by New intel has arrived in the briefing folder 📁—let’s crack it open ➜
note this one’s a little shorter b/c the editor’s traveling with family, but we still tried to load you up!
Fourth annual Favorite Solo War + Historical Games Survey is now live
Note that we’re using a new platform this year, which solved the problem of pasting in BGG URLs (yay!)
However, if you see a Google Drive error instead of the survey, try opening this page in a private/incognito browser window or another browser.
This is a Google account session issue that occasionally affects Apps Script surveys (boo!)
Get your nominations in for the SDHISTCON awards! You can use this form to get your submissions in 
Nominations are now open for the 2026 Summit Award and 2026 Bobby Nunes Memorial Award! The Summit Award, established by SDHist in 2022, is an annual award recognizing the published game that most broadens the historical gaming hobby through its ease of teaching and/or play, novel topic or novel approach. The past winners are Red Flag Over Paris (2022, for games published in 2021), Votes For Women (2023, for games published in 2022), Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War (2024, for games published in 2023), and War Story: Occupied France (2025, for games published in 2024).
The Bobby Nunes Memorial Award was established by SDHist in 2024 in honor of our friend and colleague Robert “Bobby Factor” Nunes following his passing that March. It was created to recognize an exceptional piece of gaming media (including but not limited to a video, podcast episode, written article, etc., or a cohesive series thereof) published in the prior calendar year that reflects Bobby Nunes’ enthusiasm for and interest in discussing important cultural issues within the historical gaming hobby, including as editor of the first Conflicts of Interest e-zine. The inaugural award went to Liz Davidson for her Beyond Solitaire podcast interviews, while the 2025 award went to Amabel Holland for her “Vonnegut’s Board Game: Preservation, Annotation, Context” video essay.
RIP Jeff Horger, designer extraordinaire, longtime CABbie, and occasional guest at our Origins event tables. Jeff’s designs included Maneouvre and Thunder Alley and he was always happy to play whatever you had on the table. Jeff was sadly preceded in passing by his wife and collaborator Carla Horger.
The Global Game Jam takes digital game development in a different direction. Rather than judging ‘completed’ games they have a new “Micro Missions” program that offers cash prizes for participants to develop just part of someone else’s game design, whether it’s art assets, or the QA process, or some other necessary step in the development of a digital game. The goal is to give participants tangible resume bullets toward breaking into the industry. The current round of Micro Missions are already underway and there are more being planned.
The release calendar just got busier 📅—and we’re not complaining ➡️
- Panzer Corps 2: Elite – All American released from Slitherine Games; read our first look at it here
- Space Imperia 4X – the digital implementation of the Space Empires 4X boardgame – launched today on Steam
- Imperial Elegy update pack from VUCA Sims
- Daimyo is now available from Osprey
- Late Roman Legionaries (2): Lorica Squamata and Dark Ages Unarmored Cavalry from Wargames Atlantic
- Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy #141 is now shipping
- Steve Jackson released Dahlia’s Diversions for Peculiar Parties and GURPS Power-Ups 11: Roll Your Own Skills
- This week on Wargame Vault
- Merde! Italy Campaign 1796 is an updated version of the minis rules for Napoleon’s first campaigns
- Anywar: D6 Edition gives you solo-friendly minis-agnostic fights up through 500AD “and beyond”
- New Shadowrun books from Catalyst ~ Shadowrun: Québec: The Northern Lily and Shadowrun: Desert Wars 02: Cry Havoc
- Other new releases on Steam
- Nightmare Frontier also released from Slitherine
- City States: Medieval just launched and is on sale until 7 August
- Frontline: Operation Kosmonaut has you playing the Russians trying to take back your own space station
- DICE!
- The new Wicked Game set from Dice Envy has nothing to do with Chris Isaak, sorry
- d10packs from Easy Roller dice in a couple of nice colors: Cobalt and Copper, Orange and Grey, Cyan and White, and Yellow and Black
- Kraken Dice released a new Turtle Dino Polyhedral 7pc Dice Set
The latest campaigns are officially underway 📋—early birds this way ➡️
- David Thompson’s Rebels Against Rebellion launched on Kickstarter today; go get it already!
- Worthington Games just launched Lee’s War: The War in Virginia 1861 – 1865 on Kickstarter this past weekend; FWIW, they’ve delivered all their campaigns, and usually early
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes a bunch of Osprey softcovers, and a grab-bag of books and minis from different games
- Following their successful crowdfunding campaign, Modiphius is now offering Hardwar pre-orders through their store, with an expected October ship day; they’ve also been explicit that they are shipping crowdfunded order first
- Vitoria 1813 is on pre-order from TS Wargames
- Axis & Allies: Zombies is back on pre-order from Renegade with an August ship date
- This week on Kickstarter
- Medieval Command: Battle of Varna 1444 is a print-&-play game from the folks that brought you Fliegerkorps and War in the Pacific
- Compass Games has Road the Rhine on Kickstarter, so about 10 weeks from now it should start shipping
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is The Wanderer, which is only at 18% with 11 days to go
- Oathmark: Second Edition is on pre-order from Osprey
- “Zulus, sir! Thousands of ’em on pre-order from Warlord Games!”
- Black Powder Epic Battles: Zulu Wars “Thousands Of ‘Em” Bundle
- Black Powder Epic Battles: Zulu War Mega Bundle
- Black Powder Epic Battles: Zulu! – Rorke’s Drift
- Black Powder Epic Battles: Zulu! – Isandlwana
- Black Powder Epic Battles: Zulu! – British Army Cavalry Brigade and the Black Powder Epic Battles: Zulu! – British Army Brigade facing off with a Black Powder Epic Battles: Zulu! – Zulu Impi Brigade
Savings continue advancing across the map 🗺️—let’s track them 🐾
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Napoleonic Battles: Campaign 1814 for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- CSW sale is still on at Legion Wargames until Friday
- Bellfortis Complete is 40% at GOG right now
- Big GURPS bundle on Bundle of Holding right now
- VentoNuovo has Kiev ’41 on sale over 50% off1
- Noble Knight has copies of SOPAC starting at $38
New analysis and commentary have arrived 📝—let’s dig in 📋
- First Impressions of Panzer Corps 2: Elite – All American
- Year of the Rat: Then and Now
- Normandy Deluxe in small bites
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “OGRE Miniatures”: Ceasefire Collapse
- First Impressions of Strategic Command WWI – Battles For Ypres DLC
- Hubris, or How My Plans All Went for Naught
- FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ Checkmate Games & Hobbies of Toledo OH
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 17 Nov 25, we published Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War Preview from Peter Robbins
- On 12 Oct 25, we broadcast Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2025 Day 2 afternoon session on our YouTube channel
- Gameplay this week
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was an older but still fascinating article
Can Playing RPGs Really Make You A Billionaire?
Reid Hoffman was born in Palo Alto, California and discovered role-playing at the age of 9. By 12, he was gutsy and precocious enough to mark suggested changes to a product in red ink, and walk in to the offices of the company that published it. That company was Chaosium, home of RuneQuest, and Call of Cthulhu. A developer looked through Hoffman’s suggestions, and was so impressed that he offered him a job writing on an upcoming product.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream (theoretically) talked about Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia before pivoting to some RPG talk
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Best wishes for Tory Brown, designer of Votes for Women, as she’s starting chemo on her path to beating breast cancer.
- This week, Scott Thorne’s column asks if we’re back to the 1990s
- Huh, CMON’s bet on NFTs didn’t pan out? Weird. 🙄 BoardGameWire gives us the low-down
- Rascal notes how dark the kid-focused version of Apocalypse World got
- ICv2 are rebranded themselves as “The Business of Fandom”
- Hasbro’s second quarter earnings call had all sorts of bad news for their D&D video game plans, and on top of that, WotC’s president—a former video game exec—is now out, after overseeing record M:tG sales and, uh… $56 million flushed into canceled video game products
- Board Game Beat looks back at their first six months
- Stonemaier asks “What Puts You Over the Edge to Buy/Back a Game?“
- Wargames event in Devizes raises nearly £1000 for charity (Gazette & Herald)
- The all-digital-wargame column from S&W asks “How Well Do You Know Wargaming Logistics? These wargames Will Test You!” and as discussed in the Dragoons’ discord server they don’t ever really define what they mean by “logistics”
- Company Updates
WBC- a great occasion to meet many faces of gamers I only knew by name 😊and conventions are always a great occasion to get a 5 player MARE NOSTRUM on the table. 😊with Lee from NKG and Richard
— Sound of Drums Games (@soundofdrumsgames.bsky.social) 2026-07-28T03:40:01.301Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine talks about 8 ways to stock a dungeon: monsters, traps, and more and c’mon, we’ve got news to finish today – we don’t have time to break to read 4000 words of coolness!
- Winning and Losing while Journaling
- 5 Design Lessons from making Master of Coin
- Progression Design and the Surface Area Problem
- Why Listening to Every Playtester Will Ruin Your Game | Design Pillars
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 ~ August 2 and September 6
- 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
- 24 Jul-1 Aug World Boardgaming Championships (Seven Springs PA) <– THIS WEEK!
- 30 Jul-3 Aug GenCon (Indianapolis IN) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 31 Jul-2 Aug Southern Fried Gaming Expo (Atlanta GA) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 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)
- 18-20 Sep Southern Front (Morrisville NC)
- 24-27 Sep 6ᵉ Open de France des Jeux d’Histoire (Bordeaux France)
- 4-11 Oct ASLOK (Cleveland)
- 9-11 Oct Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly (Cary NC)
- 22-25 Oct EssenSpiel (Essen Germany)
The Armchair Dragoons 2026 Fall Assembly event submission is now open, and we’ve already got almost a dozen submissions for the weekend of 9-11 October in the first few days.
We’ve got plenty of space to still add some more games on tables, and this year we’ve got a few surprises for attendees, too!
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
The Best Pro Content We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Game-Based Exercises And Real-World Readiness
The absence of cascading consequences compounds this problem because a standard tabletop design does not require participants to absorb the downstream effects of their decisions. A delayed resource request does not trigger a gap in field operations. A miscommunication between functions does not produce a missed threshold. Because consequences are suspended, the friction necessary to surface genuine problem-solving under pressure never materializes. Participants describe what they would do rather than doing it, and the exercise accepts the description as evidence of capability. The result is an assessment that measures familiarity with the plan rather than the integrity of the decision environment. Systemic failures are not stress-tested, so root causes remain invisible. The exercise concludes without revealing what it did not measure.
Wargaming News & Articles for the Pros
- The Swedish Defense University is looking for PhD students interested in War Studies, including a hefty dose of Wargaming (SDU)
- Matrix Games: An Introduction — Video (Source)
- UWA DSI Wargame Series report on “Wargame Two” down in Australia is now available (PDF DOWNLOAD) (Univ of Western Australia)
- Selective Service System wants to wargame the draft (Military Times)
- Space Delta 10 wargame helps shape future of Space Force battle management (US Space Force)
- Lawmakers get taste of AI-enabled cyberattacks in China-Taiwan war game (NextGov)
- The next GUWS webinars
- 3 August — Future War in Your (Cargo) Pocket
- 1 September — Joint Wargaming in Denmark
- Upcoming PGS/MORS events
- 22–25 September – Wargaming Emerging Technologies Workshop
- 19–23 October – Certificate in Wargaming
- 3–5 November – Designing Tactical Games Course
- 17–19 November – Gaming Space Operations Course
- 7-11 December – Certificate in Cyber Wargaming
- Upcoming wargaming events of interest
- 31 July — GameNation with Ed & Betsy, register here
- 14 August — Wargaming Civil Contingencies & Security, details here
- 15 August — Maskirovka III with IKS, through the Women’s Wargaming Network
- 19-20 September — Iron Tide virtual wargame/exercise (Taiwan Straits scenario), register here
- Get Hired! Bozz-Allen-Hamilton has a posting for a Wargaming, Exercise, and Readiness Specialist in El Segundo CA
The stereotype of role playing gamers as socially awkward and withdrawn is badly in need of debate. Hat tip to Dr. Christa Mackey, whose University of Arizona Global Campus dissertation examines skill transference from Dungeons and Dragons play to personal, social, and work life.
— 42 Educational Games Coaching and Design (@42edgames.bsky.social) 2026-07-24T16:02:30.000Z
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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