by A fresh batch of updates just cleared editorial review 📝—let’s dive in ➜
Last week, we issued a challenge to the Armchair Dragoons content team in our bi-monthly writers’ update:
Someone sees a thing online from Armchair Dragoons and realizes you’re one of them.
“Hey, so what is ‘Armchair Dragoons’ anyway?”
Your answer is . . . .
(and you gotta keep it about tweet length, too, or you’re gonna lose their attention!)
So now we’re asking all of you, too — what’s your tweet-length ‘elevator pitch’ explanation of what we are? Drop a line in the comments below or in our forum or discord, or on any of our social channels that you can find on our linktree, and maybe we’ll share the best of them down the line.
This isn’t strictly “wargaming” but it’s close enough! The Muster is a new site that aims to do for historical re-enactment what our convention & event page does for wargaming events. They’ve got some pretty in-depth listings of events around the world, and you can search/filter by location and era
My Own Worst Enemy started a new live show!
New titles are entering the chat 💬 —and they brought friends 🤝
- World at War Issue #110, with the included Operation Lorraine-Alsace 1944 game is now shipping
- Compass Games’ website lists Road to the Rhine as now shipping, but also still available at the pre-order price so grab it quick
- This week’s winner of the “Wait Until Right After #TuesdayNewsday To Release A New Product” is Flying Pig Games, who let everyone know their ’65: Squad Level Battles in the Jungles of Vietnam Strategy Guide was available as of about 2am on Wednesday
- Catalyst has their newest BattleTech starter box on their webshop
- This week on Wargame Vault
- The Long Patrol is a campaign for Archibald, Certainly Not! 2 that brings seaplanes/flying boats into your WW1 game
- Mike Lambo’s Zombie Island is a print-&-play on the vault now
- Tyrannos is the fight over Sicily in the 400s BCE
- Other new releases on Steam
- TFC2: The Fertile Crescent 2 – Collapse of The Bronze Age from Microprose is now in Early Access
- Campaign DLCs for the Civil War: Battle of Petersburg from Cult Software, with both the Union Grand Campaign and the Confederate Grand Campaign available
- A new Gallipoli game was just released last week; some of the Dragoons are discussing on our Discord server
- New French Revolutionary Line Infantry flags from Perry Miniatures that you can download for free
- Pico Armor just released a bunch of 3mm medieval minis focused on the Teutonic Knights and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and heck, you could probably use these to really trick out an oversized copy of Nevsky too
- Mounted troops: Polish Knights; Polish “Czeladz”; Mounted Crossbowmen; Lithuanian Knights; Teutonic Order Knights; Lithuanian Light Cavalry; Commanders & Banners
- Dismounts: Spearmen XV Cent; Crossbowmen XV Cent
- DICE!
- Fossilized Violence 5 Dice Set new from Black Oak Workshop
- Dice Envy’s mystery metal sets are currently marked down over 50%
- The Hobbit TCG Dice Sets from Q-Workshop: Radiant Dawn, Umbral Hollow, Ember Hearth, and Verdant Grove color options
- New Heroscape products from Renegade
- Free League started shipping their most recent Dragonbane expansions
- Arkand – City of Waves and Flames (and read Rocky’s preview on our site here)
- Book of Magic
The latest launches are chasing your attention 📣—and they’re gaining ground ➡️
- On Hell’s Highway is finally on pre-order from New England Simulations with a $75 pre-order cost1 and expected release in early 2027
- Avalanche’s newsletter continues their bait-&-switch wording of “Now Available!” and “(this game) is here!” but when you go to the actual game page in their store it always includes some variation of “This game is not yet available, but will be out soon. Please allow an extra six weeks for delivery”
So anyway, Second World War at Sea: Sea of Iron is the latest in this line of “no it’s not available but we’re gonna tell you that to get you to order” products - And heck, for good measure, they did it just today too: The newsletter is titled “News from the Front. Manila Bay is Here!” and inside the newsletter it says “Remember the Maine: Manila Bay 1898 – Now Available!!” but when you click through to the product page, you still get “This game is not yet available, but will be out soon. Please allow an extra six weeks for delivery.”
Is it available “now” because it’s “here” or is it 6 weeks away because you don’t have one in the warehouse you can go pull off the shelf right now? - Skybirds is WW1 biplane air combat game on Backerkit right now
- This week’s newsletter from On Military Matters includes the upcoming reboot of Cry Havoc! as well as some Grimdark Future sets and more
- At the last possible minute, MMP tried to sneak Shenandoah: Jackson and Sheridan in the Valley, 1862 – 1864 by us when the put it up for pre-order in time for tea today
- Preorders from Warlord Games
- This week on Kickstarter
- The Great Anglo-Boer War – The Battle for South Africa 1899-1902 is the latest big-box map-&-minis game from Cadet Games, on Kickstarter, and somehow its absolutely nowhere on their own website to let you know about it
- There’s a new expansion, plus a reprint, of Snap Ships Tactics, which we’ve shown you before from GAMA Expo
- Star Squadron is a new space dogfighting game
- And this week’s hopeless campaign is Master of Galaxies, which still has 23 days, but only 3 backers and 6% toward an already-high funding goal
- Modiphius has a pair of Discworld board games on pre-order
- Kill Sam Vimes – A Discworld Board Game
- Readers Digested – A Discworld Board Game in both Deluxe and Basic versions
- The newest p500 games from GMT
- Enlightenment Empires (Central & Eastern Europe in the 18th century using the Baltic Empires system)
- The Forgotten Hell (vol 6 in The Last Hundred Yards series)
Price reductions are arriving in force 📉—brace accordingly 💵
- No we can’t tell you about the MMP sale, because it started on Thursday and ended on Monday and it’s clear they hate us 🤷♂️
- WDS ‘Game of the week’ is Civil War Battles: Campaign Gettysburg for $29.95, on sale until Sunday
- Two different bundles from MicroProse on sale thru Steam until 31 August
- MicroProse Strategy Bundle which includes TFC2 from above (9 games, 27% off)
- MicroProse Simulation Bundle with a bunch of flights sims + others (10 games, 23% off)
- Old School Tactical V4: For the Empire expansion is $10 off at Flying Pig’s site
- Noble Knight has copies of Andean Abyss starting at $125
- Miniature Market has Guerre Eclair on sale this week
- Northgard: The Viking Age Edition is on GOG at 65% off
- The GMT Newsletter also noted that all of these are over-stocked in the warehouse an on sale anywhere from 45-60%
The editorial pipeline remains productive 📈—here’s the evidence 📄
Last week for our 2026 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming Survey!
- Feeding the Content Beast — Keeping the Wargaming Media Flowing
- #TBT — System 7 Napoleonics in Dragon Magazine
- Saturday Night Fights ~ Valour and Fortitude 4.0: “A Stroll to Smolensk”
- AARs
- From The Armchair Dragoons Archives
- Back on 11 Dec 19, we released Matrix Games’ Command: Modern Operations – First Look! by bayonetbrant
- On 9 May 25, we shared an 8-Player Game of Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific at Buckeye Game Fest 2025 on our YouTube channel
- Shorts!
- Gameplay this week
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
credit where it’s due — this column from Big Board clearly states, and tests, criteria for the author’s definition of a “wargame”; you can disagree with it, of course, but taking the time to define and test and stake out the hill leaves no doubts about the author’s positions
I wrote: a wargame involves kinetic action between two or more parties in the game. His reply is that this doesn’t only throw out business and political games. It throws out logistics wargames, MEDEVAC wargames, intelligence wargames and cyber wargames. Then the line that made me give pause:
“if a game about something like cyberwarfare doesn’t make the cut, then it’s obvious that something’s off.”
He’s half right, and the half he’s right about matters. My sentence threw a MEDEVAC game into the same bin as a hedge fund game, and those two are not alike. A game about lifting casualties off a battlefield belongs to war in a way a game about rare-earth supply does not.
Lumping them together was sloppy and I’m not defending it.
But the fix isn’t to call them wargames. It’s to stop pretending there are only two boxes.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream covered (some of) the ACW
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- This week, Scott Thorne challenges WotC to spend as much effort promoting their upcoming D&D WoW products to customers as they do to the stores
- BoardGameWire goes back to the real world intruding on our games to talk about how after a successful debut, Middle East’s first major tabletop games con faces new challenge securing publishers amid US-Iran war
- Rascal talks about the games getting public funding in Europe
- ICv2 reports on the retirement of Chessex owner Donald Reents after 40 years of everything from dice to battlemats to chess clocks
- The mouse in this AI war game is a demonic latex hand (Killscreen)
- A good look back at Sir Ian Livingstone’s career (Telegraph via Yahoo)
- Company Updates
- Alternative Armies’ “Summer Event 2026” is underway and it’s a mix of new releases with daily drops, some freebies, and more but doesn’t fit neatly into any of our categories above
- Matrix Games has some technical updates to their Rule The Waves 3 game
It seems to me that if you are going to use AI images for advertising and then post an emotive video about how you are not using AI images and how dare someone accuse you of such a thing, remove the AI companies watermark from your AI images first. Pasting over it with a logo is a start I guess.
— J from 3 Minute board games (@3mbg.bsky.social) 2026-08-25T10:39:44.571Z
Articles, advice, and ideas for those of you on the creative side
- Skeleton Code Machine asks “Can we use soccer in a TTRPG?“
- When do you earn the right to call yourself a successful designer?
- Grading publishers on their contracts
- Welcome to CCDS Design Lab for high school kids
AEG is looking for a paper airplane enthusiast or expert to consult with us on a few things for a project we are working on. If you are the person who knows way too much about paper airplanes, folding tech, or the wonderfully weird world around them, lets connect. Yes, this is a real request. 😄
— Alderac Entertainment Group (@alderaceg.bsky.social) 2026-08-19T09:33:45.431Z
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 ~ September 134 and October 4
- 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
- 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)
- 5-9 Nov Compass Fall Expo 2026 (Meriden CT)
- 6-8 Nov HMGS Fall-in! (Lancaster PA)
- 6-9 Nov SDHistCon Summit 2026 (San Diego CA)
Event schedule as of 25 August; Registration is still open!
| Event Name | Max | Starts | Mins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Battles of the American Revolution: Rhode Island | 1 | 10/09-FRI 12:00 | 240 |
| Kriegsspiel Scenario | 10 | 10/09-FRI 12:00 | 120 |
| Raider Drop Zone (Full division!) | 6 | 10/09-FRI 14:00 | 300 |
| Red Baron’s War—WWI Air combat a remake of Richthofen’s War | 10 | 10/09-FRI 14:00 | 240 |
| Off the Line: The Winter War | 2 | 10/09-FRI 15:00 | 180 |
| King of the Tabletop | 4 | 10/09-FRI 19:00 | 120 |
| Combat Commander | 4 | 10/09-FRI 19:00 | 240 |
| Sails of Glory | 10 | 10/09-FRI 20:00 | 180 |
| Cracking the Hammer Bastion (Saturday) | 6 | 10/10-SAT 09:00 | 240 |
| Air & Armor: V Corps Learn To Play | 5 | 10/10-SAT 09:00 | 360 |
| Grand Tactical Series Beach Landing Scenario | 4 | 10/10-SAT 09:00 | 240 |
| BCS- Danger Forward | 2 | 10/10-SAT 09:00 | 180 |
| Wings of War/ Wings of Glory: WWII | 10 | 10/10-SAT 10:00 | 120 |
| Eagles in the Sky | 2 | 10/10-SAT 10:00 | 180 |
| SPI’s Würzburg | 4 | 10/10-SAT 13:00 | 180 |
| From Rappahannock to Bull Run – (rolling game part 1) | 4 | 10/10-SAT 13:00 | 240 |
| Anaconda: Gray Skies, Blue Water | 4 | 10/10-SAT 14:00 | 240 |
| Red Baron’s War—WWI Air combat a remake of Richthofen’s War | 10 | 10/10-SAT 16:00 | 240 |
| The Napoleonic Wars by GMT | 4 | 10/10-SAT 19:00 | 240 |
| From Rappahannock to Bull Run – (rolling game part 2) | 4 | 10/10-SAT 19:00 | 240 |
| MASS Impact | 4 | 10/10-SAT 20:00 | 180 |
| Cracking the Hammer Bastion (Sunday) | 6 | 10/11-SUN 09:00 | 240 |
| Air & Armor: V Corps Learn To Play | 5 | 10/11-SUN 09:00 | 360 |
| Musket and Pike Battle Series – Naseby | 4 | 10/11-SUN 09:00 | 240 |
| Wings of War/ Wings of Glory: WWI | 10 | 10/11-SUN 10:00 | 120 |
| Brief Border Wars 2 | 4 | 10/11-SUN 12:00 | 120 |
| Die Atom Bombe (by Against the Odds) | 5 | 10/11-SUN 12:00 | 240 |
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
Wargaming News & Articles for the Pros
- The First US Army War College Wargaming & Professional Military Education Symposium: A New Home for a Growing Community (SWJ)
We’ve also got our own wrap-up coming up at the end of the week, with one of our Dragoons who also attended - FCI’s Supply & Steel game gets reviewed by the Australian military (The Cove)
- This week, Wargaming Weekly asks “Is business wargaming an oxymoron?!“
- University of Vaasa and Finnish National Defence University launch collaboration – games offer new tools for preparedness (University of Vaasa)
- What Happens When Wargaming Has to Keep Pace with Real Conflict? (SPA via LinkedIn)
- A Wargame 15 Years Ago Tested A War With Russia And China At Once. ‘It Didn’t Go Well’ For The US Military And The Iran War Proves It Today (The 1945)
- Military Wargaming Update (StrategyPage)
- Wargame Tested: What the Air Force Needs for a China Fight (MigFlug)
- Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Behavioral Cloning in Modern Wargaming: A Critical Assessment (LinkedIn)
- PaxSims laments The Army Taught Me to Write Like AI
- Get Hired! MANTECH has a posting for Wargame Exercise Analyst
Wargame Events of Professional Interest
- The next GUWS webinars
- 1 September — Joint Wargaming in Denmark
- 22 September — Build Excel War Gaming Tools
- 6 October — After AlphaZero: Human-Machine Teaming from Games to the Battlefield
- 20 October — Wargaming in the French Army: Duel Tactique
- 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
- 11 September — Playing the nation: Identity, culture, and power in video games, register here
- 19-20 September — Iron Tide virtual wargame/exercise (Taiwan Straits scenario), register here
- 18 October — Designing Historical Games for Classrooms – A Practical Guide for Educators, register here
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
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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Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
