by Gather round, generals 🫡—we’ve got #TuesdayNewsday updates worth a victory point 🎖️ or two. 🎖️🎖️ ➡️
The Annual Professional/Practitioner Wargaming Conference, Co-Sponsored & Hosted by the Armchair Dragoons
Registration is now open for Connections Online, the professional wargaming conference, co-sponsored by The Armchair Dragoons
The conference starts on Monday — core events will be held 21-23 April, while all events will run 20-25 April.
This year’s theme is Wargaming Soft Factors
We still have the Monday afternoon “Infomercial Day” for companies and contractors to showcase their services, but there are other Monday sessions ahead of those.
Tuesday-Thursday from 10am-4pm US Eastern time are the “core” events where we focus fire on the theme, and other seminars or topics we want to highlight. There are evening sessions each day TU/WE/TH, plus some additional ones on Friday this year!
Attendees will receive the link to the conference Discord server once they are registered.
By this time next week, we’ll be underway!
2025 GoldenGeek Awards nominations are open, and we are continuing our probably-futile quest to at least make the final round of voting in the “podcast” category. Please go throw us a nomination, and if you need som GeekGold to get your nomination in, PM Brant or Mike on Discord or our forums and we can get you hooked up
In space, everyone can roll dice, but no one can hear you scream at the results
View this post on Instagram
Prepare for another round of “I don’t need it… but I want it.”
- High Flying Dice released A Mad Endeavor: The Fight for Stoney Point, July 16, 1779 covering an under-gamed battle from the American War of Independence
- Towers of Ilium has finally be released by Dark City Games; adventuring in the Trojan War with an old-school TFT feel
- Matrix Games released the Republica DLC for their Shadow Empire game that adds new politics, feats, and more; we’ve got some coverage of our own coming, too
- Solo War: WWII Italian Front is a new print-&-play card game
- Wargames Atlantic released the King John: Barons’ War Hardcover Sourcebook
- InfoSphere is one of several small digital games that Ali Kocho-Williams has been working on
- This week on Wargame Vault
- Cyber Strike looks like it wants to be the Shadowrun skirmish game
- And hey, you can get the new Sci-Fi Hex Maps Collection to use with the game
- There’s also a new 28mm hussar brigade of the Russian army from Just Paper Battles
- Modiphius released a new Fallout: Factions Crew Folio
- The Fantasy Trip: Path of Mastery is a new TFT adventure from Steve Jackson Games
- Other new releases on Steam(these are also all on sale for their launch)
- ModernFire1 is in early access and is a tactical combined-arms game with decent animations and a top-down view
- Full Metal Sergeant 2 is a cartoonish game that turns you into a combo drill sergeant/camp counselor with battles at the end to see how your training paid off
- Conquest is a Risk ripoff with 80s-era colors, but it’s also pretty cheap
- DICE!
- Kraken Dice’s latest release is the Athena color combo that’s a smoky grey w/ silver ink, in a 14pc set or bricks of d6’s
- Dice Envy has a very shiny new “Oath of the Noble Genies” set that’ll blind everyone else at the table so you can just make up the results of your die rolls
- Unicorn Dice from Black Oak Workshop
- Easy Roller Dice has their giant d20s back in stock; “giant” is not an exaggeration here – think of the boulder trying to run over Indiana Jones as a comparison for 28mm/1:72 minis
- Alternative Armies has some new Garden Wars sets in stock; every order this month from AA includes a Warbot IV for free, too
Pre-orders open, excitement rising—here’s what’s new.
- Flying Pig Games has a big reprint on four of their Old School Tactical games that just launched today
- VUCA Sims has their In Fours to Heaven game on pre-order with an anticipated Summer release; it covers the 1939 campaign in Poland
- TS Wargames added Ostreleka 1831 to their site, and it looks like you can “add to cart” now; last time they did this, though, the game wasn’t actually ready for another 4 months, so even though it doesn’t say it’s a pre-order, we’re treating it as one
- This week on Kickstarter
- Not One Step Back: Stalingrad is a solo print-&-play game with a campaign that ends tomorrow
- MICRO HERO: Ulysses & MICRO HERO: Achilles are a pair of card games for mythic adventures on-the-go
- Mars Attacks! brings your favorite silly invasion scenario to the tabletop
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is Battle of the Seas, which has 8 days to go but isn’t even past 30%
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes books on Alexander the Great, Emperor Maxentius, George Washington, and Samuel Pepys
- Word on the street is that Thin Red Line Games opened pre-orders/sign-ups for First Man in Rome on the civil war that led to the end of Rome as a Republic; details here, and yes, you have to email them to get on the list
If you love bargains, this is your kind of battlefield. ⚔️
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Musket & Pike: Thirty Years War for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- Big sale on “Classic Warhammer” games on Steam
- EVE: War for New Eden pirate collectors box minis set is 44% off right now
- Save over $20 on Scythe direct from Stonemaier right now
- 33% of FFG’s Civilization: A New Dawn box set
- Noble Knight has copies of Beyond the Rhine starting at $225
- Miniature Market has Fighters of Europe on sale this week over $10 off
- Classic Tunnels & Trolls set on Bundle of Holding
In what was certainly a clerical error, MMP’s most recent sale does, in fact, extend into & beyond #TuesdayNewsday
These articles marched out of our content bunker last week—take a look.
- Armchair Dragoons Interviews Luke Hughes from Burden of Command
- Space Empires 4X Endgame: All Good Things Part 1
- Adepticon 2026
- Mentioned In Dispatches S16 E11 – The Politics of Play with Aggie Hirst
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Lasalle 2”: A Peninsular Folly
- Command Is the Management of Attention
- Short Rounds! Headquarters Cold War
- Connections Online 2026 – One Week To Go!
- Tim Densham of Catastrophe Games talks Origins WargameHQ, from our upcoming podcast season finale
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 14 Jun 21, we published Preview of Valor & Victory from the Armchair Dragoons PAO desk
- On 24 Nov 22, we released COSh22-2: Decisive Operations (Dan Warner) on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums, JD returns!
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
this thread about exhibiting at game conventions from Jon at Handiwork Games
Exhibiting at conventions are also a lot of work, and potentially can cost a lot of money. You’re in no way guaranteed to break even, let alone turn a profit. Especially if you’re not keeping a close eye on the spending vs revenue.
Some big shows are incredibly taxing to plan for, expensive to get stock to, hard to staff, and just incredibly exhausting. They can also be lucrative and exhilarating to be a part of.
Some small shows are just plain slow and boring. But they can be really friendly and affirming. So how do you know which ones to go to, and how can you assess all these different sized events?
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream gave away a lot of stuff to celebrate his 10k subscriber count
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column explains why wording matters when publishers communicate with stores
- FFG has discontinued their Descent series of map-&-minis dungeon crawling boardgames, which was one of the original flagship titles that built the company 20 years ago
- BoardGameWire has more details on the cancellation
- Rascal are experimenting with varying levels of free/paid for reading their content and since we usually only share 1/week you should be able to read most of those for free, but it’s not the worst thing to pay a little to support the folks doing the grind work on digging up the news
- ICv2 reports that longtime designer and artist Reinhold Wittig has passed away; an AAGAD hall of famer, he was the driving force behind the movement to get designer’s names on the front of gameboxes back in the late ’80s
- Gaming Trend reviews the new Company of Heroes board game
- Raise your hands if you realized Gamescience was still in business 😮
- The American Tabletop Awards were, uh, awarded today; don’t look for any wargames, but Molly House at least gets a historical game in there
- Company Updates
- Draco Ideas released the Castelnuovo 1539 VASSAL module
- New info about mission packs from Battlefront Minis, for both Flames of War and Team Yankee
- Wargame Design Studio has updated their Sword & Siege series engire
It is time to vote for the best historical game of 2025. Last year Golden Luddite winners were: 1812 Napoleon's Fateful March from @vucasimulations.bsky.social, Pax Penning from @mildamatildagames.bsky.social and A Gest of Robin Hood from @gmtgames.bsky.social Vote here : forms.gle/xjS2YW9c7xMZ…
— Fred Serval (@fredserval.bsky.social) 2026-04-14T12:32:05.018Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Step 1 of prepping your game to go in front of anyone other than yourself: GOOGLE THE NAME YOU WANT TO USE 😾
How many different stories do you want to hear about someone releasing a game with the name of something already out there? And we’re not talking about names of battles like “Waterloo” or “Gettysburg” either 🙄 - Cole Wehrle goes deep talking about expansions and democratizing game design
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about going from cards to journals
- Matthew Dunstan’s latest game design video is How can you reliably come up with good game ideas?
- A very cool new service imports your playtest game into a digital platform based on your manufacturing specs at The Game Crafter
- The benefits of starting (and finishing) small games while you work on bigger projects (Pam Walls)
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 ~ May 3, June 7, and July 5
- 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
- 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)
- 15-17 May CanGames 2026 (Ottawa ON)
- 16-17 May Chimera Con (Dublin IRL)
- 21-25 May BGG.Spring (Dallas TX)
- 22-24 May Enfilade (Tacoma WA)
- 22-25 May Gamex 2026 (Los Angeles CA)
- 24-24 May Tre Kronor (Haverhill UK)
- 29-31 May ConCarolinas (Charlotte NC)
- 29-31 May UK Games Expo 2026 (Birmingham UK)
Big report from Storm of Steel from over in the UK
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Results & AAR’s from Fight Club International’s CMBS tournament on the Russo-Ukraine War
- New Wargame Assessed USAF Force Mixes for a China Fight (Air & Space Forces) and it wasn’t pretty (1945)
- Students at the School of Advanced Military Studies enhance futures thinking, operational, tactical skills alongside successful wargame coach (USArmy), so yeah, lets make sure we keep as much wargaming in the curriculum as possible, right? RIGHT?!
- Wargaming shapes how Air University prepares leaders for future conflict (Maxwell AFB); it’s like it’s a trend or something
- This week, Mick Ryan talks about the lessons being learned from the world’s ongoing conflicts
- The next GUWS webinar is Games for Conflict and Resolution on 20 April followed by Evaluating Wargaming as a Methodology on 27 April
- PaxSims latest article covers Wargaming… this
- Get Hired! Booz-Allen-Hamilton has a posting for Wargaming Analyst
We’re kicking off a Combat Mission Challenge series where FCI’s best CM players become ‘bosses’ and build unique missions as their ‘lairs’ for challengers. Each boss fights with 2 secret handicaps for 45 minutes, then runs the AAR. 1st lair opens Wednesday; fight/watch on Discord
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.
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