by Welcome to #TuesdayNewsday! Where we’re not at ConSimWorld Expo but we’re all wishing we were… Here are this week’s headlines!
Happy 25th Anniversary to Slitherine Games! 🎉
To help celebrate, they’ve got a bunch of freebies over on Steam, and not a bunch of second-tier dreck, either, but some A-list titles in there.
Over the weekend, Nova Game Designs reported that founder Alfred Leonardi has passed away.
His design credits include Ace of Aces and Lost Worlds and the opposed-gamebook model was adapted to media properties as diverse as Battletech, Star Wars, and Marvel Comics, among others. The Lost Worlds series in particular pushed the boundaries of early hobby game design, creating a “first person” view of combat years before digital FPS games became a “thing”.
Ace of Aces was inducted into the Origins Awards Product Hall of Fame in 1993, and was the “Gamers Choice” award winner from the 1980 Charles S Roberts Awards.
| There are a variety of reports about the publishers who are banding together to reclaim their consigned inventory of games that had been sent to Diamond Distribution to allow those publishers to get their games into bookstores, as well as mass market retail like Target & Wal-Mart.
As it currently stands, Diamond is claiming the right to seize and sell this inventory to pay off their creditors rather than either return it to publishers, or at a minimum, return the money to the publishers — neither of which is currently being discussed. And while consignment isn’t always a great way to get your products into distribution, (1) it’s better than nothing, and (2) the people whose businesses depend on these decisions are probably better source of information than internet trolls who are supremely confident in the “rightness” of their position regardless of how poor their track record of “expertise” is. |
Chris Pramas of Green Ronin provided the following statement to Armchair Dragoons
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Meanwhile . . .
- ICv2 reports on the publishers banding together to fight this seizure, and that there is a legal precedent path to winning
- GAMA are helping connect other publishers with consigned stock to the law firm representing the group
- Green Ronin has launched a GoFundMe to help raise money for their legal fight, since much of their capital is tied up for GenCon at the moment
- Scott Thorne talks about it in his weekly ICv2 column
- Here’s a video with a lot of the details
📆 SAVE THE DATE
The 2025 Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly is coming up ‼️
We’ll see you 10-12 October in Cary NC for a weekend of wargaming fun
🖋️ Event submission opens early August <– small change from before!
🎟️ Registration opens late August
🐣 Early bird specials
Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!
- Compass Games started shipping Combat! Volume 3: Arnhem and if you hurry you can still get it at the pre-order price and $30 off
- S&T Press started shipping World At War #103 to the public; the included game is Battle for Finland 1944
- Matrix Games released the Rise and Fall of an Empire DLC for their Strategic Command WWII: War In The Pacific game
- Every Day We Fight is a new one from Hooded Horse that just launched into early access and you can get at 35% off thru GOG
- Old West gunfights? Noble Knight has Your Magnificent 7 and it’s a few dollars off
- New scenario book from RAPID FIRE! that covers 1941 in Greece and is a free PDF download
- New stuff from Warlord Games this week
- Worthington’s site lists these guys as now in stock and available to the general public
Time to get those orders in now and then either (a) complain that it’s 2 years late, and/or (b) be surprised when it gets here sooner than you thought
- Emails are going out to the people on the pre-order list for the 4th edition of Under an Iron Sky so if you want one and weren’t on the list, contact Thin Red Line Games ASAP or they’ll be gone before you get yours
- MMP announced their new Battalion S3 magazine, dedicated the BCS series1
- Hannibal’s Revenge was de-listed from GMT’s p500 program, but picked up Legion Wargames, who put it on their CPO system
- On Military Matters latest newsletter has pre-orders for Konflikt ’47 and several new books in the Tank Aces of WWII series
- Modiphius has the new Star Trek Adventures 2nd Ed Exploration Guide on pre-order for both US and UK customers
- You can pre-order Frostgrave: Advanced Spellcraft from Osprey
- Ares Games has a couple of pre-orders that they plan to ship in early September
- Quartermaster General: South Front (although if you want to pick up at GenCon, you can place that order, too)
- Fighters of Europe
- Fighters of Europe theater expansions Battle of France and Defense of the Reich
- Fighters of the Pacific theater expansions Battle of Midway and Battle of the Coral Sea
Looking for a deal? Getting more bang for your buck?
- WDS “Game of the week” is Campaign Atlanta for $29.95
- There’s a pretty insane “Roll Big or Go Home” bundle of RPG PDFs at Humble Bundle right now, including (deeeeeep breath) Runequest, Castle Falkenstein, Dr Who, the Root RPG, Homeworld, Outgunned, Vaesen, Cyberpunk RED, Apocalypse World 2nd Ed, WHFRP, Dishonored, Call of Cthulhu, and more
- Dice Envy’s new drop this week is their “Doomspace” metal dice for gritty/dark sci-fi or cyberpunk game, and 10% with coupon code CASE at checkout
- Big sale on many Matrix Games titles directly on their site
- Kraken Dice release a new Tropical Mermaid 14pc set that’s 25% off for its launch
It’s been a busy week for the regiment; here’s what you might’ve missed!
- Saturday Night Fights ~ D’Erlon’s Attack (III) for “General d’Armee 2”
- Forbidden Lands – A One-Half Dirty Dozen Adventure
- 5 Questions with . . . Dana Lombardy about NORAD 3
- Wednesday War Stories ~ Battle of Fornovo 6 July 1495
- AARs
- Gameplay this week
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
You Have to Play This 1,600-Year-Old Viking War Game over at Trench Art
That’s how, Wheaton noted, the game gives insight for generals, diplomats and spies tasked with fighting, besting—or at least—understanding what an enemy or rival thinks.
Hnefatafl is a Viking’s worst case scenario: outnumbered, cut off from their boats—and on the verge of being massacred. Understanding the game played by Viking war parties on the way to raid England of its booty meant understanding something about the way the Vikings saw themselves. The total time spent playing the game may have been more than any individual warrior spent sacking the Anglo-Saxons, for instance.
“I think the games cultures play can help intelligence professionals understand something about the way cultures think about strategy. Much of the language of strategy gets re-cast as the language of the game,” Wheaton said.
This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world
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The best videos this week from our wargaming friends
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Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about Solo Wargaming (and stayed mostly on topic!)
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- WDS posted their 2nd-quarter update for Q2 2025
- ICv2 has a long interview with the head of Universal Distribution, who purchased the Alliance Game Distributors business from Diamond as a part of their bankruptcy — part 1 and part 2
- BoardGameWire talks about CMON’s cancellation of the Degenesis: Clan Wars campaign
- Rascal talks about the use of AI images in the minis wargame Pillage, in both the original French and English-translated versions
- Slitherine are recruiting players for their PanzerCorps 2 tournament, with a 23 July start date for play
- Both BGW and ICv2 have articles on the Spiel des Jahres winners in Germany
- Norsehound was digging through the closet and going through prototypes and early playtest copies of some games
- Rascal notes the One-Page RPG Jam is back this year
Wargaming helps to meet the most interesting people,wherever you go. In Osaka, I had a pleasure to meet wargame designer, publisher and Banzai magazine editor Yasushi Nakaguro and learn so much about topics as broad as wargaming and board gaming in Japan to language and economics.
— Pijus Krūminas (@pijusk.bsky.social) 2025-07-15T14:35:23.144Z
- Hasbro’s CEO warns that toy prices could start to rise in the fall because of tariffs
- Trying to increase domestic toy production, and with no gov’t incentives to do so to help offset higher costs
- Tariffs are starting to impact the minis business too
- Panda started opening factories outside of China to diversify their production, and work around heavy US tariffs on China, starting with a factory in Brazil, that Trump just slapped a tariff on even though the US has a trade surplus with the country
A nice tribute to Rodger B. MacGowan at the welcome ceremony at Consimworld. The next C3i magazine is coming out in August!
— Meeple Lady (@meeplelady.bsky.social) 2025-07-14T02:29:27.761Z
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 3 August and 7 September
- Next confirmed live event is The Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly, 10-12 October 2025
- Next planned virtual event is the ACDC2, 16-18 January, 2026
Other Conventions & Events
- 16-21 Jul Historicon (Lancaster PA) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 26-4 Aug World Boardgaming Championships (Seven Springs PA)
- 31-4 Aug GenCon (Indianapolis IN)
- 14-18 Aug NashCon (Nashville TN)
- 22-25 Aug Dragonflight Con (Bellevue WA)
- 28 Aug-2 Sep DragonCon (Atlanta GA)
- 29 Aug-1 Sep Strategicon: Gateway (Los Angeles CA)
- 19-24 Sep World Series of Board Gaming (Las Vegas NV)
- 10-12 Oct Armchair Dragoons’ Fall Assembly (Cary NC)
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Try your hands at a USMC Tactical Decision Game on this YouTube video
- We’d previously pointed you to Rascal’s article about the wargame that recreated January 6th; here’s a UK-based article about their (non-gamer) experiences with a similar gaming event
- Here’s a case study from the UK about “how large language models (LLMs) could solve the challenge of getting through large amounts of wargaming data“
- Dr Nick Bradbeer pointed his audience to the online copy of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, a 1970s-era book that provided a lot of hard-science info for literary or game scenario development
- This week, Mick Ryan asks if there’s a “shift in tone on Ukraine”
- The next GUWS webinar is Reinvigorating the use of Manual Wargaming in the Australian Army on 5 August and Wargaming and the Just War on 19 August
Why #Kriegsspiel? Why today? Students at SAMS Army University #army play and discuss –
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
That’s all for this week!
Be sure to drop by our forums and join the fun, and next Tuesday we’ll drop some more news on 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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