Fortress Party 2023 - These Are the Voyages

We love doing fortress rooms based on the kind of things that people like to cosplay about... Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and the Marvel Universe. So it sort of felt like doing a Star Trek room was... what's the word for it, the final frontier?

Welcome to the Bridge of the Enterprise. We had two full walls of cheesy science fiction paneling, a large screen with the obligatory button in front of it, and Jean Luc Picard himself standing in the corner, looking appropriately bald.

Seven of Nine is a character from Star Trek Voyager, not the Next Generation, but I had a silver onesie and rubber ocular implant lying around. Plus, she was in the Picard series, so there some canonical overlap there.

Here is the complete series of push-button videos, including the "Backwards Man" bit that was not, to my knowledge, shown at the party. All scripts by actual Trekkie Jason DePasquale. 

Outside the room was a map of Ann Arbor, and a map of the Star Trek Universe, as well as a small bin of pushpins. We did a similar gag a few years ago, but we didn't have the Star Trek map then, so I didn't feel terrible about bringing it back. 

Fortress Party 2021 - Chuck E. Cheese

There are many horrors at Chuck E. Cheese, but the worst is the animatronic animal band.

This video is my family's least favorite part of Fortress Party. If you happened to walk by and see it during the party, it is quite amusing, but when the house is otherwise quiet, and you hear these dozen or so saccharine birthday songs over and over, it makes you want to drown yourself in a ball pit. 

But the real reason for this room was the home-made video game cabinets. Sean and Andy worked on these diligently for the weeks leading up to the party, and they worked like a charm. They included mashy my favorites such as Gauntlet, Ms. Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Elevator Action, and Q-Bert. My only regret is that I forgot to ask them to install Moon Patrol. 

We borrowed a pinball machine from a guy named H, who had loaned as the Mystery Machine a few years prior. I bet that if we did a study, we would prove that people with one-letter names have the coolest stuff. 

A visit to Chuck E. Cheese would not be complete without a wall full of useless crap that you can spend your tickets on. We weren't actually dispensing tickets, of course, so nobody was able to buy any of this stuff, but the candy was free. (Note that the first bowl actually has Lactaid pills, and those were not free. Neither was the Ivermectin, which was available in case anyone caught COVID19 at the party.)