by Grab a seat in the command post—it’s time for another cheerful round of #TuesdayNewsday! ▶️ ➡️
The 2026 ACDC is now wrapped up, and here’s this year’s keynote. We only run these every other year, but this is the update from the past 2 years.
The MIT Summer Wargaming Institute Application 2026, July 12-16, 2026
The Summer Wargaming Institute is a four-day “bootcamp”-style program hosted by the MIT Security Studies Program Wargaming Lab. The Institute’s goal is to teach practitioners and scholars how to design and run wargames for research, training, and analysis.
Your shelf of shame is about to get a lot more crowded—check out the newest releases.
- Wargames Illustrated #457 is available
- Ad Astra Games finally has their Honorverse minis for their games up on their site
- If you missed the original launch from NUTS! Publishing, you can get EuroWarGames in the US from Ares Games
- New DLC from Avalon Digital for their Napoleon’s Eagles game — Napoleon’s Eagles – La Marseillaise (1792)
- MicroProse just released Strategos today into early access and it’s 10% off for the launch
- Minis accessories from Wargames Atlantic in their box for the Sorcerer’s Spoils
- This week was busy on Wargame Vault
- Lone Corvette: A Solitaire Wargame from Mike Lambo just got added to Wargame Vault; it’s 1942 in the Atlantic
- Thermopylae: Last Stand covers pretty much what you’d expect but you need your own dice & cubes
- Blitz Tactics, 28mm minis wargaming
- Venusian Hammer. Victorian Scifi Wargaming for small battles on the second rock from the sun
- Dominion of Rice and Napalm expands the Dominion of the Spear rules to solo battles in the Vietnam War
- This week’s new release from Dice Envy is ‘fizbang’ but it’s not on sale
- Black Oak Workshop’s got some new ‘snack’ dice: popcorn, and cheese
- Other new releases on Steam
- Battle Simulator: Counter Terrorist is a bit of cheesy FPS game that’s more “battle” than “simulator”
- Small War looks like a high school project, but it’s oddly endearing
- Infinity Battle has a real Galaga ’88 feel to it
- Avalanche Press says they’ve got 4 games releasing in January, but 2 can only be ordered if you’re in their Gold Club, one says it won’t ship for another 6 weeks (so not really in January) and only Coral Sea: First Air Fleet seems to actually be available both (1) to the public, and (2) now
Ready to fund the future? These projects just launched.
- As announced on our ACDC Welcome Happy Hour on Friday, the Dietz Foundation has launched pre-orders for Littoral Commander: Space Force and congrats to bluerononinrob who won a copy of the game during the show
- Decision Games has opened pledges for their Napoleon at War Quad Deluxe edition, that brings back the old SPI quad in an updated format
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes pre-orders for books on Vietnam & Korea, and a bunch of new books from Helion, too
- Steve Jackson Games has Munchkin Vox Machina – A Critical Role Game on pre-order
- Olivier Revenu is back! The former BATTLES! Magazine publisher is doing RPG products these days and Dungeon Inc is the latest; manage a corporate mega-dungeon behind the scenes, as you figure the best way to oppose the adventurers coming through the door
- Renegade Game Studios just launched a BackerKit campaign for a bunch of accessories for Axis & Allies and Diplomacy and Ikusa
- A couple of new ones from Warlord Games
- This week on Kickstarter
- The Ballad Singer: Knights Templar is a digital game that blends RTS & realm-management but has a long way to go
- Dice in the Dirt is a p&p game for skirmish battles
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is unfortunately our friends at Dark City Games who didn’t even make it to 10% for their Wild, Wild West game
- A couple of pre-orders from Avalanche that will ship “Spring 2026”
- Per-orders open for new Flames of War stuff coming in February, where this year’s ‘theme’ is the Early War Blitzkrieg
Here’s what’s discounted this week—your wallet may cautiously celebrate.
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Musket & Pike: War of the Austrian Succession for $29.95, on sale until Sunday; and you can hear the guys talking about the development of this one on the Prime & Load podcast from last week
- Easy Roller Dice has their “adventure boxes” on BOGO thru 26 January with coupon code BOGOBOX at checkout
- Spend at least £30 at with Modiphius and you can add the DUNE core rulebook for free with coupon code DESERTPOWER at checkout
- Modiphius also has both a Standard and Collector’s bundle of DUNE RPG products on a pretty deep discount that both exceed the threshold you need to hit for the free rulebook
- Noble Knight has copies of Sixth Fleet starting at $55 and 2nd Fleet starting at $85
- GameNerdz has Seljuk: Byzantium Besieged, 1068-1071 on sale this week for over $25 off and Hubris: Twilight of the Hellenistic World is over $23 off
- Dark City Games has a B3G1 sale thru 25 January, but you have to email the company1 to get the free game
Curious what we’ve been working on? Here’s the full roundup.
- 5 Questions With . . . Denver Walker of Flying Pig Games
- First Impressions of Runequest: Warlords
- The 2026 ACDC Happy Hour & Opening Night
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “General d’Armee 2”: The Battle of Dresden – South Flank
- Your 2025 in Wargaming, Part 3 – Pre-Orders & Information-Seeking
- Mentioned in Dispatches starts recording again this week!
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 21 Sep 20, we previously published Design x Dragoons: Military Doctrine on the Tabletop by bayonetbrant
- On 23 Jun 23, we showed Origins 2023 ~ The Friday Storm on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums we talked Gus into ordering Plague of Dracula
- This week in our merch shop — a black line art version of logo would be invisible on a dark shirt, so we flipped it into a light gray
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
not technically “wargaming” but still something you’d love to see in a wargame
Weird Weapons and Clever Traps
According to Otto of Friesing, the defenders of Crema resorted to guile rather than brute force. Such devices, ‘like mousetraps’, would have been difficult to construct and their effectiveness is impossible to quantify, but Otto’s account suggests they were unsettling enough to merit attention. So why use them? They may have formed part of a strategy of intimidation. The defenders also dug hidden pits and launched targeted attacks to disrupt or destroy the enemy’s siege weapons. These traps would sap the attackers’ morale while protecting the defenders’ finite manpower. According to Otto, the Cremonese possessed abundant grain, suggesting that starvation was not their immediate fear; instead, the challenge was maintaining resistance while minimising losses.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream was canceled, but The Chit Show was still live on Sunday
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Here’s a pretty good idea, centered around Greenville, SC — “Upstate Local Game Store Crawl” to hit a bunch of stores, win some swag, and more3
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column covers the successes and opportunities of WotC’s recent pre-release event for MtG
- BoardGameWire has a report on people on the move in the biz, including GAMA Board Member Ross Thompson leaving Atomic Mass Games
- Rascal addresses yet another foot-in-mouth moment around women and wargaming
- ICv2 reports that GAMA’s overall “net”4 went down in 2024, even with revenues being up overall, with the bulk of spend being accounted for with salaries for the f/t staff; as reported at last month’s board meeting, some of that staff hadn’t had a raise since the pandemic
- The 1 Million Dollar RPG Maps Bundle Scam (Professor Grimm)
- Decision Games has updated their “Deluxe Editions 2026” survey with some refined / streamlined choices based slimming down the original survey
- Ed Greenwood says don’t build something giant and sprawling like his Forgotten Realms (Polygon)
- Company Updates
- Legion Wargames launched their own Discord server
- First VI·VIII·X update of the year!
- Mantic Games launched a new digital store specifically for their .stl files and print-on-demand service
POV: Explaining rules of modern board games to new gamers
— For Chits & Giggles (@chitsandgiggles.bsky.social) 2026-01-16T23:38:51.994Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skelton Code Machine talks about 2-player dice games
- Matthew Dunstan’s latest game design video is “Stop trying to design good games“
- How To Draw a Sci-fi Building Map!
- Creation and Play cut back their Gal4Xeon game into a smaller free demo
- Structuring your game, comparing to tennis scoring
To new & aspiring designers – the best way to approach a new design is almost always whatever gets it to the table the fastest.Not sussing out every detail or balancing any of it ahead of time. Actually making & playing the game.
— Taylor Shuss (@drawnonward.bsky.social) 2026-01-19T19:37:02.899Z
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
Our Next Armchair Dragoons Events
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ February 1 and March 1
- Next confirmed live event is Buckeye Game Fest (Columbus OH), 12-15 March 2026
- Next virtual event is Connections Online 2026, 20-25 April
Upcoming Conventions & Events
- 22-25 Jan Bellota Con (Badajoz Spain) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 23-25 Jan MMP Winter Offensive (Bowie MD) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 30 Jan-1 Feb Captain Con (Warwick RI USA)
- 30 Jan-1 Feb SquareBash ’26 (London UK)
- 30 Jan-1 Feb Winter War Con (Champaigne IL)
- 31 Jan SDHist Winter Quarters 2026 (Online)
- 4-8 Feb Game-on Con (Bellevue WA)
- 5-8 Feb Cold Wars (Los Angeles CA)
- 5-8 Feb Unfurl Your Banners 2026 (Carlisle UK)
- 5-8 Feb TantrumCon (Charlotte NC)
- 13-16 Feb DunDraCon 49 (Santa Clara CA)
- 13-16 Feb OrcCon 2026 (Los Angeles CA)
The Annual Professional/Practitioner Wargaming Conference, Co-Sponsored & Hosted by the Armchair Dragoons
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Who in the fuck ever thought this would be a real headline?!
Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion (The Globe & Mail) - The OG of OG Games: Kriegspiel (and other topics) with Jan Heinemann! (20 Sided Gamified Podcast)
- Sinews of War: A Gaming Approach to Sustaining the Force (TRADOC Mad Scientist Lab)
- And an AI-heavy load of professional stories this week
- AI-Enabled Wargaming at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College: Its Implications for PME and Operational Planning (SWJ)
- US Army Command and General Staff College leads AI integration in professional military education (US Army)
- This week, Wargaming Weekly asks Wargaming Weekly #057: Are we ready for AI-powered wargaming? (Part 8)
- Space Force taps Slingshot to build AI adversaries for orbital wargames (Breaking Defense)
- World-first social media wargame reveals how AI bots can swing elections (The Conversation)
- The international lawyer teaching AI to war game (Financial Review)
- Wargamers explore tech of tomorrow (Australian MoD)
- This week, Mick Ryan shares a (hopefully permanently) fictional account of a US expedition into Greenland
- The next GUWS webinar is tonight! Wargaming AI—Representing AI-Enabled Military Systems in Games, and then Integration of Wargaming and Modeling & Simulation on 9 February and Decision making under uncertainty in educational gaming on 23 February
- PaxSims latest article covers AFTERMATH: A Venezuela matrix game
- Get Hired! MANTECH has postings for both a Wargame Analyst and a Wargame Designer
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
That’s all for this week!
You can chat about the news in the Intel Dump in our discussion forums and next Tuesday we return with another update for you
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
Footnotes
- info@darkcitygames.com
- translated from Japanese
- and yes, Game Kastle Greenville is in there even though they’re a chain and not exclusively “local”
- the ‘profit’ for a ‘non-profit’
