The Sad Decline of the Historical Miniature Gaming Society
A farewell to arms for another poisoned institution
The Historical Miniature Gaming Society is a large miniature wargaming club founded more than 40 years ago. They are famous for running Historicon, the largest historical wargaming convention in North America, which consistently has over 2,000 attendees and 400+ scheduled games (this also makes it one of the largest miniature wargaming cons in general, though it has in recent years been surpassed by events like Adepticon). HMGS has also traditionally run two other conventions throughout the year, Cold Wars in the Winter and Fall In! in the Autumn. The main organization is centered in the mid-Atlantic, and their conventions are typically held in the Pennsylvania/Maryland border area, although it also operates allied regional organizations in the Midwest, South, and the Pacific coast. It boasts a paid membership of around 2,000.
The ‘About’ section of their website still describes them this way:
HMGS, Inc. is a non-profit, charitable and educational 501(c)3 organization whose purpose is to promote the study of military history through the art of tabletop miniature wargaming.
HMGS membership offers discount admission to HMGS conventions nationwide, Education, an opportunity to spread the gospel of historical gaming through Outreach, a periodic e-newsletter and fellowship with other military history buffs and gaming enthusiasts.
Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. For starters, the HMGS lost its non-profit status in 2024, apparently because they did not bother to file the correct renewal paperwork and none of the elected Board Members nor their accountants or solicitors noticed.
I anticipate that at least one person with insider knowledge will read this and reply that I’m mischaracterizing the event, but if so it’s only because the organization did not actually see fit to explain any of this, nor, indeed, even announce it when it happened. It came to my attention only through back-channel gossip and some suspicious ballot measures during the 2024 officer elections. We were asked to approve changes to the organizational charter and bylaws, removing the bit about being a non-profit organization, though it was already a fait accompli.
Somewhat surprisingly, this earthquake produced a collective yawn from the membership. Historically, most members don’t vote, and that continued even after the loss of non-profit status. I don’t ascribe all of this disengagement to apathy, however. As I have already alluded to, many probably did not know what had happened. And if my own experiences are reflective of the general membership, many more probably stopped caring after several years of board members failing to do very simple things, like respond to emails. I shall give a few examples to illustrate.
On June 12 of 2023, I sent an email to the HMGS Education chairman asking what wargames-as-education efforts he had running, if I could be of assistance in any of them, or if not, what sort of support could I expect from the HMGS in running demonstration programs at local libraries and homeschool co-ops. I did not receive a reply until June 27th, containing only a short message that he had been in Europe for the past several weeks, and would return on the June 30th. I wished him well on the rest of his trip. June 30th came and went, and so did half of July. On July 16, I received an email from him wondering if we could just talk it over in person at Historicon a few days later. I did indeed talk it over with him, but only by accident, as he was running a Hobby University class that I attended. After a 10 minute discussion, I received promises that HMGS education budget could pay for the sort of events I had in mind, and that he would be in touch after the con with more information. As of January 2025, I still haven’t heard back.
In October 2023, I noticed there wasn’t a single HMGS advertisement in any game stores within an hour’s drive of me, so I emailed the officers looking for a promotional poster for Fall In!. After bouncing around to a few people, I was finally sent four fairly dense PDFs of the sort that you were supposed to make multi-page informational pamphlets out of. These are great to hand out to people who are already interested, but of no use for grabbing attention from a bulletin board behind a checkout counter. I asked for something much simpler, with the name and dates of the event, the website, ticket prices, etc… Once again, as of January 2025, I never received a reply. Could I have made my own? Sure. But why doesn’t this big organization with a a few thousand members and few hundred grand in the bank care enough to produce the most basic outreach material?
Please permit me a short digression about my own efforts on behalf of the HMGS, lest I be accused only of offering complaints and not my own efforts. Besides the abortive educational program I just mentioned, I have run several 4-hour game sessions at both Cold Wars and Fall In!, was responsible for a half dozen other people becoming paid members and regular convention attendees, and I ran for the Board of Directors in 2023. Now, I have only been a member of the HMGS since 2022, but in my defense, I joined as soon as I discovered their existence. My ignorance persisted in spite of being a miniature wargamer for 30 years, and despite them operating their big conventions in my backyard. This must tell you something about their ‘outreach’ program during nearly the entirety of their existence, but I will gladly take most of the blame here. Regardless, within a few months it was clear even to this Johnny-Come-Lately that the organization had some serious problems to sort out. Having run a couple of successful (though admittedly much smaller) conventions myself, and being a homeschooling father with a particular interest in popularizing the study of military history and introducing youngsters to wargaming, I received a nomination to the board and accepted my candidacy. I presented a somewhat lengthy platform filled with actionable specifics that I hoped would at least provoke discussion, even though I had little hope of winning.
As expected, I lost. Every incumbent was re-elected by a wide margin. These were the Board of Directors in office during the disaster year of 2024. Would I have caught the oversight and saved the club’s 501c3 status, along with tens of thousands of dollars in taxes? Possibly not; after all, I’m not sure it would have even occurred to me to check. But I couldn’t have done any worse than the multi-decade members, multi-term sinecures who definitely should have thought of it.
The loss of non-profit status must’ve had an immediate impact on the club’s finances, because by Fall In! 2024, they started nickel-and-diming the attendees in petty and ridiculous ways. First, they started charging attendees, even paid members, to bring their minor children and non-playing spouses. For what I think are obvious reasons, it had been free to bring your kids and wife along since I joined the club, and as far as I know this was always the case. No more. The fee was ‘only’ $2 per head, but this also makes it all the more insulting. If it’s ‘only’ $2 per person, why can’t the club just forget about it, especially as the added expense of their attendance is literally non-existent? It gets worse: even if you commit to GM’ing 16 man-hours of gaming, which gets you a free pass to the convention, you still have to pay for Junior and the Little Lady. Running games is the whole reason anyone comes to these conventions, and it involves a considerable investment of time, energy, and money to conceive, playtest, and transport your own miniatures and terrain to the event, with the attendant risk of breakage, loss, and theft, not to mention actually setting up and running the game. Charging these people to bring their kids along is a slap in the face.
The hypocrisy is even more aggravating when the Important People of the club, including their unofficial spokesmen at YouTube channel Little Wars TV, frequently lament the supposed “graying of the hobby” and how we all need to be more welcoming to young newcomers. I’ve heard absolutely no complaints about this policy change from any of these ‘advocates’, so I am forced to conclude this is mere virtue signalling. After all, if the HMGS really wanted to have a kid-friendly environment, they’d do something about the childless weirdos that always sign up for Youth-designated games, particularly the couple of conspicuous troons with their pronouns scribbled on their name tags.
Another example of nickel-and-diming at Fall In! 2024 was the policing of the vendor hall for badges. It had previously been the official, if unannounced, policy that they weren’t going to make people pay for admission to the vendor hall. This is good for the vendors, especially at Fall In!, since the vendor hall is located in separate building and several hundred feet away from the convention space(!). Nevertheless, I was stopped at the entrance and demanded to produce my badge. Showing the ticket on my phone wasn’t good enough. I was told I had to walk all the way up the hill and check in. Last year, you could check in and get your badge printed at the vendor hall, but I guess the extra machines got laid off!
As an aside, HMGS promised vendors that the ridiculous situation of the Fall In! Vendor Hall being located far away from the main convention area was supposed to have been rectified in 2023. Vendors who paid several hundred dollars per table were particularly miffed that the flea market was not only scheduled during vendor hours, but was placed on prime real estate right off the gaming floor. Another promise made, another promise broken.
For all this, and more, the convention atmosphere clearly suffered. I spent the better part of Friday and Saturday there, but the foot traffic was light, there were even fewer kids than usual, and, most tellingly, there were many empty game tables during prime hours that are usually wall-to-wall. After I left, I was pretty sure that I was not going to bother going to Cold Wars in 2025, which had been put on hiatus for a year but was scheduled to return, this time in Gettysburg. Still, I was willing to think about it.
At Christmastime, I was more enthusiastic because I thought I’d discovered the perfect game to introduce kids to wargaming: Snap Ships Tactics. With plans of running that and a continuation of the Weird WW2 campaign I had run at several other cons, I began to get optimistic. That optimism dampened when I discovered the aforementioned Dad-penalty still applied to people running games and was extinguished entirely when I learned about the $135/night room block at the most dilapidated, lowest-rated hotel in the Gettysburg area. Seriously, check out the reviewer photos and comments from recent visitors of this place.
Cold Wars 2025 will be the first HMGS convention that I do not attend since I learned about the club. I will not renew my membership in July. If I attend any of their other events, it’ll be as a day trip and I’ll probably stick to the flea market. It’s not that the organization doesn’t merit saving, it’s just the people who can do it haven’t and won’t. I have no doubt that it will continue on for a while under its own inertia, probably for a decade or even more, and I have no doubt that it will be helmed by officers who see their titles as a reward for past greatness rather than a grave responsibility to the future. And hundreds of honest and dedicated—but naive—men who thought they had found a place where they could focus on their hobby and spend time with their buddies will wonder what the hell happened.
Meanwhile you, reader, most go out and build your own clubhouse. But when you do, remember the tragedy of the HMGS, and be vigilant.
This is a bigger problem than just this organization. There is a general malaise among the whole population. Voting has been declining. Public engagement has been declining.
I myself have said that voting is irrelevant, even though I still cast my ballot. Whether it will be counted or not, I don't know.
Even Presidents who are supposed to set policy are declining to do their civil duty.
We hear from them once every couple of years during their "State of the Union" address.
FDR held a weekly radio address.
Reagan consistently came on tv to enlist the peoples aid in legislation, and to inform the population what was going on, and what the administration thought was best.
Now we are lucky to get a note that we started another war in another country.
It's never been easier to contact our elected officials, but no one even cares to anymore.
This sounds so similar to the demise of the hexagon-based wargaming that I used to play and attend conventions through the 1980s. I started miniature gaming largely because no one played old Avalon Hill or SPI boardgames anymore.
The local gamer group that I belonged (I'm no longer active) is also graying. It was still well attended, though, but I moved and don't know the status.