by Start your week with a bang by catching up on the latest wargaming happenings in our #TuesdayNewsday column
It’s not necessarily a ‘big’ story in wargaming, but it’s big enough to affect the gaming ecosystem as a whole. The Embracer Group, the vulture capitalist holding company that hoovered up a bunch of game publishers and design studios, has been bailing water for a while now, and they’ve found a way to save 2/3 of the company while strapping an anvil to the one part of the organization that actually knows how to swim.
They’re spinning off multiple parts of the company. Crucially, they’re spinning their debt off with Asmodee, the parent company of board game publishers like Repos, Fantasy Flight, and Z-Man Games. So Asmodee gets to fly free, but with €900 million in debt attached to it, so that Embracer can walk away from their other shitty deals without the bank hounding them, and somehow still claim that they created some form of amorphous “shareholder value”
Why does this matter to the wargaming world? Asmodee is a huge company whose operations employ a lot of designers, artists, printing presses, and demo teams, and whose presence (or absence) from a convention or store can make a big difference in the health of those outlets, which all trickles down to other parts of the overall gaming hobby.
What you likely won’t see? Any of those imprints within Asmodee getting set free. We all loved FFG when they were cranking out some innovative games in the early- and mid-00s instead of the corporate-mandated limited imprints they’ve got now. But FFG is unlikely to taste any greater freedom under an Asmodee that’s going to need to service €900 million1 in debt2. Asmodee is going to need every half-penny they can scrounge from the couch cushions, so keep a close eye on what starts to happen with production quality, timelines, prices, expansions, etc.
- Embracer’s press release, which focuses on the shareholders and couldn’t give the tiniest little shit about the customers impacted by their bad business decisions
- BoardGameWire’s report, which does not pull any punches on the history of how this debt came to be or just how underwater Asmodee is for the next few years
- ICv2’s report on the matter, which seems very light on the details compared to the other articles
- Dicebreaker weighs in, not necessarily happily
The Embracer press release includes this line of corporate pablum
This move has been made with the intention to unleash the full potential of each team and provide them with their own leadership and strategic direction.
No, you utter mollut. We’re not that stupid. This move was made with the intention to unshackle you and your fellow vulture capitalists from their piss-poor prior decision-making and stick the debt on the old part of the organization they’ve never figured out how to correctly capitalize on.
Brunel University, London, is now offering a full degree program for wargaming. It’s an MA program in “Wargaming and Resilience Planning” that’s set up as a one-year full-time program with a September start date.
You can all sorts of info from their website here.
We didn’t make the final cut for the Golden Geek Awards. You can still go vote for some other people if you feel like it. 🤷♂️
Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!
- Wargames Illustrated #437 is now available, and includes a set of medieval skirmish rules
- World at War #96, with War Plan Z is now shipping to subscribers and available to order
- Panzer Grenadier: Fire & Sword covers the ’44-’45 battles in Hungary / Budapest in a very packed game
- Modiphius released their new 2d20 Achtung! Cthulhu game with a starter set and a bunch of support products
- SGS released their new Battle for Hue game on Steam (and it’s 20% off thru 25 April)
- Somewhere along the way, TS Wargames flipped Friedland 1807 from pre-order to available, and we missed it
- Last week we told you about the new Overflight! game book that just released; Blue Panther has a new boxed set, including a canvas map, to support your gameplay with that book
- Warlord Games has several flights of aircraft for their Victory at Sea game
Time to get those orders in now and then either (a) gripe that it’s not here already, and/or (b) be surprised when it gets here sooner than you thought
- Steve Jackson’s Munchkin Big Box is on BackerKit and already over a half million dollars
- The Silver Bayonet: Egypt – Shadow of the Sphinx, is an expansion for The Silver Bayonet minis wargame, now on pre-order
- Cloth battlemats for RPGs or skirmish battles, and not very expensive, either!
- Renegade are bringing back Risk 2210 and have it on pre-order
- No shit, 10 minutes after we hit “go” on last week’s #TuesdayNewsday, GMT drops their newsletter with their latest p500s
Saving money? Spending just as much but getting more for it?
- WDS “Game of the week” is Squad Battles Eagles Strike for $29.95; this one just had a major update in January, so you’re getting a good deal on some newer material
- CSL has a 7th anniversary sale going on right now, and you can get free shipping on orders over $100 with coupon code 7YEARS at checkout
- Easy Roller Dice has half-pound packs of random metal dice on sale and 35% off with coupon code HALF35 at checkout
- Decision Gams has Luftwaffe (yes, that one) on sale for $35 right now
- Alternative Armies has a 15mm Sengoku set on sale right now
- Tabletop Tycoon has Nemo’s War Ultimate Edition at $60 off
- Save $10 on Compass Games’ WWII Campaigns over at Miniature Market
This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world
- Stuart reviews Forbidden Lands from Free League
- Dan wasn’t a huge fan of Undaunted: Battle of Britain
- Matrix Games has their next article in The Armory series, WW2 Infantry Arms
The best videos this week from our wargaming friends
- Moe looks at Rifles in the ‘Nam
- My Own Worst Enemy wraps up Eutaw Springs
- Legendary Tactics talks about the history of TAHGC
- Justegarde plays The Spanish Road from C3i #37
- ZillaBlitz is playing Race to the Rhine
- Meandering Mike talks about the CSRs
- Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about C2 in wargaming
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Steve Jackson Games continued their tradition of releasing an annual “Stakeholders Report”, this one on 2023
- BoardGameNewsWire reports that CMON raked in some dough last year, largely through decreases in costs
- Cynthia Williams announced her resignation as the CEO of WotC and while there were some egregious mis-steps (wanting to ditch the OGL) they were also the only profitable division of Hasbro last year; Scott Thorne has some thoughts, too
- GAMA board elections were recently held, and for the first time in history, all of the key offices are held by women; someone might want to update the actual GAMA site, though
The GAMA Board of Directors elected its officers for 2024-25 yesterday, and for the first time in our organization's history, all four roles are held by females within the industry. Please join us in congratulating our new officers for 2024-25! pic.twitter.com/aMpazNPZOD
— The Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) (@TheGAMAOnline) April 19, 2024
It’s been a busy week for the regiment; here’s what you might’ve missed!
- Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Eggmuhl for “Valour and Fortitude”
- Mentioned in Dispatches took the week off
- #UnboxingDay!
- Shall we play a game? How about THE DRIVE ON METZ…
- Gameplay this week
- Next #UnboxingDay3 will be 16 May
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
Upcoming Dragoons Events
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 5 May and 2 June
- Next planned virtual event is the ACDC4, 17-19, 2025
- Next confirmed live event is Buckeye Game Fest, 29 April – 5 May, 2024
Other Conventions & Events
- 26-28 April 2024 Conscripts! 2024 (Kleineibstadt, GE)
- 29 April-5 May 2024 The War Room at BuckeyeGameFest (Columbus OH)
- 2-5 May 2024 BuckeyeGameFest (Columbus OH)
- 10-12 May 2024 PunchedCon (Coventry UK)
- 16-20 May 2024 Compass Expo (Meriden CT)
- 6-9 June 2024 GamemORe (Albany, OR)
- 8 June 2024 SDHISTCON Second Front 2024 (Virtual)
- 19-23 June 2024 Origins (Columbus OH)
- 25-27 June 2024 Connections (Carlisle PA)
- 12-20 July 2024 CSW Expo (Tempe AZ)
- 8-11 August 2024 SDHistCon East (Newport, RI)
- 15-18 August 2024 HistoriKC Fest (Kansas City MO)
- 27-29 September 2024 Czech Consim 2024 (Prague, CZ)
- 8-11 November 2024 FoxCon (Dallas TX)
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Senior Wargaming Fellow position at NDU, but there’s about 10 people, max, that’ll hit all the qualifications
- Political considerations affecting international ABM system; anyone ever incorporate these into wargames?
- ATACMS raid on Crimea
- Another bullet
- The next GUWS webinar is TONIGHT! Cole Wehrle talks about Perspective and its Consequences in Historical Game Design; next one is 7 May: The Hidden Power of Games: Game Based Models Within the Corporate Environment with Jared Fishman
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
That’s all for this week!
Be sure to drop by our forums and join the fun, and next Tuesday we’ll drop some more news on you.
Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
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