Under the Dice Fest 2024

 

On the last weekend of January, I was fortunate to be able to attend Under the Dice Fest 2024, a small festival in Massachusetts celebrating miniature-based tabletop wargaming. The festival was designed to appeal to those who shy away from the mainstream iterations of the miniature wargaming hobby, focusing on those who want play the games on their own terms, sometimes outside of the scope of the game rules as written, or those who want to play old games which are no longer supported by their publishers. It is highlighting those who are more concerned with telling a story with the miniatures they build than with creating something that would be optimal in terms of a game’s rule system. A punk rock approach to the miniature wargaming hobby, if you will. Beyond the opportunity to play games like Mordheim (a fantasy skirmish game released in 1999 by Games Workshop, set in the remnants of a city destroyed by a comet), a host of musical performances were planned for Saturday evening. The musical guests were from around the New England area and thoroughly rooted in the underground music scene.

Song Highlight: Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean - The Chalice

The prolific Louisiana sludge metal band Thou have a song on their first full length album called "Fucking chained to the bottom of the ocean". The song does an excellent job of giving a sound to the bleak oppressiveness of confinement. There is something extremely evocative in the song title alone, conjuring images of someone eternally shackled in the icy darkness below the ocean’s lapping waves. The Massachusetts sludge metal band Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean must have thought as much, as they most certainly took their name from the song. If we needed any more evidence that Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean are fans of Thou, they recorded a cover of “The Chain” which Thou and The Body performed at the KEXP studio in 2015, which is a cover of Fleetwood Mac's classic "The Chain".