by Friendly reminder: hobby news is the best news. Let’s dive into #TuesdayNewsday! 📰 ➡️
Looking to show off your wargaming skills? Signups are open for the Littoral Commander – Online World Championships 2026, which will start 1 July.
Littoral Commander – Online World Championship 2026: A single elimination online vassal gaming tournament designed to test the mettle of Littoral Commanders world wide! Sides and scenarios will be set per bracket “rung”. Side to be played by each player will be randomly determined by the bracket system. Seeding will only be used for when a “bye” needs to be determined. If you’ve PLAYED and WON a game of LC, that is a higher seed than someone that has played but only lost, etc. Anyone that has ranked within top four of any wargaming tournament will get extra seeding consideration, etc. All in all, you still need to survive to stay alive in this tournament to make your way to the top of the pyramid and the title of World Champion!
There’s a signup form for you get registered, and you’ve got about 7 weeks to hone your skills before the tournament starts. Good thing they just started shipping the games again, right? (See “Incoming” below)
Big news last week (on a Wednesday, of course) was that Osprey’s parent company (Bloomsbury) is selling off the boardgame business, but retaining the RPGs and (minis) wargames. It seems clear that if it can be published as a book, they’re all for it, but anything more than that and Bloomsbury is warding it off with a silver cross. Interestingly, the first ‘news’ of this broke on social channels, not an official company release
- BoardGameWire’s report talks to a couple of involved parties
- ICv2 repackaged the press release
- Tabletop Gaming went a little deeper than just the press release
- David Thompson commits to taking over publishing of all of Osprey’s boardg… wait, hang on. Correction, David Thompson is committing to NOT taking over publishing of the games. Maybe time to send in the clones?
There’s a new map design tool from GeoTactics that makes some pretty nice visuals, and works great for rapid prototyping and early development in your game designs. You’re a bit locked into their terrain definitions, but there are a LOT of them to choose from. It’s an intuitive click-&-drag to “paint” the terrain over the hex grid, and can export to a variety of formats.
Come join us at the Wargame HQ as we bring wargaming back to best of the big game conventions
Something we handle specifically for the Wargame HQ at Origins is our own raffle. Everyone who plays in a game with us gets a raffle ticket for each game. At the end of the convention we raffle off a giant table of stuff; as an example, this is about half of 2025’s raffle as we had more stuff come in after we took the photo. This is our way of saying “thank you” and giving back to the wargamers that come support our events, and for the companies to show their love for the gamers that come out to play. GMT provides a huge amount of prizes for us, but we’ve had donations come in from Worthington Games, Catastrophe Games, Cadet Games, Warlord Games, Ares Games, Osprey Games, and even some donations from our GMs.
You can watch the insanity of the 2025 raffle here, or the 2024 raffle here, and yeah 2026 will probably be just as nutty.
Fresh resin, crisp shrinkwrap, new PDFs, and more—let’s take a peek. ️
- YAAH! Magazine #16 is now shipping to crowdfunding backers and presumably it’ll flip from “out of stock” to available soon
- ASL Action Pack #22: A World At War is now shipping from MMP and thank you for announcing that on a Monday!
- Panzer Corps 2: Allied Operations – Italy: Vol.1 is now on Steam; you need the original PC2 to play (more coming from us on this soon!)
- Strategy & Tactics Quarterly #34 – Sealion: The Plan to invade England is now available for shipping; remember the S&TQ’s do not include a game
- New stuff in stock with the Dietz Foundation, all shipping from their new location!
- Littoral Commander: Australia
- Littoral Commander Indo-Pacific 2nd Edition
- Littoral Indo-Pac Challenge Coin in case you want to truly nerd out at a game convention
- ASL Rulebooks & such available again from MMP, and on sale
- ASL Rules, 2nd Edition (2026)
- ASL Chapter Dividers (2026)
- ASL Rulebook Binder (2026)
- The whole ASL Rulebook kit & caboodle (rules, binder, dividers, at a combined discount)
- A pair of new releases from High Flying Dice
- This week on Wargame Vault
- As noted last night on Ardwulf’s show, Europa Briefing 001 – May 2026 is now available, and we’re all trying to figure out exactly who it is using the GDW imprint on WGV
- Modiphius has made Paranoia: Five Clones from Alpha Complex available in PDF
- Sieben Jahre Campaign and the historical companion Amidst the Folds of the 7 Years’ War are both available, but be aware there’s AI-generated content in them
- Warlord’s new releases this week are all sorts of individual paints, but there’s also a pair of boxed paint sets for WWII British 8th Army and WWII Soviet Union
- Matrix Games released a new ‘refit’ update for Rules The Waves 3 and yes, the Steam page reads like you’re paying for “a series of fixes and gameplay improvements aimed at enhancing the overall experience across campaign mode, Quick Battles, and scenario creation tools” that you’d usually get with an unpaid update for a lot of other games
- Other new releases on Steam
- History of Kingdoms: Three Kingdoms goes back to late Eastern Han China for a 90s-looking game that mixes strat/tac maps
- Corsairs – Battle of the Caribbean has some gorgeous visuals and who doesn’t love age-of-sail pirates?!
- Let’s all prepare to re-open the Strait of Hormuz with the Minesweeper: Unlimited Expansion 1
- Skull Tales Full Sail 2nd edition is pretty much done shipping to crowdfunding backers, so you still have few days to snag it a pre-order price before they start retail shipping
- Fellowship of Simulations’ site now says that Revolutions – France 1820-1880 is in stock
- DICE!
- You can now order the British Royal d10 or the French Imperial d10 from Tactical Workshop to enhance your games from them, or any other Napoleonic d10 game
- Dice Envy’s newest metal set is S8yr Boi . . . ahhh, yeah, we get it: He was faun / She was a nymph / Can I make it any more obvious?
- These rusty d6 minis from Dice Envy also would look great for a post-apocalyptic game, or one in the desert
- New dice bag from Black Oak Workshop; per them: “Now, I wish I could tell you this was part of some grand artistic statement. Like “we explored transformation, color, and the fleeting nature of beauty…” buuuttt, no. We just thought it’d be pretty.”
- Kraken Dice have a B3G1 sale right now
- ASL scenario pack Quick 6 VIII from Lone Canuck Publishing is in stock at The Gamer’s Armory for all of $16
- Gamer’s Armory has has Le Franc Tireur’s ASL Companion #3 in stock
- Gall4xeon is available to the public – it’s a print-&-play roll-&-write space 4x game
- Worthington’s now shipping their latest batch of solitaire travel games
- Pacific War 1942 2nd Edition
- Midway Solitaire
- Tarawa 1943 Solitaire travel edition – same as the full size game but with counters instead of blocks and generally scaled down from there
These projects are building momentum fast—jump in early! ⚡
- Adam Starkweather’s new company, Bring It On Games, has their first game on pre-order, and you can reserve your copy of Anzio: A Lost Opportunity for a mere $300 and no we didn’t forget a decimal point in there
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes a bunch of pre-order minis for WH40K, 02 Hundred Hours, and more
- Following the set they did for their Indo-Pacific game, there’s a wood unit upgrade kit for Littoral Commander: The Baltic on pre-order with The Dietz Foundation
- TSWargames has Rovine 1395 on pre-order
- 2nd ed of NUTS! Publishings Urban Operations is on pre-order
- This week on Kickstarter
- The Great Commission: Roman Oppression launched on Kickstarter; it’s a standalone sequel to an earlier card game about getting the Christian church established in Roman times
- John Steele: The Paratrooper of the Steeple, 6th June 1944 is a graphic novel telling the story of the paratrooper in Sainte-Mère-Église
- The revised edition of Free Leagues Symbaroum RPG is on Kickstarter and doubled its total in about 6 hours
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is looking like Starship Command: Orion Spur that still has 22 days, but is about $95,000 short of the goal
Wargaming joy at reduced prices—what’s not to love? ❤️
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Panzer Campaigns: Normandy ’44 for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- Decision Games’ Summer folio sale, with 3 folios for just $49
- Decision also has a sale on Der Weltkrieg series: 20% individual boxes, or 25% off the whole set
- Big Spring sale going on at Modiphius right now, and a lot of the starter sets / base rulebooks are 50% off
- Ding & Dent sale from Flying Pig Games
- Tycoon Games2 is launching their new site with 26% off everything with coupon code NEWLAUNCH26 at checkout; these guys have a bunch of old VPG games in snazzier productions (Ottoman Sunset/Hapsburg Eclipse and Nemo’s War among others) as well as having bought the “Tiny Epic” line of games from Gamelyn last year
- Ventonuovo has copies of Orange Swan for over 50% off; the game takes their Black Swan system to the WW2 PTO
- Noble Knight has copies of War Along the Gulf Coast starting at $117
- Avalanche Press have a deal through 22 May that if you order SWWAS South Pacific and SWWAS Midway, they’ll throw in the Ironbottom Sound scenario book and the Solomons Naval Campaign Historical Study for free and not even bump up the shipping cost
- 63 Days is on GOG for over 60% off
- The Fifth Column from Puzzling Pursuits is 30% off right now; crack the Nazi spy ring in Manhattan at the end of WW2
Everything The Regiment published last week—bundled for convenience.
- Origins 2026 ~ Wargaming at Origins
- First Impressions of Modern Naval Warfare
- Campaign Scenario for Modern Naval Warfare
- Modern Naval Warfare – Interview With Designers Giannis and Dimitris
- Saturday Night Fights ~ Still Yet More 1809 Madness
- Convention Report — Stack Académie
- This Month’s Interview ~
FiveTen Questions with Dr Sam Mustafa - AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 27 Feb 22, we published A Review of Aden, from Tiny Battle Publishing from the Armchair Dragoons PAO desk
- On 15 Apr 21, we released Connections Online 2021 Day 3, Session 2: Distributed Campaigns Over the Long Haul on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums we’ve had some new faces join up; why don’t you check them out, too?
- This week in our merch shop, something you might be seeing on camera soon
And stay tuned for a special #TuesdayNewsday–related announcement in the coming weeks, although Patreon supporters are already in-the-know!
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
I do not recommend it. Not ironically, not for a sake of a lookie, not to release its carbon back into the atmosphere through combustion. Stay away. The radioactive skeleton has been thus mounted atop the dump, its meaning undeniable. If you enter here, you will leave poorer.
Read the whole thing. Have popcorn handy.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered games and game series that have evolved over the years, often through different publishers
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Spiel des Jahres nominees are out, and they actually included the designer’s names, which is why its curious that at least 2 media outlets omitted them
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column talks about crowdfunding going direct-to-consumer vs cutting the FLGS in on the action
- BoardGameWire reports on the folks that Asmodee picked to make new Lord of the Rings games
- ICv2 reports that eBay told Gamestop to get bent over their attempted acquisition
- As reported by TTRPG Insider, Kickstarter is going to start putting limits on NSFW content, which could severely impact some indie TTRPGs, but also means there’s going to be fewer cheesecake STLs to filter through; this would impact Cyberpunk 2077, all things Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Mass Effect, Monsterhearts, and more, and some publishers are already jumping ship
- Jamey Stegmaier asks What’s Your Favorite Thing a Game Publisher Is Doing?
- Dana Lombardy was recently released from the hospital after emergency open-heart surgery and is recovering at home; best wishes to him for a return to health!
- Revolution Games’ site had been promoting their Cambrai game for “early Summer” and then it was “June” and now the top of their site is saying “July” so lets hope it doesn’t slip again
- There’s been a Consim Marketplace on Facebook for quite some time now but many of the listings are US-based and there are a lot of sellers that won’t ship overseas b/c it can be a hassle. Well, there was a Euro-focused group for a while that got over-run with spam, so now there’s a new group out there to avoid those all of those different issues. Yes, you have to be a Facebook, but if are there, it might be worth looking into. For those wondering, there is also an Asia/Pacific group, too
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about puhing your luck in dice game design
- Important video for designers here: How boardgames fail colorblind players
- We normally put Liz’s podcast episodes up in The Screen Line, but Beyond Solitaire Podcast 237: David Thompson on Managing Multiple Designs needed to go down here
- Another new podcast to check out! Episode One I Have Thoughts On… History in Games
- Sebastian Bae talks about “physics engines” vs player decisions as a priority in game design
- Nick Bentley starts a conversation about the depth of Chess
The pain is real
How to know if you're a board game designer. Your prototype file names read like this:"Scenario2_Board_Final_Mod2_alt.jpg"IYKYK
— David Thompson (@djackthompson.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T09:04:13.068Z
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
-
- 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)
- 12-14 Jun Bayou Wars (D’Iberville MS)
- 12-14 Jun BottosCon Spring (New Westminster BC)
- 12-14 Jun FriedrichUK26 (York UK)
- 12-14 Jun LuxConquest 2026 (Mondorf-les-Bains Luxembourg)
- 17-21 Jun ORIGINS (Columbus OH)
- 19-21 Jun LibertyCon (Chattanooga TN)
- 25-28 Jun Unthirl Your Banners Summer Gathering 2026 (Keswick UK)
- 27-27 Jun SDHist AmRevCon 2026 (Online)
- 10-16 Jul Consimexpo (Tempe AZ)
- 11-12 Jul SDHistCon North 2026 (Minneapolis MN)
- 15-19 Jul Historicon (with SPI’s Alive!) (Lancaster PA)
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
Also, look for this section to evolve a bit over the next few weeks as we develop a couple of partnerships that are in early discussions.
New Releases / Pre-Orders / Wargame Events of Professional Interest
- New stuff in stock with the Dietz Foundation, all shipping from their new location!
- Littoral Commander: Australia
- Littoral Commander Indo-Pacific 2nd Edition
- Following the set they did for their Indo-Pacific game, there’s a wood unit upgrade kit for Littoral Commander: The Baltic on pre-order with The Dietz Foundation
- Sign-ups in progress for Fight Club’s Flashpoint Campaigns “Command Exercise” to see how well folks can produce an order that others can follow
- Operation Gulf Shield from Fight Club International is looking for players to join the event
- Signups are open for the Littoral Commander – Online World Championships 2026, which will start 1 July.
The Other Professional Headlines
- Next Big Thing proposal submissions are open for IITSEC 2026
- This week, Wargaming Weekly tells you “What has this micro-wargame taught me about logistics in land warfare?“
- A review of KCL’s Wargaming Week (LinkedIn)
- IWP Interns Use Wargames to Supplement Classroom Learning (IWP.edu)
- A new US military wargame series began by simulating a nuclear weapon in orbit (Ars Technica)
- I Was the Russian Commander in a War Game. This Is How I Defeated NATO. (Foreign Policy)
- Fighting and planning wars against “reality” (LinkedIn)
- The next GUWS webinar is Five Wargames Every Force Design Process Needs on 1 June as they slow down over the Summer break
- PaxSims runs down the latest issue of Simulation & Gaming
- Get Hired! Booz-Allen-Hamilton has a posting for Simulation Center Technical Lead in Fayetteville, NC3
I'm teaching my "Basics of Wargaming" course at Georgetown this fall semester. I am looking for sponsor proposals for educational game designs. There is NO COST. Previous student teams have designed games for various sponsors on a range of topics. DM or comment if interested. 🎲
— Sebastian Bae (@sebastianbae.bsky.social) 2026-05-14T12:54:28.377Z
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
is that a bird or a human in a bird suit?
I found this and it may bring a smile!🙂This is called the "feather-drying dance of the Great blue Heron"
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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Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
$300 for a Starkweather game? Dont think so. Hard pass. Plus prelim graphics not that appealing.
NOTE: Bayou Wars is now held in D’Iberville MS.
Thanks! We’ll get it fixed later tonight. Pretty sure that was an outside submission someone sent us
$300 for a Starkweather game? He must be high! Prelim graphics not that appealing. Hard pass.
Note that Bayou Wars is now held in D’Iberville MS.