by Another week, another stack of #TuesdayNewsday stories from the wargaming multiverse—let’s dig in! ↘️
ZillaBlitz put it all out there. Salute, good sir 🫡
BoardGameGeek seems to have accidentally goofed and acknowledged wargames exist, and then even worse, inducted one into their “Hall of Fame”! So big congrats to Memoir ’44 and designer Richard Borg for the honor of being recognized by a site that would prefer wargaming went away.
Memoir ’44 – 2004
At its core, Memoir ’44 (2004) distills the chaos and urgency of WWII battlefield command into fast, intuitive play. Richard Borg designed the entire Command & Colors [sic] system to give players meaningful decisions every turn, while the modular mapboards, dozens of official scenarios, and many expansions provide near-endless replayability. Its rules are simple enough for newcomers, yet the gameplay rewards seasoned strategists who understand timing, positioning, and the delicate rhythm of push and counter-push. For those that just want to play a fun battle game with dice, it delivers. For others who see its real treatment of history, together with simple modeling of command-control, morale and casualty effects, geographic conditions, and training, Memoir ‘44 shows how historical wargaming enhances our understanding of world events.
And watch for the celebrities & friends-of-the-Dragoons in the video!
Dandar’s in Arcata, CA was wiped out in a fire that destroyed their building and several others downtown. There’s a GoFundMe to help them rebuild, and you can also place mail orders that will support them through partnerships with a couple of fulfillment companies you can find on their website.
On January 2nd, Dan Gilkey and Doranna Benker-Gilkey lost their store, Dandar’s Boardgames and Books, in the fire that destroyed an entire block of downtown Arcata.
Dandar’s opened its doors in August 2019 in the Valley West area. The store survived the pandemic and as restrictions were lifted, a gaming table was made available. In May 2025, the store moved to a much larger location on H Street in Downtown Arcata.
You can support the store—even if it’s just $3—to help this FLGS get back on their feet, through their GoFundMe page
| We’re starting a new one-question poll in #TuesdayNewsday, at the end of each month.
Nothing earth-shaking or ground-breaking, but just a little fun! If the poll doesn’t display correctly, you can follow this link ➡️ and we’ll give you the results next month! |
New games alert! Collective excitement begins… now.
- S&T #357, with the included game CENTCOM: Persian Gulf War 2001-2003 is now shipping
- Sapper Studio announced they’ve started shipping Battlegroup Clash: Baltics to initial backers, and you can also buy it on their site
- Matrix Games has released War in Spain 1936-39 on Steam
- Microprose released Task Force Admiral into early access for you on Steam
- Fight Club International has made their original introductory professional wargame, Take That Hill, available through Amazon; warning for experienced wargamers though, is that this is a pretty basic low-complexity game
- The digital edition of Mr President has released into early access on Steam and is 20% off until 2 February; always nice to see a self-published game get a big digital release!
- The Quiet Year is a map game where you’re (re)building a post-civilization community, but beware the price jump from product page to the actual checkout screen as the shopping cart converts from your local currency to Canadian dollars
- VaeVictis #184 looks like it’s shipping now, with the included game Battle of Molodi 1572
- This week on Wargame Vault there’s a couple of periodicals alongside the games
- Foxholes & Firepower 2nd ed, for more WW2 minis gaming
- Fokker Fodder for WW1 aerial dogfighting
- Dominion of the Sherman and T-34 is a solo WW2 game
- Napoleon Magazine #2
- The Quintessential Curios: Zine #1
- World of Tibasolite Issue 4
- Steve Jackson Games released GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 24: Finer Points as a PDF
- Roman-era minis combat comes to your table in On Bloody Ground – Augustus to Aurelius
- The Fire and Move minis rules are available for free online, and they’ve released a new scenario pack (PDF) and you’ll recognize a few of the scenario settings
- Other new releases on Steam
- Danmo Three Kingdoms: Battle of Wits is a more Chess-like game
- CodeWar Kingdom has you write orders for you units to execute in sequence, rather than a point-&-click fest
- Mike Lambo’s Lone Corvette: A Solitaire Wargame hit Wargame Vault last week, and this week the book hit Amazon
- 🎲 Dice!
- New – and free! – from Catalyst
Your next big obsession might be hiding in this week’s campaigns.
- Worthington Games has Astra Titanicus Deluxe on Kickstarter, so you can play a solo game “inspired by…OGRE and the Borg”; it’s an updated reprint of another classic Victory Point Games title
- Decision Games has a bunch of pledges available
- The deluxe / boxed version of Year of the Rat is on pre-order
- A new deluxe/boxed version of Sixth Fleet is also an option; this is the game from Modern War #41, not the old VG game
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes the usual excellent book pre-orders, but also wargaming magazines like WSS, Ancient History Magazine, and S&T Quarterly #33
- Steve Jackson Games has Munchkin Second Edition on pre-order through Backerkit
- Modiphius has their Species Sourcebook for Star Trek Adventures 2nd Ed on pre-order and you get immediate access to the PDF
- Perry Miniatures have a new set of Spanish Napoleonic Guerillas on pre-order
- Warlord went a little nuts in their pre-orders this week, in both quantity and stressing their spellcheckers
- The Pyrrhic Wars – Hail Caesar Supplement With Pyrrhus On Foot
- Pyrrhus Of Epirus and Antigonid Heroes
- The Diadochi and Gastrophetes
- Hellenistic Greek Light Artillery Bolt Thrower (single) and the Hellenistic Greek Light Artillery Bolt Thrower Battery
- Onager With Hellenistic Crew (single) and the Onager With Hellenistic Crew Battery
- Ballista With Hellenistic Crew (all by its lonesome) and the inevitable Ballista With Hellenistic Crew Battery
- Illyrian Nobles, Illyrian Nobles Command, and a full Illyrian Nobles Regiment
- Illyrian Warriors, Illyrian Warriors Command, and the big Illyrian Warriors Regiment
- This week on Kickstarter
- Battle Decisions: Kriegsspiel1 has made its goal but will end before next Tuesday, so this is our last chance to pimp it!
- Rolling Tactics: Scales of Peace says it can scale up to 100 players!
- If you’re OK dealing with Tycoon Games, then you can jump on Tiny Epic Invincible, their first game in the Tiny Epic line since they bought out Gamelyn Games
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is Conflict of Europe 1914, which has 25 days to go, but hasn’t cleared $100 against $14k yet
- Lords of Heaven from Phalanx is available for pre-order with a projected Summer release
- UWAR – Urban Warfare & Armed Resistance is on Gamefound; it’s a digital shooter that focuses heavily on the ‘world’ where it takes place
- Several new blue-book minis wargames on pre-order from Osprey Games
- Daimyo – A Mass Battle Samurai Wargame coming in July
- Trench Raiders – World War I Skirmish Wargame coming in September
- GMT’s new p500s from last week’s newsletter
- Checkpoint Charlie, a solo game of British SIS missions in Berlin in the Cold War years of the 1960s
- Here I Stand, 500th Ann. Ed. 3rd Printing
- Special Component Pack for TLHY: For King & Country which gets you the parts necessary from other LHY-series games that you need to play all the scenarios in this box
- and of course, that venerable wargaming classic-to-be Racket Dice
These price drops might just make your day. ☀️
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Modern Campaigns: Danube Front ’85 for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- Noble Knight has copies of C&C Napoleonics (2010 Edition) starting at $195 and going up from there
- Some insane deals on Atari games managed by Microprose on Steam – all of these are under $2
- Total War: Three Kingdoms on sale at GOG for 75% off, and most of the DLCs are there too
- Big sale at Stonemaier Games, including Scythe and Tapestry and their expansions
From deep dives to quick reads—here’s what hit the site this week.
- Wednesday War Stories ~ The Battle of Huế, January 31, 1968
- Future Fight with Littoral Commander: The Baltic
- Armchair Dragoons Reviews Barbarossa: Army Group North, 1941
- Mentioned in Dispatches is back this week!
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “General d’Armee 2”: The Battle of Dresden (South Flank) (2)
- FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ Old School Gaming of Maumee, OH
- Your 2025 in Wargaming, Part 4 – The biggest stories
- Battleplan – Developer Interview over on Peter’s channel
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 7 Sep 23, we published #TBT/Throwback Thursday ~ 1974 Avalon Hill Catalog from BBMike
- On 22 Nov 21, we dropped MystaraCon 2021 Day 1: Mystara in Italy (in Italian!) on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- Videos from the ACDC (with more still coming!)
- This week in our forums we were talking about Barbarossa: Army Group North
- This week in our merch shop, it’s the one item we have right now with a full color logo – the field cap
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Carl Fung talking about AI and wargame research
As I’m dabbling with Gemini, I realize that it’s not just a straight Google Search. I can challenge it if I think it’s going in the wrong direction. This is basically me mentally rejecting search hits that I don’t think are correct. So I’m not in the full camp of “AI will automatically help” but I know that AI is learning based on my instructions. One feature of Gemini is that it while it is thinking and searching, it previews the websites it is searching, then shows the webpages it used in its response. I know the limitation is that what’s on the internet is not all reliable or have all the nitty gritty details I am looking for. But I am coming around to using it more frequently to at least assist in my research.
Today, I got curious and started asking Gemini to rate British and Canadian Divisions in the ETO 1944-45 campaign on a scale of 0 to 5. Basically, I was testing it to see how it would rate the Action Ratings for units in BCS or OCS and compare it to how I’ve rated them.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered The GMT newsletter and multi-player wargames
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column remembers writer & editor Jean Rabe, who worked on many RPG-related books, magazines, and events
- Rascal’s Khee Hoon asks How Does Tabletop Journalism Function Today?
- ICv2 reports that CMON seems to have found a plan to finish & fulfill their outstanding crowdfunded campaigns, including some that go back multiple years
- Cardboard Edison is preparing a new version of their report about publisher contracts to help designers not get screwed
- BoardGameWire has another angle on CMON exploring more IP sales after heavy losses, as it pushes to get $14m of undelivered crowdfunding campaigns to backers
- W. Eric Martin2 has launched his own site for tabletop gaming news
- A research project at UC-SD fired up a bunch of AI/LLM agents to play D&D and see what happened
- Can we just please drive a wooden stake through the heart of the re-animated husk of what was once a no-shit thoughtful, engaging, and quality source of real wargaming content?
- Company Updates
- Among the headlines in the monthly GMT newsletter last week is the change in product strategy for their Last Hundred Yards series of games so that every game is a standalone, and there will be a special kit to bring For King & Country up to that standard, too
- Compass Games appears to have removed The Troubles from their site, probably related to the recent backlash against The Great Hunger that’s probably led to increased scrutiny on The Troubles
- Wargame Design Studio goes through their WW2 East Front games and how they cover the war
Snowfall counts for boardgamers!"How many games can we complete before the snowplows get here?"And yes, dammit, we are very much trying to give you ANY reason to crack a smile given the horrible actions of our government in Minneapolis.
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skelton Code Machine talks about Grid-based pattern and activation systems
- Matthew Dunstan’s latest game design video is Considering component cost, motivation & self-publishing
- Eric Lang’s thread about asking professional designers to look at your prototype
As a game designer, you may have to fall in love with what you're making to make it well. But then remember there's a broad distribution of opinion about each game, and now you're likely on its positive tail.Now you're at risk of going blind to what folks elsewhere in the distribution think.🎲✂️
— Nick Bentley Makes Games (@nickbentley.bsky.social) 2026-01-27T15:04:27.908Z
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
- 30 Jan-1 Feb Captain Con (Warwick RI USA) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 30 Jan-1 Feb SquareBash ’26 (London UK) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 30 Jan-1 Feb Winter War Con (Champaigne IL) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 31 Jan SDHist Winter Quarters 2026 (Online) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 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)
- 18-22 Feb Escape Winter Con (Orlando FL)
- 19-22 Feb Ghengis Con (Aurora CO)
The Annual Professional/Practitioner Wargaming Conference, Co-Sponsored & Hosted by the Armchair Dragoons
Connections Online is structured around a “core” set of events, and then “extended” events during the remaining hours.
Core events are the primary focus of the conference, and are scheduled from 1000-1600 US Eastern time on TU-WE-TH. Crucially, these events are not counter-programmed and we will never schedule a competing event at those times. Everything before and after, to include MO/FR/SA is available for extended event submissions.
You can watch our registration site here for details, and when event submissions open, you can make your proposals there.
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- A couple of Canadian wargame practitioners tackle Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War, and then Fight Club does the same
- This week, Wargaming Weekly asks Why has this Economics & Politics major designed a wargame for her Bachelor’s thesis?
- FICINT for an INDOPACOM scenario (TRADOC MadSci Blog)
- Bad taste or a new way to educate? The proposed Troubles game explained (BBC)
- Wargaming in Future Force Design–Unlocking Operational Art in the Process (Joint Air Power Competence Centre)
- Following up last week, here’s 2 more similarly bat-shit crazy headlines that reflect the state of the world
- When the Game Runs the Room: How AI-Driven GameMasters Are Transforming Mixed-Media Simulation – A collaborative study with AFRL and US Space Force (Technergetics)
- AI Wargame Points to Catastrophe for US (Daily Signal)
- Heritage Foundation report on an AI-powered game of a long-running US-China conflict
- Serious Play Conference will be held at Duke University in August, and good luck finding a tabletop gamer in the guest list
- MORS Courses, or “Mourses” if you will
- 3–5 February Certificate in Homeland Security Gaming
- 9–11 February MORS Introduction to Wargaming Course (UK)
- 10–12 March Gaming Emergency Response to Disease Course
- 31 March–2 April Gaming Weapons of Mass Destruction Course – From Policy to Practice
- Davos & Greenland headline Mick Ryan’s ‘Big Five’ this week, but talks of PLA purges might also be pretty meaningful
- The next GUWS webinar is Integration of Wargaming and Modeling & Simulation on 9 February and Decision making under uncertainty in educational gaming on 23 February
- The Women’s Wargaming Network are hosting “The History Every New Wargamer Needs to Know” by webinar and you can RSVP here
- Get Hired! Sigma Defense Systems has a posting for Ballistic Missile Defense Operations & Training Expert, in San Diego
Kriegsspiel at CGSC Army University. The OG Mission Command #wargaming for one of our staff groups. Experiential learning for the win!!!
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
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