by The #TuesdayNewsday front is lively this week—let’s charge right in! ⚡ ➡️
This doesn’t directly affect much of the wargaming community, but wargaming media could definitely be impacted by larger industry-wide recalibration of the numbers, if that’s what happens. BoardGameWire has a follow-up report, too. If nothing else, this will keep Mike Dunn of Gaming Trend busy at GAMA Expo with his Ethics in Tabletop Gaming Media panel busy!
Also, as pointed out by J from 3 Minute Board Games, you can always check a YouTube channels stats over time over at Social Blade. Here’s the link to our channel, which sees a bunch of usage when we have a live event that is streamed to the channel, like The ACDC or Connections Online, and will then sit dormant for months in between.
Screenshot of the original post on BlueSky |
Excerpt from the linked document (emphasis in the original)
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Looks like Discord is going to try to require some form of age verification or ID check starting in March. Discord’s initial press release left way more questions than answers, so they’ve released multiple clarifications up through today, and probably beyond.
per The Verge
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.
“For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities. Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process,” Savannah Badalich, Discord’s global head of product policy, tells The Verge.
Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
Direct messages and servers that are not age-restricted will continue to function normally, but users won’t be able to send messages or view content in an age-restricted server until they complete the age check process, even if it’s a server they were part of before age verification rolled out. Badalich says those servers will be “obfuscated” with a black screen until the user verifies they’re an adult.
We’ll end up asking our Dragoons what their preference is with regards to our Discord server going forward.
We’ve made some updates to our Patreon, including renaming the membership tiers. They are now the Regimental Recruit ($1), Regimental Sergeant ($5), and Regimental Captain ($10). One major driving factor behind this was trying to make it less awkward for our mid-podcast thanks to our top-level contributors, where our narrator had to be clear about annunciating the difference between our “Patreon” and our “Patrons”. By renaming the “Patron” tier, that solves the problem.
If you’re interested in supporting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming, you can find out more on our Patreon homepage.
Make space on your shelves—new arrivals inbound!
- Compass Games are now shipping Sensuikan: Japanese Fleet Submarines, 1941-45
- Hide, Stone, and Bone is the new skirmish wargame from Osprey
- Perry Miniatures released a bunch of new metal figs to go with their TravelBattle game
- Battle of the Bismarck Sea from War Diary Magazine is now available
- This week on Wargame Vault
- Rising Sun Falling Dragon – The Sino Japanese War 1894-95 focused on pre-dreadnought naval combat
- Duck Knights and Footmen are just humorously cool
- Minden Games released the 2nd Ed of Viking Fury, for your solitaire raiding enjoyment
- Menace has launched in early access
- Other new releases on Steam
- Operation Anatolia: The Great Offensive is clearly a labor of love from a studio that cares about the topic, but the graphics and animation are a bit rough and it’s tough to tell which way the jingoism breaks
- Cosmic Order Fleet bills itself as a “minimalist RTS” in space
- The Foxhole Supporters’ Edition DLC has a bunch of digital doodads like soundtracks & wallpapers
- CM-SS13 bills itself as “the most fun you will have dying in space” as a member of the Falling Falcons – 2nd Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Brigade of whatever formation that is
- DICE!
- Dice Envy’s new You Meet In A Tavern 8pc set is metal that looks like wooden crates and rolls like plastic
- OK, not dice, but dice bags as Black Oak Workshop has their Queer Coven line they just released
- Easy Roller Dice has their stone/’gemstone’ dice back in stock
Here’s what’s starting its journey from concept to tabletop this week.
- The Wharf Rats have finally launched A Forlorn Hope, their WW1 trench-warfare game from Hermann Luttmann that they’ve been showing off for a while now, including our last 2 ACDC’s
- Compass Games has Combat! Eastern Front on pre-order, including the latest version of the rules
- Fighting Fantasy Quest – The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is now on Gamefound from Ulisses Spiele and will probably actually get to backers before the Wallace Design’s FF game that’s still sitting in a warehouse even after backers have paid for shipping PLUS the additional tariff costs
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes a variety of minis sets all on pre-order, plus a couple of long-awaited books
- Free League’s Pirate Borg sets are on pre-order through their store and you get PDF access right away
- British Rifle Company for the Flames of War “Blitzkrieg” line that’s releasing this Spring
- Decision Games has Siege of Constantinople, 1453 AD Deluxe Ed on their pledge program
- This week on Kickstarter
- Fliegerkorps is a solo print-&-play WW2 game with probably the lowest goal we’ve ever seen
- Tiberpunk: Streets of Rome asks “what if the aliens showed up when the Romans were still in charge?”
- Pigskin: The game of American Football inspired by Slapshot from Columbia Games
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is Tamerlane: Empire & Conquests, which hasn’t raised a dime as of this writing
- Ancient Empires is now live on GameFound
- SGS & Avalon Digital have some new games on pre-order
- Another week, another stack of Warlord Games pre-orders
- Crimean War Turkish Infantry and Crimean War Turkish Infantry Command
- Crimean War Russian Infantry In Summer Dress and Crimean War Russian Infantry In Summer Dress Command
- The bulk discount order packs! Crimean War Russian Infantry In Summer Dress Regiment and Crimean War Turkish Infantry Regiment
- Crimean War Turkish Artillery and Crimean War Turkish Artillery Battery
- Crimean War Turkish Cavalry and Crimean War Turkish Cavalry Command
- Crimean War Turkish Generals & Officers
Discounts are rolling in—let’s see what bargains await.
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Squad Battles: Advance of the Reich for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- There’s a ridiculously good Humble Bundle out there for PHYSICAL RPG core books
- XCOM2 is on a 10th anniversary sale on Steam until 19 February and it’s all of $2.99 so you have to decide if you want to supersize your lunch combo or pick up a kick-ass game for the same cost
- There’s a bunch of games on sale over at The Game Crafter
- The Lancer TTRPG core book is on sale at Amazon right now
- Multiple sales from Decision Games right now
- Noble Knight has copies of Purple Heart — the Ambush! expansion — starting at $135
- Miniature Market has Silver Bayonet: Britain – Bones of Albion on sale this week
Last week was busy—here’s everything we published.
- Armchair Dragoons 2025 Productivity #ACDC2026
- Approaching the Campaign in Barbarossa: Army Group North, 1941
- First Impressions of War In Spain 1936-39 by Matrix Games
- Mentioned In Dispatches S16 E2 – Buckeye Game Fest 2026
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Blucher”: The Battle of Eylau
- Cards, SAMs, Fighters, and Bombers, Oh my ~ IADS: The Game
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 9 Oct 24, we published More Data Diving Into the 2024 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey by bayonetbrant
- On 25 Apr 25, we streamed CO25 Extended: Professional Wargaming in Hungary on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums there was chatter about the old TSR version of Cobra
- This week in our merch shop, it’s the mandatory basic mug
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
AI Command and Staff—Operational Evidence and Insights from Wargaming by Wilcox & Metcalf
The increasing and uncritical integration of Artificial Intelligence into command-and-control functions poses a fundamental threat to the U.S. military’s core strategic advantage: the philosophy of Mission Command and the efficacy of violence. By potentially supplanting human judgment, which is capable of creative and intuitive leaps of logic, with the purely inductive, pattern-based logic of current AI, the Army risks dislocating the application of violence from human moral agency. Such a shift would directly undermine the foundational principles of mutual trust, shared understanding, and disciplined initiative that define mission command and thus the American way of war.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered Winterfest and East Front WW1 gaming, and some other news
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column covers the impact of tariffs on the biz, using actual research & sourcing
- BoardGameWire published their article on Pandemic creator Matt Leacock on fighting for designers’ rights, working with effective developers and his publisher ‘pet peeves’
- Rascal reports on some of the Upper Deck backlash from their Harry Potter licensing deal
- Jay Dragon posted a rebuttal to Rascal’s reporting on the Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast
- You gotta wonder if the $18 million in legal fees racked up in the Diamond bankruptcy would’ve been enough to keep the company afloat
- Dad starts wargaming club for men’s mental health (BBC)
- TTRPG Insider breaks down Hasbro’s claims about how they plan to use AI
- Company Updates
Professional wargaming on the front page of BGG. A first?
— James Buckley (@jsbuckley.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T08:05:48.157Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about lane battlers / area control games
- Matthew Dunstan’s latest game design video is Game balance is overrated – do this instead
- Meandering Mike’s Game Design Prototype Supplies – Taking A New Course
- Why people don’t want to play your game (and what to do about it)
- Long thread from Nick Bentley here about playtest experiences vs wide release
- Geoff Englestein breaks out the math to try to quantify ‘expectations’
Most people learn games from half-remembered rules, in a fugue of distractions: kids, TV, phones, or just enjoying each other’s companyAnd most finely tuned hobby games need to be played perfectly and optimally or they’re … a rough experienceRecalibrate
— Eric Lang (@ericlang.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T02:43:56.041Z
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 ~ March 1 and April 5
- 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
- 18-22 Feb Escape Winter Con (Orlando FL)
- 19-22 Feb Ghengis Con (Aurora CO)
- 19-22 Feb TotalCon (Marlborough MA)
- 21 Feb-1 Mar PrezCon (Charlottesville VA)
- 22-22 Feb Tre Kronor (Haverhill UK)
- 27 Feb-1 Mar CincyCon (Hamilton OH)
- 27 Feb-1 Mar BottosCon Winter (Coquitlam BC)
- 1-6 Mar GAMA Trade Show / Expo (Louisville KY)
- 9-15 Mar The War Room at Buckeye Game Fest (Columbus OH)
- 11-15 Mar Dice Tower West (Las Vegas NV)
- 12-15 Mar AireCon (Harrogate UK)
- 12-15 Mar Buckeye Game Fest (Columbus OH)
SAVE THESE DATES! These are the four Chaosium Cons (so far) for 2026:🇺🇸 CHAOSIUM CON US — April 17-19, Ann Arbor MI 🇬🇧 CHAOSIUM CON UK — May 21-25, Cranfield UK 🇪🇺 CHAOSIUM CON EU — Oct 30-Nov 1, Gdansk, Poland🇳🇿 CHAOSIUM CON NEW ZEALAND — Nov 22-23, Wellington, Aotearoa
The Annual Professional/Practitioner Wargaming Conference, Co-Sponsored & Hosted by the Armchair Dragoons
Connections Online 2026 Call for Proposals/Presentations
Connections Online 2026
Wargaming Soft Factors
will be held 20-25 April, 2026
Our Theme
“Soft factors in wargaming: moving beyond the kinetics”.
Wargames have traditionally focused on “hard factors” — movement rates, firepower scores, penetration values. But all wargamers (especially professional wargamers) understand that there is more than just the kinetics. Command and control, morale, and even cognitive factors are tremendously important — yet are often given short shrift. Connections Online 2026 will explore soft factors in wargaming.
You Can Contribute!
Drop us an email at connectionsonlinehq@gmail.com with your suggestion for a presentation, and we’ll get back to you with options on inclusion in this year’s program.
About our event:
Connections Online is an all-volunteer non-profit online conference dedicated to advancing and preserving the art, science, and application of wargaming (including business and non-war topics) by bringing together wargaming professionals and dedicated hobbyists interested in the theory and practice of wargaming for analysis, education, training, and fun. We charge a nominal fee to cover the cost of our online collaboration tools.
We have been the premier online/distributed conference for the wargaming practitioner community, running for half a decade (so far!). We are a part of the Connections series of international conferences, which includes regular events in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, as well as occasional events in other parts of the world.
The conference is structured around 3 days of core events (covering 6 hours each). Outside of these core event hours, extended events may include additional seminars, game sessions, or social events.
Connections Online has upgraded our social media presence and will be sharing a variety of links and information throughout the year, including information about our 2026 conference as we get closer to it. You can follow us on your social platform of choice, and find all those links on our Linktree here.
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Wargaming – Australian Combined Arms – What’s new in Army wargaming? Read more about some of the latest Aus Army-specific wargames from Army Battle Lab! (Australian MoD)
- Battlegroup Clash: Baltics – a professional wargame for a commercial audience (Designer James Buckley via BGG)
- Wargaming Weekly took the week off, or held publication of this week’s column until after #TN posted
- Ten Strategy Games That Explore The Next Decade (PWK) uses a bunch of AI box mockups for “games you wish you could buy” that are . . . ‘mediocre’ seems charitable, but go with it; the topics are more interesting than the bad art, but the write-ups sound like they were written by a marketing agency that doesn’t know much about games, rather than a game-knowledgeable person
- Lots of news on the Russia / Kaliningrad / Lithuania scenarios
- A Wargame Shows Just How Vulnerable Europe Is to a Russian Attack (WSJ)
- He played Putin and broke NATO in three days. Alexander Gabuev, the scholar behind an alarming wargame, tells Meduza how he did it (Meduza)
- In Wargame Simulation, Russia Invades A European Country. Then This Happens (NDTV)
- Lithuania wargames security incident on Russian Kaliningrad transit train (EuroNews)
- Marijampolė: The unassuming Lithuanian city which might break Nato (BFBS)
- German wargaming ignores Baltic forces, sees Russia seize Suwalki Gap (LRT)
- German wargame simulating Baltic attack dismissed as ‘insulting’ and ‘nonsense’ (ERR.ee – Estonian Public Broadcasting)
- Headline (Source)
- PaxSims latest article even talks about the wargame
- Accelerating Decision-Making: Integrating AI into the Modern Wargame (RealClearDefense)
- Even Mick Ryan’s ‘Big Five’ talks about the AI / battle command intersection
- The next GUWS webinar is Decision making under uncertainty in educational gaming on 23 February and then General Generative AI and Professional Military Education on 9 March
- Get Hired! Mantech has a posting for Assistant Wargame Director
Tonights wargame was planning a NEO and embassy evacuation from Taiwan. They had to draw up a Emergency Action Plan for the American Institute in Taiwan and then red-team it. Both team's plans took some different approaches, but each time I run it I get something interesting!
— Evan D'Alessandro (@evandalessandro.bsky.social) 2026-02-07T22:26:01.785Z
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.
