Origins 2025 Coverage – WHQ Gameplay

Armchair Dragoons PAO, 25 June 2025

The Wargame HQ has continued to expand dramatically since we came back from the pandemic.  While 2021 was a pretty small convention, we’ve ramped up every year since 2022.

Over the previous 3 years, we’ve averaged just under 3.4 players/game, so multiplying that out, we projected about 580 players in our games this year¹.  While we do need to wait for our final numbers to come back from Origins, the attendance we were able to track came in a bit below that.  We have attendance numbers on 157 events² and totaled 468 players, for an average of just under 3 players/event.

While we don’t get granular enough to know for sure how many different individual players rolled through our area, we can say we put over 450 butts in seats for over 150 wargaming events across 5 days.  Find another board wargame convention here in the US that’s got those numbers.

GMT Games

As per the last few years, GMT Games was a huge supporter of the Wargame HQ.  They provided over 20 games for the raffle, and sent a pair of GMs to add to the event crew so we could dramatically increase the number of games we could offer.

most images can click to enlarge

Plenty of GMT events ran all weekend, with our folks (Marc, Todd, and Scott) plus theirs (Jason, a different Scott, and designers Jason Matthews and Hermann Luttmann) as the GMs.

Decision Games

After a few events last year with us, Decision Games jumped in with both feet to join the Wargame HQ, running 2 full tables of events for most of the weekend, with a mixture of rebooted classics (Blue & Gray and Operation Typhoon) and early-awaited new ones (Over the Rhine and Battles in the East #4) among others.

Catastrophe Games, The Dietz Foundation, Ares Games, Fort Circle Games, High Flying Dice Games

All of these publishers joined us for a bunch of games, with most of them coming back around for another run, plus Ares hanging out with us for the first time.  At some point, we hope to work out an agreement to get some vendor booths co-located with us back in the gaming hall, and some of these folks might be manning them.

Games included (deep breath!) We Are Coming Nineveh, Zurmat II, True Command, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Bagration, A More Perfect Union, Stalingrad Roads, Patria Libre, Halls of Montezuma, Votes for Women, 300 – Earth & Water, Littoral Commander – Baltic, Hunt for Blackbeard, Polar Vortex, Quartermaster General 1914, #Maneuver Warfare, SADR City, and more, although we didn’t get pictures of all of them.

This is part of our comprehensive coverage of The 2025 Origins Game Fair from GAMA; you can find the links to all published articles at the end of each one

Unpub

Although Origins runs an ‘official’ Unpub program, we pulled together a table for the yet-to-be-published games that were a part of the Wargame HQ.  This included Forlorn Hope from the Wharf Rats, David Thompson’s upcoming Rebels Against Rebellion, Dr Wictz’s Littoral Commander – Space Force, and Werhlegig’s Hell Raisers of Kanahwa County.  It was our little insurgency, but it seemed pretty successful and we’re going to look at ways to enhance it in the next few years.

Other Games!

We have plenty of games that are not from a publisher that’s at Origins.  These included David Thompson showing off his new Line of Fire: Burnt Moon from Osprey Games³ and Bob Fix with both Crisis 1914 from Worthington, and A&A: Arnhem from Cadet Games⁴.  Our PicoArmor brethren alternated their 3d-mini-Panzerblitz game with a 7 Years’ War scenario using the 45-yo Frederick rules.  Ted led a pair of sessions for Hearts & Minds.  The recently-crowdfunded Song For War guys were back, too.  Not all of those games are in the gallery, of course.  Lighting in the building sucks and it’s hard to get great shots.

GAMES!  IN!  SPAAAAAAAAAAACE!

We had not one, but two Trek-verse games this year, as there was both Star Fleet Battles and Lyran Space on the table.  SFB in particular was pretty outstanding, since it was a 6-hour session, and still overfilled both times!

Multi-Table Double-Blind “Fun”

Of course we’re going to run a Kriegsspiel.  Several actually!  We set up 3 tables in the middle for a mix of classic Prussian Kriegsspiel, a team game called The Von Moltke Problem, and the US Army’s own non-commercially-available Major’s Gambit.

Our booth team worked their tails off between exhibit hall photos, event tracking, raffle tickets, gumball machine babysitting, and more.  And still found time to goof off!

Every year, we raffle off a bunch of prizes for everyone who’s played a game with us throughout the weekend.  Every game you play gets you 1 raffle ticket.  We added a twist this year with the gumball machine, too.  The kids had the idea that if you pull one of the 6 Armchair Dragoons-branded yellow d6’s, you could turn that in for a pair of raffle tickets.  And yeah, we had some people drop $8-10 in quarters in that machine to get those dice.

And yes, we try to livestream this thing each year, to varying degrees of success.  This year, the audio is pretty horrible, and the glare from the background lights ain’t great either.  But here it is.

Origins 2025 Coverage
Wargame HQ Events ~ War College Previews ~ Wargame HQ Previews ~ Exhibitor Spotlight ~ All The Wargaming Events ~ The Final Countdown ~ Setup & First Games ~ The Charles S Roberts Awards ~ The View From Above ~ AAR for A&A Arnhem ~ The Kind Spirit ~ The AAR ~ Exhibit Hall

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1. our previous comparison erroneously included the War College events in that multiplier
2. the other slips we either forgot to record before turning in, or the GM took them directly to the Event HQ instead of bringing them to us first
3. who also sent along some copies for the raffle
4. both of whom sent along some games we added to the raffle