that I had the luck of playing back at Adepticon this year. I watched Noe resin casting miniatures for probably a solid three hours before realizing that he was, in fact, my favorite French miniature sculptor. I’m sorry, other French miniature sculptors. It’s unfortunate that you had to hear about it this way.

Conventions are quite a strange creature across the board. From the science fiction conventions of the 1940s to the emergence of Gen Con in the late 1960s to the cultural dominance of San Diego Comic Con in the late 2010s, the con experience has loomed large over various nerd domains. In the United States, a lot of the air in the room is sucked out by destination cons that bring in attendees from all over the country (and world); PAX Unplugged 2025 had more than 30,000 attendees, Gen Con 2026 claimed more than 70,000, and my local(ish) Dragon Con announced 75,000 participants this year. These are massive commercial ventures that make up both a significant part of the tabletop games market. They also present themselves as black holes for the social and commercial elements of their given fan bases – plan your life around this thing, go there, spend a huge amount of money, and go back home. The pilgrimage structure to the mass event is thrilling, but they are exhaustive and exhausting. People go to these things to be surrounded by their objects of fascination, and they feel culturally embraced by being surrounded by tens of thousands of other people who want to be as well.

Before those destinations conventions appeared, and alongside them the whole while, is the local and regional con scene. Held in VA halls, hotel ballrooms, and community centers, they run on sweat and table rentals. Their blood is volunteer labor. Their driving force is one or two people who think their vision for the right kind of nerd gathering needs to be expressed in the world. Under the Dice Fest is one of these, and it looms large in the miniatures community. It also lives in a rising tide of smaller and regional conventions borne out of always-more people who feel the need to organize a weekend in a rentable venue. Word of mouth on events like Fractured Realms Fest in Peoria, IL and Portland, OR’s Between Two Cons is extremely strong – I traveled in these regions during the summer of 2026, and both of them came up in organic conversation with shop owners and gamers in the areas they took place in. I cannot speak to the desires of others, and maybe it is just a filtering effect on my end, but I do think that there’s something going on in mass culture that is increasing the appetite for smaller, local, and more face-to-face driven events rather than the “one big thing” convention experience.

Part of what took me to Under The Dice Fest was social media. Where the big cons present everything tabletop, Under The Dice pitches itself based on the people who will be there and the narrative-forward, experimental-ish games that get run at the many tables in the Elk’s Lodge. Word of mouth, and the opportunity to engage with miniature painters, game designers, sculptors, and players who enjoy all of these same specific people, drove my desire to hop a plane and see what was happening. With some of the organizers being from the Hive Scum podcast, and given the interesting experience I had at Adepticon where I attended (and wrote about) the Brothers of Promethium event that the podcast hosts ran there, I wanted to see what it looked like when this crew got to drive the whole boat instead of creating a cluster of barnacles on the side of the massive ship Adepticon. 

I don’t think I am alone in being drawn to an event like this based on, essentially, word of mouth. Enthusiast spaces are absolutely crowded with narratives about what we should care about, and in the accelerated world of generative AI I feel like I am at the end of a large firehose of promotional images, videos, and text that are vying for my time and attention as a designer, player, and critic. The promise of a building where I can talk to a lot of people whose work I admire and where I can fundamentally turn all that stuff off and just have longform, thoughtful conversations with people is more important day after day, and in many ways it feels like the only way out of the media and information nightmare we are in: a considered word; a handmade zine; a hand-sculpted miniature; and some rules for a game you thought should exist and it did not already. 

It’s weird to say that going to a convention can feel like reclaiming a little piece of your humanity but, well, sometimes we have to be truthful. 

The drive toward these experiences put me in a place I did not expect, which was sitting behind a desk for two days. Yes, that’s right. I traveled to Under The Dice and ended up volunteering almost all of my time helping with the Rusted Demon competition, a miniature kitbashing and painting competition that focuses on creativity and style over the “clean” painting than the Warhammer-backed Golden Demon that runs at several events every year. Alongside my co-volunteer Nadia, and event organizers Tyler and Phil, I spent a large chunk of the event doing what I have always dreamed: helping fill out paperwork and meticulously inspecting weird little art objects that people made. For a while, Eric (of Eric’s Hobby Workshop) also worked the desk, for what it’s worth, showing that YouTubers are just like us. They also love paperwork.

Those of you who have read my previous work about the tabletop hobby over the past couple years, particularly miniatures, knows that I am in it for cool ideas and interesting minis. My desire to compete in, or “win,” a game is very far down my list, certainly far beneath “looking at stuff” and “talking about how you made a robot look good.” And I think those desires had me initially commit to volunteering and then kept me down in the basement for a dozen hours or more over two days, constantly taking work in, answering questions, and listening to attendees as they slowly filled the tables and chairs in the rest of the basement with us as we did our work.

I feel deeply fortunate to have sat behind that table, though, because it gave me the opportunity to watch and listen a lot. As any good critic knows, those are generally useful things to do. 

I heard people playing games and yelling “whoa!” as a dice rolled. I heard someone patiently counting up Commander damage in a marathon game of Magic: The Gathering. I saw Tanner Simpson giving a fairly commanding speech about the purpose of game design as an art practice in a class that he was teaching. I heard an infinite number of conversations about how something was designed, painted, sculpted, or kitbashed, all from people standing in front of the cabinets and admiring each others’ work. From my vantage behind the desk, getting to do a couple minutes of chit chat constantly and surrounded by the echoing din of the Elk’s Lodge basement, I assembled a totalizing image of people who were drawn together just to do things. This is in distinction to that monocultural impetus that has us looking at things, just seeing things through an app owned by one of the four corporations that are allowed to make things these days. People were gathered with intention and purpose. It’ll make you weep for the simplicity of it. 

The bulk of the weekend’s activities took place in the proper hall of the Elk’s Lodge in Enfield. A massive, wooden room was filled with tables and wargaming terrain for people to play on through the weekend, probably most seriously in Saturday’s New England Mordheim Open, a large tournament where people assemble to play the fanbase-resurrected game Mordheim, which many people find delightful and enjoyable (I am not one of those people). On the other days, there were additional events spread throughout the room. One of the most notable to me was Adam’s Necromunda narrative event, Maude Bogbody’s Rat King nightmare grinder, and the previously-mentioned Ortlvar board of idyllic plains and crunchy hills for fantasy tribesmen to quarrel over. 

In traditional con offerings, there were also vendors there selling their various products. Perhaps less traditionally, a series of tattoo artists were set up at the front of the hall selling, well, tattoos to people all weekend, a very popular experience from what I could tell. As a personal huge fan of Weird Heroes of Public Access, I was delighted to see creator Joey Royale selling his work; and as a convert to the church of original Traveller, I made a beeline to Arcane Sword’s booth to grab the paperback of Spacer, a Creative Commons-ification of that older game for those of us who want to play, and make, stuff in a mechanically similar universe. Glaive made an appearance, Draugr was selling prints, and lots of other people were there. It was a hoot.

Beyond the tattooing, Under The Dice Fest really made a commitment to two things that I would like to see at other events of this sort. First, there was a working kitchen for the entire event, and they had traditional hamburger/hotdog world as well as some vegetarian and vegan options. As someone who gets stuck eating french fries at literally every nerd event, I appreciate that I can eat a veggie burger (or “bug burger,” as the kitchen labeled them) and feel like I am living something close to a normal human life. Big ups to the kitchen. Second, the event had music on the second night, and it wasn’t an afterthought. I was able to catch The Body and Deathless Forever in the same big room where, not long before, people had been fighting with lil fantasy critters. It’s all one thing. Culture is all one thing. You can feel it.

I’ve gone to a lot of events over the past few years. Sometime in the aftermath of COVID, I made a decision to care about analog things as much as, or more than, I cared about digital ones. Maybe I decided I wanted to die with more plastic and paper in my house. I don’t know. What I can say is that the big events are often about figuring out how to carve a space out for yourself. A PAX Unplugged experience is mostly centered on being a consumer, and maybe a fan. Then, after that, you might be able to meet people or develop a community and, through works and thoughts, become a person in that big anonymous crowd. Hell, you might now want to. There are pleasures in just being a number. 

The small convention offers something else. You can walk up to the chef running the kitchen after everything is closed and beg for him to engage in commerce, securing some after-market-hours burgers. If you’re that kind of person, that is. You can watch people do armed combat in the parking lot, and you can introduce yourself to a full quarter of the participants in the entire convention. It makes you feel like we have something in the world that’s not just being bonded by buying the same plastic, even if a lot of the things we share are, uncomfortably, about buying our favorite plastic. 

There’s a danger of trying to enchant this kind of thing, and I don’t want to do that. There’s a long history of arts movements, DIY activities, and countercultural impulses that just get absolutely rolled by leaning into utopian impulses – “this space is different” – in such a way that obscures how things really feel and work out. Under The Dice Fest certainly has that DIY ethic, but it also very visibly tended toward the same crowd as the macro-sized Adepticon, with what appeared to be three or four different genres of white men dominating the space in terms of sheer numbers. As far as I can tell, after looking for a whole, there’s no posted harassment policy or posted process for reporting a problem with another attendee. It runs largely on personalities. 

Simultaneously, it is obviously more inviting to a wider range of people than most random hobby spaces I have engaged with, and certainly more than any Warhammer store I have gone to. The convention pushes a dream, that DIY spirit, and it is hard to beat the enthusiasm, even as I know mechanically that it would be better to have spelled-out policies and procedures. It’s the push and pull grind of society happening. It’s holding up the arts event against the violence of the waged week. 

Co-organizer Steve told me that there were about 400 people this year. I spoke to folks from England, Australia, Chicago, California, and Spain. It took place in a building where you had to be a member to sit at the bar, a social invitation that felt out of time and yet appropriate, like we were squatting in the ruin of a dead world that still had a couple rules to abide by.