by Your weekly hobby briefing📝 is ready—move those mental forces into position! ➡️
There’s an academic survey from a couple of folks at UT-Knoxville asking about gamers’ interactions with content creators. While it’s not specific to wargaming, we do have a bunch of content creators in our space1. This survey is heavily tilted toward the YouTube/video space, and does include discussion toward the end about uses of AI in content creation, too.
Also applies to games —
Origins Game Fair (17-21 June) — so there’s 200 events in the queue now for Armchair Dragoons: over 180 games plus the balance in the War College. And there’s a chance that GMT adds another couple of game sessions to us.
Keep in mind, that those wargames are just what’s in our area and doesn’t count what people submitted for just general gaming events, or what folks like HMGS or Steve Fratt might be doing.
Warning: The following items may increase your enthusiasm and decrease your available cash reserves, both dramatically. ⚠️
- World at War #107 is now shipping, with the included game Stalingrad Relief: December 1942
- War Diary Magazine #31 is now available on their site
- Compass Games started shipping Combat! Eastern Front for your solitaire man-to-man wargaming needs
- The Five Parsecs from Home: Planetfall hardcover is still on pre-order w/ Modiphius but you can get the PDF right now from them if you put your pre-order in
- A couple of new releases from the S&M empire
- Rule The Waves 3 Expanded Battles DLC to add onto the acclaimed game
- Headquarters: Cold War takes the WW2 engine to the 1980s and gives you the biggest war that never was
- Jamie Daggers’ first game is now available from Black Site Studio, as you can get Lyctor in PDF in time to play at Adepticon
- This week on Wargame Vault
- Federation & Empire: Civil Wars Rulebook and Federation & Empire: Civil Wars Map Pack, along with a Federation & Empire: Civil Wars Fleet Charts Pack from Amarillo Design Bureau
- Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall is on pre-order for the hardcover2, but if all you want is the PDF you can get it from Wargame Vault
- BelloLudi Pirates gets you ship-to-ship skirmish combat, but you provide your own minis
- Warlord got frisky with their Hail Caesar supplements and a bunch of them are now at the top of their “new releases”
- Wagames Atlantic dropped some new alt-history WW2 ‘dieselpunk’ minis for Marcher: Empires at War by Golden Dragon Games
- DICE!
- Dice Envy’s new release is their Cerisian Clouds 10pc acrylic one
- Kraken Dice have another B3G1 going on where you have to put all 4 items in your cart to see the deal3
- Some grande/chunky d20s at Easy Roller Dice, with a bunch of them on sale; who doesn’t need 35mm of solid metal icosahedron denting their dining room table?!
- Now that all the Kickstarters are shipped, there are some remaining KS editions of The Lions of El Alamein available through the Ventonuovo store
- A bunch of PDFs for the Journey to Ragnarok game are available from Modiphius
- Based on last week’s newsletter, GMT’s latest shipping bundle should include the following, which are all available in their store now, too
These campaigns are now officially open for business—take a peek!
- Guerre Éclair is originally from NUTS! but being distributed by Ares Games in the US; it’s a card-drive 1940-blitzkrieg game and you can pre-order it at either link
- Company of Heroes – Desert Warfare Expansion + Reprint is now up on Gamefound
- If you’re short on new WH40K releases, this week’s newsletter from On Military Matters will square you away
- Avalanche Press has their Zeppelin Tales historical study book is on pre-order; this is not a game book
- Free League just opened pre-orders for their new Coriolis expansion The Great Dark: The Fractured Library & Other Tales From the Lost Horizon and you get the PDF right away if you back it
- You can pre-order the new Battle For Boston starter set for the Fallout: Factions skirmish minis game from Modiphius
- $12 million for a single Kickstarter campaign that’s still got over 3 weeks to go is pretty insane
- New p500s from last week’s GMT newsletter
- Chalice of Poison, The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-88
- Pericles, 2nd printing
- Silver Bayonet, 25th Anniversary Edition, 2nd printing, with the Rick Rescorla cover
- I, Napoleon 2nd ed update kit
These deals might brighten your Tuesday.
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Panzer Campaigns: Budapest ’45 for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- Steam Spring Sale is this week and there’s a bunch of AAA titles in here all under $10
- War Mongrels on sale at GOG for 75% off
- Noble Knight has copies of DAK 1 starting at $240
- Miniature Market has Diplomacy: The Golden Blade Card Game on sale this week for 20% off
Fresh thoughts, new insights—scroll down for this week’s posts.
- Wednesday War Stories ~ Battle of the Bismarck Sea, 2-4 March 1943
- Buckeye Game Fest 2026
- Mentioned In Dispatches S16 E8 – The Wargamer’s Bookshelf
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “General d’Armee 2”: The Battle of Eylau (Afternoon)
- Modern War: From RPG Creation to Wargame Clash?
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 9 Jun 24, we published Armored Brigade II: Screenshots & Interview from Peter Robbins
- On 29 Apr 24, we streamed CO24 D3S2: Challenges with Online Multiplayer Events on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- “I Ain’t Been Shot Mum”: A Grave Day at the Canal
- “O Group”: Kursk Part III, Prokhorovka (The Tank Battle)
- Buckeye Game Fest 2026 — War of Giants
- Buckeye Game Fest 2026 — Alliance Combat
- Buckeye Game Fest 2026 — Alliance by Columbia Games
- Buckeye Game Fest 2026 — 1812! War on the Great Lakes part 1
- Buckeye Game Fest 2026 — 1812! War on the Great Lakes part 2
- This week in our forums we’re giving you an update on Origins 2026 prep
- This week in our merch shop we’ve got some pretty snazzy packable hoodies that are handy for the ever-shifting weather at this time of the year
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Chris Farrell’s weekly update at Illuminating Games where he was discussing his walk around Dice Tower West
As I sit at home and game with small local groups I am vaguely aware of the absolutely unsustainable torrent of games being published each year, but cruising the halls of Dice Tower West, it really drives home that the hobby is not in a great place right now. Growth is still robust of course, vendors seem to be doing well, and fans seem to be happy. But how much of this stuff actually matters?
My context for this, as a classical musician, is the explosion of music in Europe from the middle of the 18th century through the beginning of the 19th. A bunch of factors came into play here including patronage networks, the growing middle class, the expansion and professionalization of orchestras, and the addition of new instruments (like the clarinet!) and technological improvements of others (like the piano), all of which created some kind of tipping point where both the audience size and the expressive possibilities exploded. A ton of concert music got created. Very little of it survived, but the stuff that did is likely to be relevant as long as humans are around and still humaning.
The interesting thing to reckon with is that boardgaming is no longer an emerging medium. Monopoly was published 90 years ago. Acquire, 60. Squad Leader, 50. Catan, 30. Every fiber of my being believes that boardgames can are legitimate art. If what we make today is going to make a difference, going to be something that matters enough that people will care about them in 100 years, it’s a little worrisome to me that I’m not sure we’re really moving on that. It was only 50 years from the motion picture being a novelty to Casablanca.
This brings to mind a quote from Chuck Klosterman’s excellent book But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past where he notes
To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered the GMT update and Ardwulf’s focus for 2026
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column covers the return of a Gygax to Greyhawk; here are some more details
- BoardGameWire reports on the shutdown of the Print and Play store thanks to the current world trade situation
- Rascal has a nice article about how licensed game deals come about
- The Diamond bankruptcy case might never end, but it’s a reliable source of weekly news for ICv2, like the recent filing for warehousing costs in Mississippi by the company holding all the consignment stock currently under contention
- ICv2 is looking for a tabletop game reviewer, but there probably won’t be a lot of wargaming in the queue
- How in the hell are you going to run what many consider to be one of the key social accounts in your field & you’ve managed to miss one of the most famous reissues/archival releases in that field that’s been out for over two years?
- Company Updates
$1500 in sales by the end of the month—about 16 boxed games, or 100 PDFs—would unlock some cool things for us! That's a doable, if large, sales goal for 10 days.If there's anything we make here that you want, this is a great time to buy!www.adastragames.com
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about designing stealth into a game with no hidden info
- Matthew Dunstan’s latest game design video is We need a better way to talk about game design
- A very interesting thread on Reddit5 about game theme & pitching the game
Great question from Elisabeth Hargrave here, and the replies are very illuminating
Q for boardgame publishing folks: What's your estimate of volume and/or % for each of these in your company, per year? A. How many pitch requests get to pitch?B. How many pitches result in you taking a prototype for review?C. How many prototypes under review get a contract? 🎲✂️
— Elizabeth Hargrave (@elizhargrave.bsky.social) 2026-03-17T13:34:13.164Z
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 ~ April 116, May 3 and June 7
- Next confirmed live event is The Wargame HQ at ORIGINS (Columbus OH), 17-21 June 2026
- Next virtual event is Connections Online 2026, 20-25 April
Upcoming Conventions & Events
- 26-29 Mar Adepticon (Milwauke WI) <– THIS WEEKEND!
— including a bunch of pre-launch events for the new Oasis game coming from Collins Epic - 3-6 Apr Conquest Melbourne (Melbourne VIC)
- 9-11 Apr Circle DC (Washington DC)
- 8-12 Apr Game mORe (Albany OR)
- 9-12 Apr Bellum Omnium: Wargamecon 2026 (Malaga ESP)
- 11-11 Apr Eboracon VII (York UK)
- 16-18 Apr Seven Years War (South Bend IN)
- 16-19 Apr GMT East 2026 (Schenectady NY)
- 18-18 Apr Mountain Lard Game Day (Hendersonville NC)
- 20-25 Apr Connections Online 2026 (Armchair Dragoons HQ Online)
- 23-26 Apr GMT Weekend at the Warehouse (Hanford CA)
- 1-3 May LexiCon 2026 (Lexington KY)
- 1-3 May PunchedCon (Conventry UK)
- 12-14 May King’s College London Wargaming Conference (London UK)
Journey to the End of the Night
This one’s not a convention: there’s an upcoming real-world adventure in London in April called “Journey to the End of the Night” and it involves traveling around the city to hit a series of checkpoints, and the activities in between. Oh, and you’re being chased the whole time.
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Space Command to Launch Wargame Series for Industry (Air & Space Forces)
- Wisconsin Guard Sharpens Readiness During Presidio Endeavor Wargame (National Guard) and some personal follow-up from a facilitator (LinkedIn)
- Redefining Strategy in the High North: Wargaming a Contested Arctic (RealClearDefense)
- New Estonian – British project to respond to hybrid threats and disinformation (Univ of Liverpool)
- Nato’s tabletop wargame projects moving forces, supplies and casualties across Europe (BFBS)
- Examining Perspective in Historical Games (University of Kent)
- This week, Mick Ryan’s ‘Big Five’ three different theaters of conflict!
- This week, Wargaming Weekly made us wait too long for them to post anything 🙄
- The next GUWS webinar is Kingfish ACE: A Case Study for Application of Gaming and Leadership on 13 April followed by Games for Conflict and Resolution on 20 April
- PaxSims latest article is a Connections North 2026 conference report
- Get Hired! SAIC has a posting for a Wargame Designer, and it’s in Hawaii!
Today, I had the opportunity to playtest "Red Arrow, Blue Arrow," a prototype in-the-box French Army #wargame focused on company level combat. The game has tremendous potential with its level of accessibility and flexibility. #wargaming 🪖 🎲 💥
— Sebastian Bae (@sebastianbae.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T17:19:18.481Z
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
h/t maraviglia over at Bluesky for sharing this
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
- even if some of them don’t pay any attention to what any of the others are doing
- go up a few bullets
- yes, this probably belongs down below with the sales, but we’re trying to keep all the “dice” items together
- and if it had been we would’ve led the news with it instead of burying it down here
- no, really!
- moved because of Easter
Gee, Brant. You put FIVE PARSECS FROM HOME: PLANETFALL in twice. Like you are daring me to make that preorder!
(Not so secret 🤫…doing it now 💸)
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