Welcome to the Secrets Factory
Creating safe spaces for fun people and places
Creating safe spaces for fun people and places
At Secrets Factory, we have been successfully creating opportunities for safe social connection for longer than we probably will admit. Lol.
Starting with game days and nights and proceeding to many other parties and events.
Please email us at info@secretsfactory.com for more information or
locate us on Fetlife as well these days. All our current events are listed there
| Game Days / Nights | Scavenger Hunts | Special Events |
05/18/2025 06/15/2025 |
06/14/2025 08/16/2025 |
TBD |
This really is a story for another day, but it started in July of 2011. Yes. A really long time ago now. But some of our attendees have evidence of that first year in their possession. Our first event was a pre-event to help people finish their crafting and cosplays for DragonCon. We catered a ton of pulled-pork BBQ and in attendance were 5 excellent crafts people with beautiful costumes near completion. Each and every one a confirmed vegetarian. That is where we learned to laugh at ourself. We have not seen a good reason to stop that yet.
We opened as a membership business. Free membership for a year. We found that local game stores were not being friendly and often were charging over MSRP for board games. A local collector offered to house their collection with us and poof there was born the game night event. We held three events a week and began to purchase games and sell at a discount from MSRP. Other local retail establishments were probably not worried due to our low volume, but I assumed we were not generating much goodwill at that time.
We held three items in the back of the store for the prior lessee and if you ask me sometime at an event, I will be glad to say what was there. Suffice it to say, I wish I had kept at least one of the objects. But ultimately I loaned them my tiny truck and they finally moved all the objects out.
Just in time for the summer doldrums to kick in and sales went to zero. ...
FOR SIX MONTHS. We had not accounted for the seasonality of the new business we had fallen into. This should have ended this experiment. Financially it could not support itself. But we closed that location. Tried another the next year. Then a convention the next and ended up cancelling the second convention due to low sales.
We never took it personallty and I confessed to the members as we moved to a "road show" model where game nights were at local businesses including other game stores. We preferred to keep our friends over a stressful business. I returned to traditional employment and every so often held a game day or night occassionally.
Eventually we were in the larger community and wanted to give back. That was late 2023. The world just needed more excuses and safe spaces. So we restarted as a monthly event and that is where we are to this day. I hope we never stop and there is so far no reason to even consider that, as there is as great a need to pull together and find fun ways to meet people in safe spaces as ever.
Please consider this to be your personal invitation to join us sometime.
We hope to see you soon!
You may be asking "Why Board Games?" but let me speak to how we hold board game days. We have tried a lot of different formats over the years. But most of the time, we have been guests in another venue rather at our own home venue. As a result, we have to work within the timeframe that the hosting venue provides. Because time is precious, and traffic is unpredictable we tend to structure the start a little.
The goal is to have fun together. To do that, we wanted to make it easier to meet each other. So the first activity is usually a social/party game like "That's What She Said!" It allows everyone to enjoy some humorous moments together at no one's expense and win or lose it is usually silly if not ridiculously funny. It is a baudy game but we like it that way.
Once everyone arrives the game usually breaks up if not before as folks decide to play some thing else. It's free form and unstructured so we do expect folks to speak up about what type of game they want to play. We encourage those who have a collection of games to bring anything that they want to teach. It makes for a quick start and the folks that do that are really good at including everyone. We could not do this without such wonderful community support.
Some games are quick. Some are longer. Know how much time you like to play. Most game boxes LIE! Double the play time if it is your or someone's first time. Even good games can take a little time to learn to enjoy. But there is nothing more painful than being hours into a game that we thought would be a short experience, so choose wisely.
Other games have a number of players for optimum play. The minimum and maximum number of players will work, but that works best for players experienced in that specific game. Stick to the less extreme number of players for a best, first-time play-through.
The main thing is to have fun and enjoy each other. If we do that, there is a lot of room for things to be sub-optimal and still have a good day.
At any given point in time up to about one-third of the folks in attendance are likely to be chatting and catching up and that is wonderful too. Some people call this the "social" game and it is always popular.
People.
Not simply winning or playing is what is important.
Enjoy the experience and we leave every game a winner.