Painfully early on the morning of March 23, I crawl out of my hotel room and stumble towards terminal two at Manchester airport in the Northwest of the UK. It's the start of my pilgrimage to the famed wargames convention Adepticon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and also the start of a week embedded with the game designers and business leads at games design studio Steamforged Games (SFG). It's going to be a frantic week testing games, interviewing designers, writing up keynotes, schmoozing PRs. But whenever I'm not on business, I'll be hanging out with the people who now own the rights to one of my all time favorite wargames, Warmachine.
I don't know these people. I've liaised with marketing director Chynna-Blue Scott before, over product samples and PR opportunities; and I've interviewed Warmachine product owners Jamie Perkins and Sherwin Matthews, and SFG founders Mat Hart and Rich Loxam, for various news stories. The relationship between press and game makers is normally polite but reserved - it's my job to be nosey, honest, and bring a company's dirty laundry into the open when it's in the public interest to do so, and sensible game makers are careful in what they say around me. A week together is going to dissolve a lot of that distance
I meet Scott, Perkins, and Loxam, SFG's northern contingent, at the airport. Hart and Matthews, plus new business manager Kieran Wilson and logistics manager Andy Burdis, will fly out of Heathrow, London. Mikey Herbert, aka YouTuber Hellstorm Mikey, is on the flight out of Manchester with us, as he's handling the livestream for SFG's keynote - I'll be sharing a hotel room with him. "I basically insulted them into giving me the job", he says. He'd done a watchalong party of their 2025 Adepticon keynote on Twitch, and criticised the technical quality: Steamforged's response was to dare him to do better.
We're flying out days before the con. The team all have nightmare stories about previous convention trips, and there's a suggestion that Perkins is a bad luck charm, given the number of travel mishaps he'd had: "Only when we go to GenCon", he counters. In the event, Loxam gets the bad luck, and is yanked into an uncomfortable meeting with a suited official. His cases are all packed with convention supplies - t-shirts for booth staff, miniatures for display cabinets - that a customs officer suspects he may plan to sell without paying import duty. "They pointed at some of the other t-shirts, asked me what those are for - I said they're mine, I'll be wearing them!"
The flight is fine - Aer Lingus doesn't destroy any of those irreplaceable display miniatures in the cargo hold - and when we land, I get my first inkling of just how nerdy the SFG team is. Loxam and Perkins both paid for in-flight WiFi to try and play a game of Warmachine on a virtual tabletop, though the internet connection was only strong enough for them to get through a turn and a half in ten hours. The pair are discussing Loxam's Storm Legion list pairing - Calder and Sparkhammer - while we collect our cases.
I had expected the SFG team to be obsessed with Warmachine. I knew already that Loxam, Hart, Perkins, and Matthews all met playing the game; Loxam and Perkins helped establish the Warmachine European Team Championship and were involved in the massive UK convention SmogCon; Perkins won the UK nationals four times. But hearing the pair theorycraft brings it home to me in a very real way - they're massive Warmachine nerds.
I ask them about it. Perkins says "I was just a born wargamer… well. It's my religion". "And I married into it", Scott pipes up. I ask her if she plays. "No", she says, "But I love to spectate. It's so vivid, I can just imagine everything that's happening." Outside work, she and Perkins organize the annual Warmanchester tournament. "When he's playing I obviously can't talk to him because he's concentrating, but we've got a code where he'll squeeze my leg a number of times if it's going well or if it's going badly".
I've only ever met Scott in 'business mode' before: controlled, efficient, always busy, and always immaculately turned out in classic goth couture. When she's not heads down with work she's bubbly, quick with a gleeful laugh. Over the course of the week it's interesting to see her shift back and forth between the two personas. In the enormous rental car that Loxam uses to drive us from Chicago O'Hare to Milwaukee, she laughs along as she's almost flattened by rattling luggage. Every morning in the group chat, she gives the team their marching orders for the day with military efficiency.
I first see Hart, Matthews, and Wilson over drinks in the bar beneath our hotel on the first night, fighting jetlag and debating whether Wisconsin cheese curds are any different from mozzarella sticks - they're all jetlagged, and at the other end of the table from me.
Much of the time I get with the SFG crew comes in moments like this, in car rides, at the airport, during meals, time that isn't strictly part of the convention. SFG paid around $67,000 (£50,000) to attend the show, and everyone spends the week working flat out to make sure it's money well spent.
It takes two days to fully build the booth and set up the various tables for tournaments, narrative events, and demonstration games in other parts of the con - a job I dodge like a true skiver, using the excuse that I'm setting up meetings with other publishers before the con starts.
I do however join the team for breakfast on the first day of set-up. Hart is a bit of a foodie, and he's found the excellent Sweet Diner, a great Milwaukee eatery that blows our tiny English minds with American portion sizes.
The Sparkhammer discussion from the plane continues over breakfast, with Hart and Matthews joining in the discussion of Loxam's atypical strategy for the caster - rather than double down on lightning attacks, he's seeking to abuse his spell Jackhammer. That evening, I get to see how Loxam actually plays Cygnar during a trip to a local gamestore - the name eludes me, but like everything in Milwaukee it's about four times the size of anything you'd find in the UK.
Loxam runs a Calder list featuring two units of Storm Lances, the new Thunderhead, and the mercenary Magnus and his massive 'jack Invictus. His opponent is running a Winter Korps list, headed up by the sniper Borisyuk, and packed with Warjacks and guns.
His opponent demonstrates Borisyuk's alpha-strike power by feating and removing about 40% of Loxam's army with Warjack attacks - but the Khadoran army ends its turn clumped up around the caster, with little objective presence. Loxam spreads his remaining forces wide, claiming and contesting objectives across the board, then pops Calder's powerful defensive feat. He ends the first scoring turn five points to nil, a lead his opponent can't recover from.
It's a beautiful play, and reminds me exactly why I love Warmachine so much, despite being rather inept at it. "I'm definitely performing now, but it's going to take me at least a year to get back to where I want to be", Loxam says.
In the car afterwards I ask Loxam and Perkins what it's like to be the corporate owners of their favorite game. Does it feel real yet? "It's becoming real", Perkins says. What about balancing between business sense and fan excitement? "You've got to keep the fan and the designer separate", Perkins says. "You've got to take business decisions that work for fans and for the business", Loxam adds. "We try and look at plans twice and think how we would have taken them ten years ago as just customers and fans".
The pair discuss the changes the firm is going to implement on how it will release new armies "We looked at the numbers and we find that, consistently, the auxiliary box set sold the worst" Loxam says, "It's in the name, 'auxilliary', like you don't need it". "Except for the Old Umbrey auxiliary set", Perkins adds, "and we think that's because it's just really good value". The new release model for armies will continue to feature a 30 point command cadre, but drop the current 'core', 'auxiliary', and 'battle group' packs in favor of two 50 point starter armies: the idea being that every major purchase option will represent a coherent way to start playing an army.
If Loxam and Perkins represent the competitive side of Warmachine, their counterparts, Hart and Matthews, represent the narrative. I get chatting to Matthews early on, mostly to say thanks for a tactica article he wrote about the Warlock I've been practising with lately, the Thornfall Alliance's Midas. He enthuses about Midas' inverted playstyle, which see you treat warbeasts as disposable to fuel the Warlock's feat, before saying: "I build thematic lists, not necessarily good lists". Given the company he's comparing himself against, I suspect he's downplaying his skills - but his role is focused on keeping Warmnachine's massive world of Immoren coherent and the ongoing story exciting.
I shadow Matthews as he sets up and then runs a massive multiplayer narrative game spread over at least 20 feet of tables. The table uses masses of new 3D printed Warmachine terrain which SFG has released via MyMiniFactory, representing a huge jungle and an underground cavern overtaken by the alien Cephalyx. It's a very hands-on form of tournament organising, as Matthews bobs around the intricate scenario: players in one part of the jungle are fighting for control of the portals in another; other players are trying to send reinforcements through those portals to join a massive melee in the Cephalyx hive caverns.
Centerpiece narrative events has always been a fixture of Warmachine events, but it's now part of a wider strategy as SFG tries to emphasise casual and narrative play as equally valid to tournament gaming. Co-founder Hart is its champion.
Tall, bald, and with a London accent, he looks like a gangster, but carries himself with a nervous energy and a giddy enthusiasm, particularly for the hobby side of wargaming.
"I'm playing in the doubles tournament, and there's very different levels of finish on the armies, but there's just something about playing with full colour minis with great terrain, and you can just see it". I end up interviewing him for a whole separate article about terrain and its role in wargaming.
I watch a lot of keynote presentations at Adepticon, including the Warmachine keynote. While I wait for it to start I try to collect mini interview clips from people in the queue using a camera I've borrowed from work, but I've hardly used the device, and by the time the audience files into the keynote I'm unsure if I actually turned the mike on. Hellstorm Mikey delivers on his promise of running the livestream well.
Afterwards, as I head off with the team in the direction of the hotel, I catch Perkins fretting - could they have done it better? Did they get all their points across? I spent the presentation furiously writing up my coverage - it seemed good to me.
Warmachine was in a rocky place when SFG acquired it. Over the course of the whole convention, I don't get much in the way of explicit commentary from SFG about how former owner Privateer Press (PP) handled its IP. The two studios still have a working relationship: Perkins estimates that about 20% of the game's 2026 balance update came from PP's work. And relationships between the people in the two teams stretch back to before SFG even existed.
At some point - presumably over drinks, as my notes don't mention who said it - one of them ventures that "We're coming at Warmachine fresh, we've got all this enthusiasm". The unspoken sentiment is that, perhaps, PP was burnt out with the game - understandable after two decades of consistent focus on a single IP. Being burnt out by the game that built your company is something that SFG can definitely relate to.
Several times in the convention, I hear members of the SFG team say "We learnt a lot from Guild Ball, particularly what not to do". Once, when Perkins is talking to me about the importance of an evolving meta to the health of a wargame, he brings up a concrete example: "Guild Ball has very fixed team construction, so all the meta discussion was about what happens on the pitch, how you respond to very specific scenarios, and players are always waiting for the next big release to change the meta".
He contrasts this with Warmachine: when the annual rules rebalance hits, players aren't just relearning how their team plays, they're reconsidering what their list building options are with existing models: "Then we have new releases throughout the year to keep changing things and hopefully the meta isn't solved until the re-balance next year".
Fast-forward to the last night of the convention (but before the rather entertaining afterparty), and a group dinner in a Brazilian barbecue restaurant. Hart and Matthews start to reminisce about the final days of Guild Ball, before SFG stopped production. "It got antagonistic", Hart says. "Between us and the fans. We'd had these big Kickstarters to complete and I decided to get back in and give some more attention to Guildball, try and get some feedback, and I was just surprised by how much the trust had gone". He sounds like he's reminiscing about a bad breakup.
Matthews recalls heading to a game store to play, and being met with animosity. "It was like in a Western when you walk into a bar and everyone looks up - the store owner actually said 'Why are you here?'". He's a very calm man, practically indefatigable, but he still seems dumbfounded. "I was only writing the background, I wasn't actually on the rules team".
There's an awareness that the success of Warmachine - and there's very good evidence that it is currently riding a wave of fresh success - only exists because fans, old and new, are excited by what SFG is doing with it. The narrative around Warmachine right now is one of resurgence and renewal - the headline of this article pushes that narrative. But it's a story that can't escape from its own shadow: for something to be remarkably good, inadequacy and failure must be common and close at hand.
The week of Adepticon passes in a blur, and before I know it I'm flying home, hung-over from the show afterparty and bleary-eyed by lack of sleep. I've written lots, conflabbed with designers left and right, and done absolutely nothing in the hotel room that would allow Hellstorm Mikey to blackmail me. Did I mention that he's very erudite - quite probably a better writer than I am - and doesn't snore?
As the delegation headed to Manchester wait for our second flight in Dublin airport, Loxam regales us with tales from SFG's early days: constructing a life-size mannequin of a former director; a customer getting shipped a box containing six hundred legs; staff ordering packing peanuts by weight, the resulting tidal wave of styrofoam overflowing the warehouse and cushioning staff in the offices like they were figures ready for mail order. "Those were the early days", he demurs, "We were making mistakes, figuring things out. We're a proper company now". There's a twinkle of mischief in his eye.
It was a hell of a week.
Wargamer hosted a follow-up to the SFG keynote in our Discord community during Adepticon, a live video AMA where fans asked the SFG team questions, with able assistance from Hellstorm Mikey running the AV capture, and our own talented mods connecting the dots from the other side of the Atlantic. You can watch the recording above, or on the Wargamer YouTube Channel.