by Tuesdays are better with intel 📰 —welcome to your weekly briefing! ➡️
Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy Magazine, and Karwansaray Publishers released the results of this year’s Great Wargaming Survey, and have been slowly going through the results. This post talks about the “opponent desert”
Remember that this are primarily minis wargamers, but this really feels like it’s pretty applicable to the board wargaming crowd, too.
When respondents state opponents are few, nearly 80% report a Group Size of four or fewer (25.1% for solo and 52.3% for groups of between one and four). Comparing the “Plentiful” group, solo gaming drops to 8% while groups larger than four players increases markedly. Not surprisingly, gamers with larger existing groups tend to be more likely to feel they have enough opponents.
Survey results on group size may suggest that once a player becomes part of an established gaming group, opponent scarcity diminishes. Gaming isolation can be a self-reinforcing deterrent, though. As smaller groups struggle to grow, there are fewer introductions, fewer games, and less scheduling flexibility. In this case, group discovery and compatibility is more important than raw population numbers.
One our Dragoons is helping out with a game day at the US Army Museum up in the DC area
Soliciting Gamemasters for the Rev War wargame day at the U.S. Army Museum, 27 September 2026, 10 am – 5 pm
Hello board wargamers! The Army Historical Foundation (AHF) is holding a second wargame day in September in Veteran’s Hall at the U.S. Army Museum at Fort Belvoir, VA, this time to honor the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolutionary War. This event is a joint miniatures and board wargame event, and I have volunteered to recruit wargamers to gamemaster Rev War boardgames for visitors to the museum. This is a chance to teach the younger generation about the hobby that you love. Since these will be teach-and-plays, probably involving kids and teens, simpler games with shorter playtimes are best.
I plan to run two copies of Road to Independence, a streamlined dice-heavy game playable in 60-90 minutes so I can run it 2-3 times. As another example, the game Commands & Colors Tricorne: The American Revolution by Compass Games has several shorter scenarios to choose from. Even an old Milton Bradley game like Skirmish would be fun as it has plastic playing pieces and only takes an hour to play. The players are not going to be able to read the rules ahead of time, so streamline them where needed.
Please note that this is a one-day event of about 7 hours. It is ideal if you live within less than a few hour’s drive from the southern Washington, DC, area. No accommodations are being provided; if you need to stay at a hotel you are on your own. Admission to the museum is free, and you should have time to visit the displays (the museum opens at 9 am).
If you want to participate as a gamemaster, send me an email at aaronndu@comcast.net with the name of the game you will bring, and about how long it will take to play an iteration. Here is my writeup of the last Wargame Day in January which was miniatures-heavy to show you the venue.
Come join us at the Wargame HQ as we bring wargaming back to best of the big game conventions
Updated exhibit hall map & listings, plus a listing of (but no map for) the “supported play” areas in the main gaming hall, which is where you’ll find us
Meanwhile, as of this afternoon, 89 of our 188 game events are sold out, and fewer than 2 dozen still have all their seats open
Fresh reinforcements? Yes. Self-control? Uncertain.
- Wargames Illustrated #462 is now available
- Starship Troopers: Terran Command – The Eradicators DLC just dropped and you can see our coverage from yesterday
- Microprose released Battleship Command into early access
- Serious Historical Games has a new Battles of the Sengoku Jidai Bundle
- World of Tanks HEAT is a new free-to-play version of the MMO games
- Writing Game Histories is a new anthology from Bloomsbury that looks at historical games studies
- This week on Wargame Vault
- The Pacific Naval War 1922 – 1945 | Doctrine, Intelligence, and the Battles That Decided It is a book rather than a game, but it’s a lot of good background PTO info
- Mare Nostrum 3.0 covers ancient naval battles using minis on a hex grid
- Bloody Barents Sea – A Striking Effectively First scenario is a WW2 naval scenario with its own rules
- Now that backer shipping is complete, the 2nd edition of Skull Tales: Full Sail! is going to retail and general public ordering
- The Damned Army Box is now available from Wargames Atlantic and there’s over 50 figs in there(!)
- Other new releases on Steam
- Final Strategy looks like it’s trying to be Command & Conquer with better graphics, and somehow all the battle scenes look like they’re straight out of Braveheart or one of the star Wars prequels1
- Global Protocol: New World Order looks like Risk with economics, but you can play over 250 different countries
- Runebound Legends is a chibi-looking puzzle game with a real FF1 feel that apparently has absolutely nothing to do with FFG’s original Runebound game
- CSL has a couple of new digital games they’ve launched: Zero Page and Veridian Contraption and both on sale for their launch
- Dungeon Fantasy: Naked Into the Void is new from Steve Jackson Games
- DICE! — see below in the sale section
- New Middle Earth stuff from Free League! Hands of the White Wizard for The One Ring, and Trials of Saruman for Lord of the Rings Roleplaying; both cover largely the same content, but for different rules sets
Future fun awaits—here’s what just hit the pledge platforms.
- Hermann’s Designer Edition of Dawn of the Zeds is now up for pre-order with Blue Panther, for both US audiences and international ones
- Draco Ideas’ latest game, Dark Kingdoms, is now live on Gamefound for all of your conquering-5th-century-Britannia urges
- Crown & Courage (Norway, WW2) is now live on Kickstarter from the designer of Halls of Hegra
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes a bunch of historical books, especially if you’re into French history
- Chessex are bringing back those classic-90s speckled dice and they’re on pre-order right now
- Disfida is a historical-ish skirmish minis game on Gamefound
- Siege – The Game is now live; it’s an abstract strategy game that has a lot to do with board placement
- Leder Games has wrapped up backer shipments and is now putting their ROOT: Homeland Expansion stuff on their own pre-order
- Warlord’s Konflikt ’47 box sets on pre-order
- Konflikt ’47: Invasion Amerika hardcover book & ‘T2 Prototype Heavy Armor’ Book Miniature
- Invasion Amerika New Release Bundle w/ the book + a bunch of minis
- Konflikt ’47 Ghost Infiltration Platoon and Konflikt ’47 Empire Of Japan Ghost Attack Infantry
- Konflikt ’47 Kimura Tadaaki, Scourge Of The Spirit Realm
This week’s markdowns are worth a moment of your attention. ⏱️
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Squad Battles: The Proud and the Few for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- Total War: Attila under $10 at GOG
- ESR 1806 in Germany Starter Bundle from The Wargaming Company is almost $40 off
- Noble Knight has copies of Summer Storm – The Battle of Gettysburg starting at $45
- Miniature Market has Battle Commander: Volume I on sale this week at 15% off
- Thunderbolt Deluxe and Three Days of Gettysburg Deluxe Edition are both marked down to $92 at Gamers Armory
- DICE!
- Dice Envy are starting their d6 subscription boxes and you can get a free bonus set in your first shipment with coupon code EARLYBIRDBOX at checkout
- 48% off all bulk dice from Easy Roller Dice with coupon code BULK48 at checkout
- Kraken Dice still have their B3G1 sale going on, and there’s a new ‘Dionysus’ color you can get in a 14pc RPG set, small d6s, bigger d6s, or d20s
Maybe work will let you count the time reading this week’s dispatches as ‘professional development’
Our first live public show for #TuesdayNewsday is tonight!
- Origins 2026 ~ Origins History
- Scourge Of War: Gettysburg, Chancellorsville DLC
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Commands and Colors: Napoleonics”: The Grand Battle of Aspern-Essling
- FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ Firefly Games
- Starship Troopers: Terran Command—The Eradicators DLC
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 17 Jun 19, we released Origins 2019! War College Presentation on Inspecting the GSFG in 1988
- On 8 May 23, we broadcast CO23 D1S3: What Surprised Me the Most… on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums some discussion of Scourge of War: Gettysburg
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Pluie de Balles by the Conflict Simulation Group – A Gamified Kriegsspiel
For all its advantages, however, the Kriegsspiel comes with one significant logistical requirement: the availability of facilitators. When it comes to running wargames with larger numbers of participants, the need to mirror every participant team with a facilitator can soon become a limiting factor; the Conflict Simulation Group usually runs Kriegsspiel with up to 25 participants, for which ideally three or four main facilitators and six to eight assistant facilitator are required.
The Conflict Simulation Group therefore developed Pluie de Balles (PdB) in order to both preserve key aspects of the Prussian Kriegsspiel and have an instrument that is actually useable with larger numbers of participants. Pluie de Balles is run regularly at Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg with about 40 participants but can easily be scaled up to twice that number. A game of around 80 participants would require at most three or four umpires.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered fantasy wargames
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Scott Thorne has thoughts – THOUGHTS! – about Hasbro’s perpetual attempts to monetize D&D and their latest shenanigans
- BoardGameWire reports that UK Games Expo soars past 51,000 attendees, show more than doubles pre-pandemic record
- Rascal reports on the union being formed at WotC for those working on MtG Arena, the digital implementation of Magic: The Gathering; Kotaku follows up with some info on management activities in, uh . . . “discouraging” union efforts
- Finalists for this year’s Diana Jones Emerging Designer Program announced
- Congrats to Mike Dunn and the Tabletop crew over at Gaming Trend, who launched their new YouTube Channel and damn does it look niiiiice
- Company Updates
Lovely to meet 15-year-old designer Laurie Buchanan, who wrote to Senet years ago about his experience entering a design competition at UKGE… And is now demo-ing his finished game, Wizards, Warriors & Werewolves! (out in Sep)
— Senet magazine (@senetmagazine.bsky.social) 2026-05-31T12:48:39.133Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about the dice-pool combat system of Encounters: BattleTech
- How to get your start creating tabletop games
- 10 Product Design Mistakes That Cause the Most Replacement Parts Requests
- I nearly forgot I designed a game thousands of kids play every year
- What Is a Euro Game?
- Bus and Shared Infrastructure Games
If you want to be a full time game designer, your highest priority is to build a reliable playtest network.It’s a LOT of work. And there are infinite obstacles in your way. Individual and systemic. But it’s the price of success. You just gotta do itYou can debate me on this, but I’m right.
— Eric Lang (@ericlang.bsky.social) 2026-05-28T17:22:26.190Z
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 Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly (Cary NC), 9-11 October
- Next virtual event is The ACDC 15-17 January 2027
Upcoming Conventions & Events
- 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)
- 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)
- 24 Jul-1 Aug World Boardgaming Championships (Seven Springs PA)
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
New from the Historical Game Studies folks at the University of Gdansk3
We are pleased to announce a new project based at the Center for Historical Games and Heritage (C-HIGHER) at the Faculty of History, University of Gdańsk. Built in collaboration with the international research community, the Living Handbook of Historical Game Studies will be a comprehensive, open-access digital encyclopaedia covering key concepts (such as “authenticity”), agendas (e.g. “peace-gaming”), and subfields (e.g. “postcolonial game studies”) related to the study of history and games.
- Eleanor Ross visit the Professor Game podcast: I Build War Games for the US Government (And I Hate Video Games) on Spotify
- This week, Wargaming Weekly asks “What have I learnt from my first AI-adjudicated wargame?”
- What happens when AI plays war? (Big Think)
- Complementing Scenario Planning to the Strategic Value of Corporate War Gaming for Foresight and Decision-Making (IRMM)
- Play It Again, Sam: The Use of Iterated Games To Illustrate Student Decisionmaking (Journal of Political Science Education )
- How the Russian General Staff Conducts Wargames (Saratoga Foundation)4
- Thoughts on gaming in emergency management (LinkedIn)
- Warfighting lab opens in Sydney (The National Tribune)
- How Russia could invade Lithuania on three fronts (The Times)
- Designing A Generative AI Platform For Tactical Training Of Junior Officers (The Defence Horizon Journal)
- Wargame: A classic Serious game, Vector of Innovation (HAL)
- The next GUWS webinar is LEXICON: Elements of Strategic Competition, an Educational Game on 15 June as they slow down over the Summer break
- Don’t forget these upcoming events from MORS
- Certificate in Wargaming, 19-23 October
- Designing Tactical Games Course, 3-5 November
- Gaming Space Operations Course, 17-19 November
- Get Hired! MTSI has a posting for Senior Defense Technologist (Operational Planning, Wargaming & Exercises)
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
From the comments: “Petition to have Garron narrate all future nature documentaries”
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
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