Plowfest 2023: the year the table went quiet at 2am, and none of us wanted to leave.
Officially, this is the case study on how we reduced meeting overhead to zero. Unofficially, it is the one we come back and read in February.
Everybody arrived on Tuesday within about an hour of each other, which has never happened before and will probably never happen again. Bryant brought the good speaker. Adam had already done the grocery run, unprompted, and refused to say what it cost. The house on the water was exactly as we left it a year ago, down to the coffee mug someone leaves every single time.
We do not go outside much. That is not a failure of the venue — the water is right there, and it is beautiful, and we look at it through the window for four days while we argue about the rules to Nemesis. This is the deal we have made with ourselves, and we make it again every year.
The Twilight Imperium game
Wednesday we set up Twilight Imperium at noon and finished a little after ten. Ten hours. For the uninitiated, that is a normal length for this game, and for the initiated, that is also somehow a surprise every time. Patrick played the diplomat and betrayed everyone in the last hour, which we should have seen coming, because he does it every year, and we never see it coming.
There was a stretch around hour seven where nobody spoke for a long time. Not because anyone was upset — because everyone was thinking three moves ahead, and the only sound was the lake and the fan and Greg quietly saying "okay, okay, okay" to himself. If you have ever wondered what the point of any of this is, it is that.
What actually happened
Somebody's kid facetimed in. Two of us have new jobs since last year and one of us had a hard spring and we did not need to talk about it much because we were all just there, at the table, which is its own kind of talking about it.
On the last night we stayed up until the number on the stat block above and nobody wanted to be the one to call it. That is the whole product. That is the thing the fake company is built around. We will see everyone next year, same house, same water, Tuesday through Friday. The beer ledger remains unbalanced, on purpose.
"We built a fake company so we would never have to explain to anyone, including ourselves, why this matters. It just does. Renew the contract."