Fortress Party 2025 - Fort Montreal 1701

Do we ever repeat room themes? Not exactly, but there are certainly overlaps. In 2014, we did The Bridge to Canada, which had plenty of great Canadian jokes. This year's room brought back the Canadian theme, but focused more on the rich history of colonial Quebec.

Guests had to follow signs attached to dead trees to find the room.

The decor could best be described as Fur Trapper-chic. Did you know that you can buy rolls of plastic tablecloths that look like old wooden planks? I can't think of another use for those other than turning a room into a Fort within a Fort. 

And the first centerpiece was a giant crockpot of poutine. Look, if animals were bigger in prehistoric times, it only makes sense that the French Fries would be four feet long and each cheese curd the size of a human head. 

The bear from 2023 Cocaine Bear Room made another appearance, this time holding a hockey stick and a wood-burned sign with the name of the room. 

This was the bar. We had three drink options: The French Canadian 75, the Maple Old Fashioned, and the Bloody Minky. 

Fortress Party 2025 - The Vault of Midnight

The first question we often ask ourselves when brainstorming room ideas is... what resources do we already have? We also like to have a little local flavor, by having one theme a year that is for Ann Arbor townies. 

So The Vault of Midnight was a perfect choice for a Fortress Party theme. It's a comic book/board game store in downtown Ann Arbor, and the origin of most of our board game collection. 

The title of the store has always sounded like an H.P. Lovecraft cosmic horror, so we decided to fill a room with games and comics and... Cthulhu.

Over 30 of the games had little QR codes on them, and when you would scan them with your phone, Chthulu herself would appear on the screen and teach you how to play the game.

Or at least that is what was supposed to happen. In reality, Cthulhu's game instructions immediately devolved into monologues about the the insignificance of humanity and the imminent and violent despoliation of the earth. 

There are 32 of these videos, with new ones released weekly on YouTube until the whole playlist is available in the Summer of 2026.

Fortress Party 2025 - Stonechella

 Welcome to Stone-Chella, the Stonehenge music festival.

First, a tour of the empty room, with three stone monoliths and a lot of plastic plants. 

The walls were covered with druidic show posters.

During the party, there were several live acts:

• Hrafnkel Beowulf (Josh Siegel)
• Cerebrospinal Druid (Brent Stansfield)
• Glunmar the Firewolfmuncher (Jeff Kleiner)
• Hey Solscticer (Forrest Heijkal) 
• Sister Andy and the Solstice Jive Jammers (Andaiye Spencer)

And after the midnight performance of Cigareets, it devolved into a karaoke stage, as usual. 

Fortress Party 2025 - Popemon, Clave-Con, and The Vatican

The pervasive theme throughout the party was Clave Con, the Conclave Convention. 

We designed and printed a pack of customized Fortress Party Popemon Cards, and gave one to each guest on arrival. There was a unique card for each Pope from the first Pope, St. Peter, through Pope Leo XIV (Officially Pope 267, but if you count antipope's and contested popes, he's #299), and they were distributed chronologically. 

Based on Fortress attendance in prior years, there was a chance that 299 Popemon cards wouldn't be enough for every guest to get one, so we also made some future popes. 

Each Popémon card included scores between three and nine in each of four attributes: Holiness, Miracles, Wisdom, and Legacy. A host (in this case, Lauren) explained that high scores would help them in their battle against other Popes to be Supreme Pontiff in the Popémon Arena. 

Individuals could boost their Pope's ability scores by succeeding at challenge stations throughout the party. For instance, anyone who ate a chip with each of Hot Ones Season 26 Hot Sauces could scan a QR code to upgrade their Legacy score to 10. 

The other three challenges were in the basement, which was entirely dedicated to different parts of Vatican City. First, guests were greeted by a captain of the Swiss Guard. 

Pope Leo held synods, encyclicals, and catecheses in his chambers. I actually don't know what any of those mean, so we just leaned into his Chicago pride. 

The video on the TV was a 20 minute loop of Chicago sports teams fails. The room was also full of various Chicago paraphernalia, like Garret's popcorn and a bottle of Malort. 

In the next room, there was a confession booth, where guests would write one of their sins on a dry erase board. These were photographed and pinned to the wall as the evening wore on. 

The Confessor was behind a closed door, so he could only be seen between the cracks of the wall or from above. 

The next area was the Sistine Chapel, complete with stained glass windows, and a child angel making gang signs. 

We had a keg of "Canon Lager," and 100 little Communion Cups, each with a wafer and a dash of grape juice. 

This was also where guests could try St. Simon's Holiness Challenge, which was a custom game of Simon on a pipe organ. If you correctly played back seven random notes in a row, you would get a QR code to upgrade your holiness to 10. 

Around the corner was the Domino Dominoes challenge. There were 12 Popes printed on giant dominoes, and guests had to solve puzzles by connecting them end-to-end. Doing so gave a code to open a box, where a QR code to upgrade the Wisdom attribute to 10. 

The Tiber River was a 24 foot long waterway, complete with remote control kayaks, two devil ducks, and one Pope John Paul II duck. 

At the end of this hall, we had the final challenge. Three Connections games tied loosely to the Vatican, Popes, or Latin. Give them a try, and see if you can figure out the three digit code to open the box and upgrade your Miracles score to 10!

• Connections 1
• Connections 2
• Connections 3

Finally, guests could proceed to the Popemon Arena, where you could put all of these attributes to good use. Guests would scan their badge, and their Pope's picture would appear in one of these two boxes. Then they would battle, Street Fighter-style. The ability scores correlated with their Pope's hit points, attack damage, defense, etc. 

We recorded some original music and sound effects for this game, most of which was Malcolm shouting Latin phrases with a falsetto Italian accent. 

When one Pope won, smoke would come out of the chimney on the desk, and it would show the leaderboard and how many challenges each Pope had completed.

 

Fortress Party 2025 Retrospective

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for January is called, "May It Ever Increase." which is also my wish for a wonderful New Year of plenty for you and yours. 

By you and yours, I don't mean you and your family. The word yours refers to me, as in "who is going to have a great 2026? Yours truly."

I also mean the word yours to indicate that you are going to get a well-deserved comeuppance, as in "you'll get yours in 2026."

And since it's January, it's time for our annual Fortress Party Retrospective. Here's the walkthrough visit, hosted by a most bemused Scarlett. 

And here's the room-by-room breakdown:

• Popémon, Clave-Con, and Vatican City
• Fort Montreal 1701
• Vault of Midnight
• Stone-chella
• Midwest Max: Rural Road

With warmest regards,

Me and mine

We Will Break You

Dear Friends,

There is credible evidence that the U.S. has used "music torture" at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as a form of psychological coercion. The practice includes blasting songs, often heavy metal or children's music, to disorient and intimidate detainees. 

I believe that is why Hard Taco's 35th album, Toxic Productivity Bonus, is not dropping today!

You see, I submitted it to my distributor last week, and as of this writing, it is still undergoing inspection. What is there to inspect? As you can plainly see, the walleyed marionette on the album cover is wearing pants. And his hand is on the C button, a letter specifically chosen because it does not appear in any controversial words. 

So what is this gauntlet through which they must run this poor album?

A man of logic can arrive at only one conclusion: the delay allows the Homeland Security Military Commission Authority more time to screen the album for potential music-torture tracks.  

Which of these songs is most likely to destabilize the psyche of a political detainee? Perhaps it is "Septuagenarian," the new song for December. Catchy little tune, absolutely. But blast it at 90-100 dB under a soup of blinding floodlights (not included), and I'd like to think that your average Joe Enemy Combatant would break and confess to at least one act of terrorism.  

An admittedly less plausible explanation for the delay is that the music distributor holds a draconian (or at least overly-stringent) definition of *7-14 business days.* I submitted the files a week ago, only to learn that there are apparently no business days in the last week of November. 

November 25 - National Play with Dad Day

November 26 - National Jukebox Day

November 27 - Thanksgiving. (Also National Craft Jerky Day)

November 28 - National Flossing Day

If folks at the distribution company truly honor these holidays, they were far too busy roughhousing with their fathers and cleaning between their teeth to release my album, 

Regardless, the album drop is coming soon, so check your favorite streaming service daily for Toxic Productivity Bonus. And when it finally appears, you can form your own 100-dB focus group and let me know which track is most humanity-shattering!

With warmest regards,

Zach

Time Travel: A Cautionary Tale

Dear Friends, 

Malcolm is smitten with theoretical astrophysics and takes it upon himself to educate anyone who will listen about black holes. I find it quite charming, at least until he drops the word "space-time." Because that's just taking unrelated concepts (space and time) and pretending that the intervening hyphen turns them into a single concept. I guess that's what makes it theoretical physics. Standard high-school physics teachers would never try to attribute observed phenomena to vacuum-topography-chaos-velocity or friction-adjacent-parallax-bureaucracy. 

The Hard Taco song for December, "Inverse Chinese Finger Trap," showcases just how little I actually learned from those conversations. 

What I was really hoping to learn is whether black holes prove that (A) time travel is possible, and (B) I could use one to go back and prevent my dog from chewing the eyes off my most precious stuffed animal, Opus. 

As a child, I related deeply to this little penguin's optimism, hopeless naïveté, and body-dysmorphic disorder. We even posed together in my high-school senior portrait. 

A boy and his penguin. A penguin and his boy. 

This delighted the folks at Worzella Photography; up to that point, no teenage boy had ever chosen a pose other than their standard three offerings.  

Approved Teenage-Boy Portrait Poses: 

(A) Scowling While Leaning Against a Brick Wall,

(B) Scowling While Sitting in the Wheel-well of a Monster Truck, 

(C) Scowling While Trying to Break Out of Minimum-Security Prison. 

Worzella Photography was so proud of the Opus picture that they featured it in their brochure the following year, along with the only other creative photo they had: Girl Scowling While Leaning on the Ruins of an Enemy Shrine.

Anyway, I would appreciate it if a black hole would take me back to 2023 so I could counsel myself to keep Opus on a high shelf so that Ozo the Labradoodle wouldn't rip the poor penguin's eyes out. 

Unfortunately, knowing my 2023 self, I would insist that 2025 Me say nothing. "The consequences could be disastrous," I would warn my future self, "Telling me to put Opus on a higher shelf (or why) could cause a chain reaction that could unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!" 

So, I would take matters into my own hands, safely tuck Opus into a closed drawer, and return to the present, only to discover that Ozo the Labradoodle had instead ripped the noses off my other two precious stuffed animals, Winnie the Pooh and Fievel. 

With warmest regards,

Zach