by If it moves, shoots, simulates, or strategizes—it’s in this week’s #TuesdayNewsday update. ✔️ ➡️
It’s moving fast enough that it could all change by the time we publish this, but in the past 3-1/2 days:
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There are plenty of links covering this, but here are a few of them
What’s going to happen with this site? Who knows. But with Whitman involved it’s anyone’s guess, and those guesses likely won’t be positive. |
To be clear, we are not AI absolutists in any particular direction. But this specifc combination of a known bad faith actor, a site disrespecting the wishes of the creative community they claim they are honoring while demonstrably failing to actually uplift that group, and intentionally obfuscating the key players involved just creates a toxic stew that pleases no one but the sickos that just enjoy poking at people for the sake of being jerks. Moreover, as multiple people have brought up, the factual inaccuracies and absolutely cavalier attitude toward them, just further cement the impression that this site is not at all about what they claim in memorializing the creators because if that were the case they would care about factual accuracy from the start rather than leaving it to the public to correct what they knew they were getting wrong in the first place.
The 2025 Golden Geek winners were announced. Here’s the category you were interested in, right?
BoardGameWire wraps up the rest of the awards
Wargame
Winner: Star Wars: Battle of Hoth
Runner-up: Toy Battle
Runner-up: Cross Bronx Expressway
It is nice to see that there’s a variety of push-back and discussion about the silliness of this in the thread where the announcement was made
Battlegroup Clash: Baltics being used in a Finnish university team-building setting with a bunch of civilians
Prepare for yet another round of “I don’t need it… but I want it.”
- Sam Mustafa’s latest Scourge of Princes: The Dawn of Modern Warfare from Machiavelli to Cromwell is here! Look for a lot more on this one from our crew, including some livestreamed games1
- Mike Nagel’s new man-to-man sci-fi game, MASS Impact, is now available from Blue Panther; can we get him to bring it to this year’s Fall Assembly? We’ll try!
- The company website still says ‘out of stock’ but Flying Pig Games have said they’re shipping Old School Tactical v5: Battle for France 1940 so look for that to change imminently
- Head of Arms is a new multi-player game of national security policy from 1870-1940 where you get to plan, train, arm, modernize, and execute policy for your nation across a volatile political period
- This week on Wargame Vault
- ENGLAND EXPECTS: Napoleonic naval wargame rules, covering the Revolutionary & Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812 isn’t quite challenging Hollandspiele for “unnecessarily long game title” but it’s close
- Horrendous Gaming has a solo fantasy bundle that includes a couple of different rules & setting books
- Microprose released Better Than Dead into early access so you can play out your Hong Kong snuff-movie revenge fantasies in an FPS that’s still in development2
- New DLC! Europa Universalis V: Fate of the Phoenix was released on Steam by Paradox
- Other new releases on Steam
- WarBoard: Arena Empire mixes and matches a bunch of historical nations in wildly ahistorical ways; on sale for launch through 14 May
- Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes mixes fleet battles and some RTS combat with the usual “run away from the Cyclons” action
- Wargames Atlantic has a new Foot Knight Command (1150-1320) for The Baron’s War in stock
- Free League has released a new, expanded edition of their Frontier Scum RPG they’re calling “More Rulebook” and includes the original base game plus a bunch of new tables and options
- DICE!
- New color scheme from Dive Envy launched called “Legato” that’s a black-&-silver and there’s multiple sets you can get
- Randice have their map generator dice sets available in their online shop now
- “Smokey” polyhedral “kitty clacks” from Black Oak Workshop
Crowdfunding enlistments never end—and here are the latest recruits. ️
- Worthington Games has a 4-in-1 Kickstarter campaign running on Napoleonic games right now, with One Hour Napoleon, Eylau 1807 Solitaire, Napoleon Returns 1815, & Aspects of Waterloo games all combined; basically, Worthington put all their begs in one ask-it
- Black Oak Workshop’s next set of Advent-ure calendars are on Kickstarter, and you can get the Streets of Neo-Tokyo, Creature Feature, or Cryptid Christmas sets from them in time for the holidays
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes a bunch of Warlord’s latest pre-orders, but a heapin’ helpin’ of military books to restock your library, too
- Europa Simulazioni put a couple of things on pre-order
- Friends-of-the-Dragoons Green Ronin have their new Wardens of the Blue Rose on pre-order through BackerKit
- Bellica3g has their Santa Cruz 1797 on pre-order up through 30 June
- This week on Kickstarter
- Compass Games put Breakthrough Russia on Kickstarter to goose those pre-orders as they get closer to release
- Sole Survivor is a print-&-play solo game of players trying to make it through an alien infestation on your spaceship that is nothing at all like the classic movie from Ridley Scott because, see – there’s little kids in the game! And a playable cat!
- Iron Protocol: Exodus mixes-&-matches mechs, post-apocalyptic narratives, and hex crawling into an adventure wargame that Rocky will probably jump all over
- Yes, they made a TTRPG out of Tom Clancy’s The Division
- Broadside: Dawn of Steel gets you naval minis combat up through the dreadnoughts
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is Checkpoint 19, a “border management strategy sim” that’s only got 5 backers and over $45k to go
- A pair of new pre-orders from MMP, both at 25% expected retail price
- Hatten in Flames, a historical ASL module for the fighting near the titular French village in December of ’44
- Solo Command: Market Garden is an import/reprint of a game that previously appeared Game Journal magazine, and you probably already figured out what it’s about, huh?
- Battlefront Minis has some new starter sets for their Flames of War and Team Yankee games
- Blitzkrieg Starter Set (FOW)
- Fury Starter Set (FOW)
- Fulda Gap (TY)
Ready to save a few coins? Check out the current deals.
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Civil War Battles: Campaign Shenandoah for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- Noble Knight has copies of Westwall – Four Battles to Germany starting at $135, but also damn near everything else is marked down on the site, too
- Miniature Market has Diplomacy: The Golden Blade at 20% off this week
- A bunch of the Flames of War books are on sale and you get a free art book if you spend over $100
- Acies Edizioni are clearing warehouse space and have Novi, Fire in the Blue, and Lepanto all at 50% off through 1 July
Catch the latest discussions, analyses, and insights from our team.
First off, you should totally check out our new archive page, which now includes thumbnails, and actually goes through all 2200+ articles, and not just the most recent 1000. And, there’s also a grid for our podcasts, too!
- Origins 2026 ~ War College Events
- Connections Online 2026 After Action Report
- First Impressions of Field Of Glory: Kingdoms ~ Burghers and Bombards DLC
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Lasalle 2”: A Bit More 1809 Madness
- A Visit to the Saratoga Battlefield
- Conference Report — Connections North 2026
- Ardennes ’44 4th Edition – Upgrade?
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 22 Oct 25, we published Fall Assembly 2025 ~ The After Action Report from the Armchair Dragoons PAO desk
- On 27 Apr 23, we released GAMA Expo 2023 Convention Center on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums we’re saying ‘hi’ to new people
- This week in our merch shop we’ve added a logo tumbler, with the old-school full-color logo
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
An Analysis of Blades in the Dark Criticism from Aggregate Cognizance
Look, this one is little deep into the weeds, as it’s an analysis of someone else’s analysis, but the idea of ‘story’ vs ‘mechanics’ and when each of those engage is heavily embedded here and smartly discussed
Fiction engines are concerned with providing mechanics that resolve the fiction, versus trying to independently create a consistent reality. The conversation — the shared imaginative space — has primacy. A player describes what their character does (“I creep along the rooftop and listen at the chimney”), and only then do mechanics engage, if there’s a mechanic to do so. That’s the fiction first part in a nutshell. Crucially, fiction first mechanics don’t need to represent anything in the diegesis. The mechanics might or might not return a result that’s incorporated into the fiction. A fiction first game can have mechanics that don’t start from, interact with, or update the fiction; it’s simply that the game will lean very strongly toward those that do at least one of those things. Stress, position, effect, Devil’s Bargains, clocks are metagame tools that often interact with the fiction, serving the conversation by giving the players a shared vocabulary for stakes and consequences. Whether they “exist” inside Duskvol or not is irrelevant; they exist at the table, where the fiction is actually being made.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered monster wargames and a side of sci-fi stuff too
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- ICv2’s weekly columns on store ops are a mixed back of usefulness, but provide an interesting look at the “business” side of the hobby industries
This week’s comic store column is guest-authored by a comic store chain owner talking about how to value your store based on your business practices and what he looks for when deciding to acquire a store and most of what he’s writing about applies to game stores, and you ought to give it a read if you’re wondering why your FLGS doesn’t stock wargames - This week, Scott Thorne’s column explains why Games Workshop has sunset the “Citadel Miniatures” branding
- BoardGameWire talks about how some board game awards helped SETI take off
- RIP Ken Tidwell, whose early coverage of the Eurogaming invasion of the US through The Game Cabinet helped that community coalesce and the market take off; here’s a report from Eric Martin
- A store manager in the UK who committed over £15k in fraud looks set to avoid jail, but still in big trouble
- While we’re going to wait until the games get closer to release to link to their respective campaigns, it looks like both Free League and Goodman Games are going to both be releasing Elric/Stormbringer games over the next 18 months
- Greater Than Games have brought back the original founders as a part of their rebirth
- Company Updates
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about d66 dice and solo maneuvering
- Just Stick to Design? – Multiple Win Conditions from Always Awake Games
- This whole thread about “Space D&D”
One piece of advice I would give to all non-self publishing designers: Reach out to other designers your potential publisher has worked with in the past.Hearing about how smoothly the process went, how well they communicated, and things they wished they'd had in their contracts can go a long way!
— Taylor Shuss (@drawnonward.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T23:09:36.356Z
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 ~ June 7, July 5, and August 2
- Next confirmed live event is The Wargame HQ at ORIGINS (Columbus OH), 17-21 June 2026
- Next virtual event is The ACDC 15-17 January 2027
Upcoming Conventions & Events
- 14-17 May Human Wave ASL Tournament (Dulles VA) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 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)
- 5-8 Jun Bordercon (Albury NSW)
- 5-12 Jun GBACW Gathering (Harpers Ferry WV)
- 12-14 Jun Bayou Wars (Kenner LA)
- 12-14 Jun BottosCon Spring (New Westminster BC)
- 12-14 Jun FriedrichUK26 (York UK)
- 17-21 Jun ORIGINS (Columbus OH)
- 18-22 Jun Origins Game Fair (Columbus OH)
Come join us at the Wargame HQ as we bring wargaming back to best of the big game conventions
Make sure you keep up with our Wednesday Origins countdowns until the show!
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Just Roll With It: Literacy and Community Building in Hobby Board Gaming (Univ of Arkansas)
- This week, Wargaming Weekly asks “Are you looking for a micro-wargame about recruiting a spy?” and uh, like if we were, would we tell you?!
- Want to know what you’re in for with a MORS Wargaming Course? Here’s one student’s experience (LinkedIn)
- On the MORS Horizon
- Certificate in Wargaming, 19-23 October
- Designing Tactical Games Course, 3-5 November
- Gaming Space Operations Course, 17-19 November
- US deploys AI wargaming system to aid military decisions, targets 10,000x simulation speed (Interesting Engineering)
- Debriefing in History class with Defensible Models in history games: A quick report (Gaming the Past)
- Protection of merchant shipping top of agenda during wargames in Auckland (NZDF)
- Center of Excellence in Digital Game Development looking for applicants for “Level Upstate 2026” – a year-long game development mentorship program (RPI.edu)
- This week, Mick Ryan talks about Taiwanese mobilization; current-events wargames ought to make sure they include these considerations, especially for cold start scenarios
- The next GUWS webinar is Five Wargames Every Force Design Process Needs on 1 June as they slow down over the Summer break
- PaxSims’ Simulation and gaming miscellany, 9 May 2026
- Get Hired! Matrix Pro Services has openings for Wargaming Operational Analysts, specifically with their games
Reboot/2.0 prototyping for what will now be a WWII-based foo fighter hunt rather than modern UAP hunt officially begins #wargaming
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.
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