by “The inbox is full, the tabs are open 📰—let’s see what the wargaming world has been up to this week ➜
21 tables of games, over 30 GMs, and over 65 different titles in 4-1/2 days of wargaming at Origins
Origins Awards Winners
- Gateway Game of the Year: Railroad Tiles – Horrible Guild
Designers: Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva & Artists: Francesco De Benedittis and Barla Tranquilli - Party Game of the Year: Hot Streak – CMYK
Designer: Jon Perry & Artist: Cécile Gariépy - Light Strategy Game of the Year: Winter Rabbit – Absurdist Productions
Designer: Will Thompson & Artists Kindra Swafford & Jonni Ketcher - Heavy Strategy Game of the Year: Speakeasy – Eagle-Gryphon Games
Designer: Vital Lacerda & Artist: Ian O’Toole - Cooperative/Solo Game of the Year: The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship – Z-Man Games
Designer: Matt Leacock & Artists: Jared Blando and Cory Godbey - Roleplaying Game of The Year: Land Eem – Exalted Funeral
Designed & Written by James Parks and Ben Costa & Artists Justin Gerard, Sean Kiernan, Anneliese Mak, Sam Mamei, Rosario Mendez, and Rob Gatto - Roleplaying Game Supplement of the Year: Call of Cthulhu: The Sutra of Pale Leaves – Twin Suns Rising – Chaosium
Designers/Authors: Yukihiro Terada, Jason Sheets, Damon Lang, and Andrew Logan Montgomery - Miniatures Game of the Year: Blood Bowl Third Season Edition – Games Workshop
- Miniature of the Year: Warhammer: Age of Sigmar – Festus, The Leech Lord – Games Workshop
- Paint/Hobby Accessory of the Year: Goblin Hobbies Stampin’ Plates – Goblin Hobbies
Designed by: Brent Amberger and Casey Alden - Fixed Constructible Game of the Year: Riftbound: Proving Grounds – UVS Games & Riot Games
Designers: David Smith and Jon Moormann - Randomized Constructible Game of the Year: Gudnak: Expansion Bundle – Chaotic Great Games
Designer: Tim O’Brien and Ian Oliver & Artist: Vittoria Pompolani
New releases are rolling off the assembly line 🏭—take a look ➜
- Compass Games started shipping Rebel Tide: The American Civil War but it’s still on the site for pre-order pricing so go get it quick; it takes Greg Smith’s “Tide” series to the ACW
- MMP are shipping both Fallschirmjaeger and No Turning Back to pre-order customers, with public orders coming right after that
- Matrix just released WEGO World War II: Desert War on Steam, and it’s 40% this week for the launch, too!
- Blue Panther’s got a boxed version of The Art of Wargames’ The Alamo that’s now shipping
- Mike Lambo released Beaches and Bunkers: A Wargame for 2 Players on Amazon that covers amphibious ops all through WW2
- Tactical Workshop has put the long-awaited “add to cart” button on their page for 1809: Talavera, the second game in their “Fix Bayonets!”1 series
- Revolution’s got new stuff shipping!
- Tankschlacht covers Cambrai in 1917 and is available either boxed or in ziploc
- Early Threatens Washington is the newest Blind Swords game, covering Monacacy Junction in 1864, also boxed or ziploc
- It’s not ‘new’ but Stalingrad: Advance to the Volga is back in print, too
- This week on Wargame Vault
- Packing Heat is a modern skirmish game for single-man figs, designed by the guy who runs the HOTLEAD wargame convention in Canada
- There’s a free edition of the Attack Now! minis rules you can go snag
- Empires, Eagles, & Lions Magazine 14-issue bundle, bringing back older magazines as PDFs
- Other new releases on Steam
- Age of Resistance looks to be a garden-variety grand strategy game, but set entirely in South America
- Radar ATC Simulator is nowhere near the silliest of the simulators we’ve seen so far and might appeal to a bunch of our audience
- Ashes of Morgravia is a deckbuilder but with animated cards, and a pretty dark storyline
- DICE!
- Dice Envy decided to drive all the non-music-nerds crazy with their Brass Section 33mm d20; it’s not the damage it’ll do to your table, but the damage it’ll do to your brain trying to read it
- Dice Envy did take pity on the normies, though, and offer their new Bardcore set with actual numbers on them
- Weird shapes available for all sorts of dice from Eternalverse
- Rebel Twilight is a “deeply unofficial” reskinning of T2K to take place in the Star Wars universe, free PDF on G-Drive
- Free PDF download for Rapid Fire!’s Market-Garden scenarios: Hell’s Highway – Kampfgruppe Walther’s Attack on Veghel, September 1944
- New generals from Perry Miniatures Napoleonics line, sculpted in metal
- New minis from Warlord Games for Mythic Americas
Fresh pre-orders have appeared on the horizon 📡—and the clock is already ticking ➜
- The revised edition of Assault Red Horizon 41 is now on Gamefound, as Sound of Drums takes over production to let Assault Studios focus on the design work
- Catastrophe Games now has A More Perfect Union on pre-order through their Old Dreamer Press imprint as you seek to get the US Constitution ratified through card-driven play
- New p500s from last week’s GMT Newsletter!
- Battles for the Ozarks (GBACW)
- Combat Commander BP 1 and Combat Commander BP 2 (both on their 4th printings)
- Battle Line: Medieval 2nd edition
- When Titans Clashed The Eastern Front in WW2 (ConSim Press)
- Bataan! 2nd ed (ConSim Press)
- New pre-orders from MMP, too!
- Inferno in the Bluegrass, a Line of Battle-series game covering Perryville in the ACW
- The Hero City, mid-war Army Group North action in the OCS series
- This week’s spiffy new graphically-formatted newsletter from On Military Matters includes a bunch of pre-order minis ranging from medieval to battlecruisers and plenty in between
- Modiphius has their upcoming minis game Haywire Modern on pre-order and there’s a free quickstart PDF that you can get right now
- Free League has put the Invincible series of superhero RPG stuff (core rules, starter box, accessories, etc) on pre-order, and you get instant access to the PDFs when you do
- This week on Kickstarter
- Pocket General: Wargaming Cards are rules-agnostic cards with Napoleonic artwork designed to be stand-ins for minis that will work great so long as the bases you need are approx the size of a US poker deck
- Neoimperialism is a new board game that looks at modern geo-politics that’s off to a slow start but has a long funding window
- MazeTales: Destiny’s Threshold is a solo RPG gamebook with a bunch of puzzle-focused rooms to explore
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is Siege — The Game, that’s only got 8 backers but somehow they’ve pledged over $2700 and it still isn’t enough because they’re asking for waaaaaay too much for what you get in that box
- Nothing about Siege Perilous screams “Arthurian adventure boardgame” until you dig into the campaign page
- Last call to back Draco’s Dark Kingdoms, which is funded but could always use another backer
- Sovereign: Shogun from Phalanx is live on Gamefound; will this one be over-produced also?
- New stuff on pre-order from Warlord Games
- New pre-orders from Battlefront minis for Flames of War
Discounts are moving through the area 📡—here’s where to find them 🏷️
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ sale is currently suspended while they have their Summer Sale going on
- Most of Revolution Games’ catalog is on sale right now, including the brand new stuff
- Noble Knight has copies of Enemy Coast Ahead – The Dambuster Raid starting at $145
- Miniature Market is showing they still have Neither King Nor God: LTD Edition in stock and on sale
- The Summer Sale from Decision Games covers their folio games, with 3 for $49, so under $17/each
Fresh articles have cleared editorial review ✏️—take a look 🔍
- Origins 2026 ~ Opening Day
- Origins 2026 ~ Above the Convention
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Lasalle 2”: A Little Light Leipzig (2)
- Germantown – Volume VII of the Battles of the American Revolution (BoAR) series
- ‘Outside the Wire’ ~ An important moral transit RPG
- Origins Videos!
- Live at Origins 2026! (Wednesday insanity)
- Origins Exhibit Hall before opening 2026
- A quick look through the exhibit hall before opening
- Catastrophe Games opening new toys at Origins
- Wargame HQ at Origins 2026 – Friday Morning
- Wargame HQ at Origins 2026 – Thursday Evening – 1
- Wargame HQ at Origins 2026 – Thursday Evening – 2
- Wargame HQ at Origins 2026 (Saturday AM)
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 15 Feb 21, we dropped 5 Questions with… David Thompson by bayonetbrant
- On 11 Oct 25, we dropped Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2025 Combat Commander on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Amabel digging into this thread on BSKY, and the other discussions that branch off of it, around “capital-C Critics” in boardgaming
Right! Because I have never seen a designer worth taking seriously who doesn't answer "both" or "it's complicated". But the question still gets asked.
— Amabel Holland (@amabel.bsky.social) 2026-06-22T12:11:50.156Z
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream actually stayed on the Thirty Years War before pivoting to (wait, really?) Traveller. Of course.
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column covers prerelease events and how they drive store sales
- BoardGameWire talks to folks more focused on creating community than just raking in sales
- ICv2 reports on the GAMA’s financial filings for the past year, and some of the larger financial hits
- DiSimula Edizioni has updated their homepage to show Sicilia 1943 “available end of 2026” rather than this Summer
- Trying to salvage some reputation for Academy Games over their Stellaris fiasco
- Young inventor challenge for POP Week is coming up
- Company Updates
60% drop in reviews if people even smell AI on your game – full supports the investors, developers, and publishers that took a hard "no gen-AI" stance, despite grifters' proclamations that they were "going to be left behind".
— Rami Ismail (رامي) (@ramiismail.com) 2026-06-20T15:35:31.559Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about “action queues”
- Jamey Stegmaier explains How Do We Decide Which Games to Publish?
- Reddit thread of advice about playtesting at conventions
- The Beauty of Balance: a Conversation with Phil Walker-Harding
The goal isn't perfect balance. The goal is making every choice feel interesting. 🎲✂️ #DesignDiary
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 ~ July 126 and August 2
- Next confirmed live event is The Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly (Cary NC), 9-11 October 2026
- Next virtual event is The ACDC 15-17 January 2027
Upcoming Conventions & Events
- 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)
- 30 Jul-3 Aug GenCon (Indianapolis IN)
- 31 Jul-2 Aug Southern Fried Gaming Expo (Atlanta GA)
- 21-23 Aug Dragonflight Con (Bellevue WA)
- 3-7 Sep DragonCon (Atlanta GA)
- 4-7 Sep Gateway 2026 (Los Angeles CA)
- 5-9 Sep World Series of Board Gaming (Las Vegas NV)
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals and the separate “”practitioner”” category for articles on our site
New Releases / Pre-Orders / Wargame Events of Professional Interest
- You can wish-list Take That Hill on Steam and help it get some additional attention
- Signups are still open for the Littoral Commander – Online World Championships 2026, which will start 1 July.
- Stock going fast from the Dietz Foundation
Wargaming News & Articles for the Pros
- Find your niche and lean into it! In related news, Wargaming Weekly is up to part 13 of the series “Are we ready for AI-powered wargaming?”
- Wargaming the Home Front: Stress-Testing U.S. Homeland Defense(RAND)
- C: MO Episode 9.5: Simulating Large Ground Forces: Glory the Chosin #1 (YouTube)
- US couldn’t repair battle-damaged ships in war with China, study finds (DefenseNews)
- The Convergence of Historical Game Design and Digital Heritage (DiGRA)
- Missing in Action: Professional Wargaming in Game Studies (DiGRA)
- The next GUWS webinars
- Get Hired! Booz-Allen-Hamilton has a posting for Game Designer
Today is the first public test of Razor's Edge: The Falklands War 1982, the next game to be published by Sapper Studio. The British Carrier Task Force is playing it safe, keeping far from the Exocets. The British subs have the Argentine fleets in their sights. Neither side has the advantage, so far.
— James Buckley (@jsbuckley.bsky.social) 2026-06-23T13:12:23.074Z
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
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