by Wargamers, report in! It’s #TuesdayNewsday, and the news rolls for initiative ➡️
Someone severely failed in their deconfliction of the wargaming event synch matrix
This week, Connections US, GenCon, and WBC are all running simultaneously, one week after we had CSW Expo, Historicon, and the first weekend of WBC overlapping
C’mon people! We publish a giant wargaming event calendar with a dedicated convention extract underneath it specifically to help guard against these shenanigans!
And speaking of that event calendar, if you’ve got a convention coming up that’s not already on our calendar, here’s the form to submit it to us1. Also, if you’ve got a specific Google calendar to which we should be subscribing for club meetings, store events, or other meetups, please let us know so we can get it added.
ICYMI elsewhere, our annual Solo War & Historical Games survey that we conduct in partnership with Beyond Solitaire is planned to launch on 15 August 2025 (kicked it back so we’re past GenCon). We usually run it during the month of August, but with GenCon being a little later this year, plus Liz working at the con this time, we decided to slide to the right on the calendar to allow us a bit more focus when we launch.
As with past years, it’ll stay open for approx 30 days, and we’ll have a few different articles / shows covering the results
From over on Reddit, a nice photo showing the differences in counter clipping radii on different size counters
Fresh reinforcements have arrived—let’s see who’s joining the fray!
- Flames of War released the new Fortress Europe The Complete World War II Starter Set
- Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance: Uprising DLC is now out in the wild
- Ad Hoc Wargames released their new Hastenbeck 1757 game in both English and French
- Avalanche Press’s latest Panzer Grenadier playbook is Broken Axis
- Kraken Dice released a 14pc dice set for SDCC and it’s also part of their ongoing B3G1 deal right now
- Some new mats from Warlord Games: Grassland Playing Mat 4’X4′ and Grassland Playing Mat 6’X4′
- New from The Historical Game Company: Battle of Little Bighorn
- War Diary #29 is now shipping to the public
- Battle Line the Rise of War just released on Steam and is on sale through first week of August
- Red Pearl Pirates is a space armada game in early access on Steam
- A whole lot of Bavarians from The Wargaming Company
- Bavarian Dragoner Cmd, Bavarian Chevauléger Cmd, and Bavarian Chevauléger/Dragoner
- Bavarian Infanterie Command and Bavarian Infanterie
- Bavarian Leichte Infanterie and the Bavarian Pioniere
- Bavarian 6-pdr Leichte Artillerie und Train and the Bavarian 6-pdr Artillerie zu Fuß und Train
- Bavarian Large Wagon und Fuhrwesen
- Bavarian Generals und Staff
- GMT is set to start charging these tomorrow and shipping right after that
These projects want your support—and they brought shiny previews to tempt you!
- Last chance to get your pre-order in for C3i #38, the last issue that RBM worked on
- Today Another Battle is an interesting looking solitaire WW2 wargame on Kickstarter
- On pre-order through Blue Panther
- THGC’s Battle of Borodino
- The Designer edition of Hermann’s Dawn of the Zeds
- Among the other things in this week’s newsletter from On Military Matters, Steve Fratt’s new book The Victory is Ours: A Napoleonic Warfare Battle Manual is on pre-order
- Old School Tactical Volume 5: Battle for France 1940 is now on Kickstarter
- Osprey Games put Voidfighter on pre-order
- Form Square Games has launched their latest crowdfunding campaign, for Donning the Sacred Heart, Limits of Glory campaign V; it’s another game about the conflict in the Vendée in the 1790s
- The Kickstarter campaign is over, but as they ramp up for shipping, Flying Pig still has Rock of Chickamauga on a pre-order sale for $20 off
- Green Ronin has a “print reservation” / not a pre-order sale going on (basically, they’ve already printed them but will be shipping them right after GenCon) and all of these are 25% off as long as you can wait 2 weeks for them to get to you
- New p500 games in last week’s GMT newsletter
- A couple of new sets from Warlord Games on pre-order
Discounts have landed—prepare for tactical application of currency!
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Campaign Austerlitz for $29.95
- This week’s new release from Dice Envy is ‘Radio Edit’ w/ a rock star motif and it’s 10% off with coupon code POPPUNK at checkout
- Enterprise Games has copies of the venerable all-genres Battle from Yaquinto starting at $25 for a shrinkwrapped copy
- Last week of Emberglow’s “Christmas in July” sale with 25% off all this stuff (discount once you hit your shopping cart)
- Big sale on Acies Edizioni’s site, with a bunch of in-stock games at 30% off
- Humble Bundle has a collection of the old gold-box D&D digital games
- Noble Knight has a collection of over 1000 unsorted ASL counters for you to spend your days organizing, for $30
- Avalanche Press has a sale on their Gold Club memberships where your annual cost covers you through the end of 2026
- Operation Dragoon: The 2nd D-Day on sale through Miniature Market
- No greater discount than “free”! — the beta rules for Wargames Atlantic’s new Death Fields Arena can be downloaded and played right now as a part of their public testing
From deep dives to hot takes, here’s what escaped from our stables this week
- Vietnam in a Big Box – First impressions of Purple Haze
- Battle Lab ~ Hobby & Practitioner Wargaming Overlaps & Divergences
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “General d’Armee 2”: The Battle of Talavera
- Inaugural SPI Alive in 2025! (Part I)
- AARs
- Gameplay this week
Dragoons correspondent Peter Robbins was also helping the pros out recently, too!
The inaugural online "Littoral Commander" tournament is approaching the final stages! Chris Lowe (USMC) and Matt Evers (USMC) will be fighting for first place in the finals! Special thanks to Peter Robbins for hosting and managing the tournament. 🎲 💥 🏆 👑
— Sebastian Bae (@sebastianbae.bsky.social) 2025-07-25T16:26:34.651Z
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Graham Smith’s farewell from Rock, Paper, Shotgun after 12 years; he drops many words of wisdom in bullet form, including these
- Game discovery is less important than game persuasion. A lot of your audience have already “discovered” more games than they can play in a lifetime and have them on their wishlist or in their Steam library, untouched. The critic’s job is to not simply help the reader discover yet more games, but to persuade them to play those games and help them to understand those games better.
- Don’t promote pre-ordering. That digital store isn’t going to run out of copies and pre-ordering is an attempt to get people to spend money before they know whether a game is worth that money. Helping people decide whether a game is worth their money is one of our jobs, so why would you encourage pre-ordering?
- You owe it to the reader to be honest about your feelings, not to hedge based on how you think the reader will feel. This sounds obvious, but I still see writers do it all the time. If you’re playing a game that seems great or that you think other people will like, but you are finding it a boring dirge, write about why you’re finding it a boring dirge, even if the answer lies in you and not the game. Trust readers to find the writers that align with their tastes, rather than sacrificing your own taste in favour of the imagined reader’s or a false objectivity. Trust that clear expression of your honest feelings is the most valuable thing you have to offer as a critic.
- When appropriate, write about what makes a game interesting and remember that whether a game is good or bad is often the least interesting thing about it. Trust the reader to draw their own conclusions. These last two ideas may seem to be in conflict, but try to hold both ideals at the same time, loosely.
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- There’s a Board Game Academics conference coming up in October, to be held in Rochester NY
- This week, Scott Thorne talked about how recent Hasbro releases impacted his store sales
- BoardGameWire reports on the purchase of Indiegogo by Gamefound, consolidating 2 of the major crowdfunding tools out there
- Rascal has a detailed report on the games that’ve been de-listed/shadowbanned from itch.io after their payment processors (Visa/MC/Paypal) all caved to an Australian advocacy group’s claims of “pornography” for basically every adult-focused game on the platform; this same group pulled similar nosy-neighbor shenanigans on Steam last year
- Catalyst Games gives you a rundown of their GenCon previews, releases, and exclusives
- Seems like maybe you should have more than one published design before being invited to speak to an audience about the fundamentals of game design
- Field of Glory II and Field of Glory Medieval tournament signups right now over at Slitherine’s site
- A couple of remaining engine updates from Wargame Design Studio: Panzer Campaigns: France ’40, Panzer Campaigns: Sealion ‘40, and Panzer Campaigns: Salerno ’43
Regardless of where you might fall on the JK Rowling/Harry Potter is “good” or “bad” spectrum, the speed with which a huge swath of the hobby games industry has turned their backs on publisher CGE for their upcoming licensed Harry Potter edition of Codenames has been pretty remarkable
- CGE’s official response to it all
- BoardGameWire sums up a bunch of it here (with official statements from several outlets)
- Rodney from Watch It Played jumps in after the BGW article
- TTGDA’s statement
- Rascal News had a short editorial about how CGE approached the hubbub
- Amabel Holland chimed in
- Beyond Solitaire’s statement
- Also interesting to see how many people CGE blocked for commenting on it
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 3 and September 7
- Next confirmed live event is The Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly, 10-12 October 2025
- Next virtual event is the ACDC2, 16-18 January, 2026
Upcoming Conventions & Events
- 26 Jul-3 Aug World Boardgaming Championships (Seven Springs PA) <– THIS WEEK!
- 29-31 Jul Connections US (JHU, Laurel MD) <– THIS WEEK!
- 31 Jul-3 Aug GenCon (Indianapolis IN) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 14-18 Aug Nashcon (Nashville TN)
- 22-24 Aug Dragonflight Con (Bellevue WA)
- 28 Aug-2 Sep DragonCon (Atlanta GA)
- 28-31 Aug Tacticon (Aurora CO)
- 29 Aug-1 Sep Strategicon: Gateway (Los Angeles CA)
- 19-23 Sep World Series of Board Gaming (Las Vegas NV)
- 1-5 Oct Game mORe (Albany OR)
- 10-12 Oct Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly (Cary NC)
The World Boardgaming Championships are happening now, and at that event, we're holding the Advanced Squad Leader World Championships. Here are the trophies that will be handed out. Good luck to all the participants!
— Multi-Man Publishing (@multimanpublishing.bsky.social) 2025-07-28T00:41:07.071Z
Details about the upcoming The 2025 Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly
Bruce Maxwell (Air & Armor and NATO: Next War In Europe) and Keith Tracton (World at War 85: Blood & Fury and Raider Drop Zone) are confirmed as designers joining us at the Fall Assembly again. We’re waiting to hear back on 2-3 others and lock down their events before we open things up to public event submission, probably at the end of next week (~8 August or so)
If you haven’t already made plans to join the best little all-wargaming all-the-time convention in the Southeast, why not?!
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about the dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- New from MCU Press, Evolution on Demand: The Changing Roles of the U.S. Marine Corps in Twenty-first Century Conflicts and Beyond includes a chapter on “Innovation in PME Wargaming for Innovation in Warfare” and another on “Ender’s Legacy: Digital Wargaming in the Twenty-first Century”
- Icebreaker wars? How do you wargame out these low-level ‘confrontations’?
- How to approach “carrier parity” in the near future? (h/t Aaron!)
- Flight Club held a webinar on cyber conflict, with John Curry
- Wargaming a drone attack on a US military base
- Business wargaming for cybersecurity and resilience
- Using AI to generate professional wargaming scenarios
- This week, Mick Ryan’s ‘Big Five’ focuses on Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s cities, and the lessons the Norks are learning from the war
- 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
- PaxSims latest article covers their annual summer CNN Academy for journalists in conflict regions
- Get Hired! Janus Research Group has a posting for a Wargame Project Manager
Playing around with various different studies quantifications of tanks combat power, which is generating some amusing results when one attempts to normalize the various datasets against each other.
— Evan D'Alessandro (@evandalessandro.bsky.social) 2025-07-24T18:34:03.490Z
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 return with another intel update for you
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