August 26, 2026
News

Old Games, New Games, Big Companies(?), Big Sales(!) ~ #TuesdayNewsday

Armchair Dragoons PAOby Armchair Dragoons PAO

Tuesdays are for news, updates, and a little weirdness—welcome to #TuesdayNewsday! ✳️ ➡️

5News 1 top

History just keeps getting cooler, as another ancient board game is discovered in Europe.


The research, published in the journal Antiquity, details the process of identifying a pattern of engraved lines as a complete Roman game board, whose nature and antiquity have been revealed through the pioneering application of a specialized artificial intelligence system combined with meticulous archaeological examinations.

The conclusions are that the inhabitants of ancient Coriovallum played, between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD, a strategy game of the blocking type, a category that until this discovery had only been unequivocally attested from medieval periods onward, pushing back its material evidence by between five and seven centuries.

Much more at the link above.

5News 2 Below 1

Last week, after the most recent Hasbro earnings call, there was a column about the “Five Tiers of RPG Publishing”

I know I’ve said many, many times before that D&D has an outsized impact on the market, but I want to make it clear what I mean. I’ve broken the RPG publishing industry into five tiers: the first four are categorized by revenue, each an entire order of magnitude smaller than the last. The final tier is everyone else who’s more than an order of magnitude smaller than the previous tier. The tiers are named by approximate revenue values: 500 million, 50 million, 5 million, and 0.5 million, with Everyone Else at the end.

It would be interesting to see a similar comparison for the wargaming world, but revenue figures can be very hard to come by.  It would also be interesting to see who the “top dog” would be, but that would obviously depend on who widely we draw the circle around “wargaming”: minis in or out?  Fantasy/sci-fi in or out?  GW would dwarf everyone if sci-fi minis are in. But even limiting to largely-historical board games, where does GMT rank if we also include things like the Axis & Allies games being published by Renegade, or the Memoir ’44 series from Days of Wonder, or hell, even Risk?

Continuing from the column

The whole intent of this exercise is context. If you’re looking at topline company metrics, the #3 RPG publisher is no more than 1/200 the size of the #1 RPG publisher. If you were to make a list of the top 30 publishers by revenue, you could probably rename it “the complete list of all RPG publishers who can afford full-time staff”. This hobby is small, and hobby fans can be forgiven for noticing that taking down D&D to make way for ten more Paizos (or thirty more Mongooses, or a hundred more Magpies) is significantly more likely to happen than the hobby growing the 300% or so it would take to get that revenue share organically.

 

5News 2 Below 2

Connections US call for presentations was published.  This is not the same our Connections Online conference!  They’re cousins, but CNX ONL is the young, cool, hip one 🤠

Connections US is being held 23-25 June at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA and while you’re there, make sure you get a reservation for Stammtisch, one of the best German restaurants on the planet (including all the ones in Germany).

 

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5News 3 Incoming

Here come this week’s reinforcements—brace your wallet!

 

 

5News 4 launch

These fresh campaigns are holding out for a hero… ’til the end of the night, or the end of the campaign window

 

5News 5 falling

Good news: your hobby budget just scored a small victory.

 

 Link to the NK site

 

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5News 6 regiment

Whether you skim or savor, here are the latest Regiment articles.

The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was

How Do You Handle the “Inside” of a Hex?

Each hex is a discrete unit, so it plays a little more like a board game with hexagonal tiles. Like Monopoly or Candy Land, you “travel” by counting the number of spaces you move along the playing board. One…two…three…four…
Your presence within a hex is also a strict binary. Either you’re occupying a hex, or you’re not. We’re not tracking your precise location within a hex, like we would with the Representational Hexes. Consequently, you always travel a whole number of hexes. Which means that, if hexes are 6 miles, then you only travel in multiples of 6 miles. You never have to calculate how long it would take to go 41.5 miles. Either you go 6 hexes (36 miles) or 7 hexes (42 miles).
In a sense, the Abstract Hexes are really just nodes in a uniform network. The map is technically a (very dense) pointcrawl.

 

This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world

The best videos this week from our wargaming friends

Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered 2026 Wargaming Goals

 

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5News 10 industry

Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world

Work on the game shop above is proceeding well, but it means no power where I run fulfilment. So I'm working on orders using a flashlight (or torch if you prefer). Feels like I'm in a bunker in Kyiv worried about the next Shaheed raid

— Catastrophe Games (@catastrophegames.bsky.social) 2026-02-16T15:55:34.613Z

 

Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side

 

5News 7 muster

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

Upcoming Conventions & Events

Heading to the Cannes Festival International des Jeux later this month? Come pop by and see us at level -1 of the exhibition area, booth 06.17. Let's roll some dice together!

— NUTS! PUBLISHING (@nutspublishing.bsky.social) 2026-02-16T10:26:19.021Z

 

The Annual Professional/Practitioner Wargaming Conference, Co-Sponsored & Hosted by the Armchair Dragoons

The week’s podcast episode included Brant, Chris, and Merle looking back over the 5 years of Connections Online and discussing how it’s different than the others (more than just “it’s virtual”), some favorite sessions, and why we keep doing it.

 

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5News 11 Pros

Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!

I really hope people are inspired by my "Littoral Commander" series to design and develop their own official expansions. #wargaming

— Sebastian Bae (@sebastianbae.bsky.social) 2026-02-13T11:37:49.580Z

 

 

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5News 12 different

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

  1. which is almost 25 years gone at this point
  2. translated from Japanese

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