by Our must-read weekly #TuesdayNewsday digs into the strategy gaming headlines for you
There’s been a whole bunch of professional wargaming that’s showed up in the press lately.
- Financial Times of the UK looks at whether or not wargames have any predictive power and so does a Japanese news outlet
- “Serious games” about issues in the Gulf of Mexico
- Obviously, the ‘big’ story is Littoral Commander making inroads in the defense world in a way that others never quite did
- And there’s even some real-world tie-ins in the Philippines that you can explore
- Plus, the new USMC littoral regiments are performing well in their initial exercises (and probably better than the original US Army Task Force XXI back in the ’90s)
- And theater-wide analyses will inform future wargames in the same vein
- The well-regarded Lawfare site discussed the art & science of wargaming
- The Naval War College’s intro to wargaming course
- Wargaming at the Belgian Defence College
- And it took them a few months, but even the local news got around to covering the CSIS wargame on Taiwan, whose report was released back in January
- Heck, you’ve even got James “Pigeon” Fielder giving a TED talk!
Speaking of professional wargaming, there’s a whole bunch of Connections Conferences lined up for this year:
- Connections Online – 17-23 April 2023
- Connections North – 9 June 2023
- Connections US – 21-23 June 2023 (yes, it overlaps with Origins – what were they thinking1?!)
- Connections UK – 5-7 September 2023
What’s shipped this past week that you’ll find interesting
- ONUS! Trainus is finally shipping to pre-order customers, so it’s now available to order on their site, too
- S&T #340, with French and Indian War Battles, is shipping now
- Command Post Games has finally – FINALLY! – gotten around to releasing their new Pirates! game, and you can order the starter kit here, plus extra card decks, ships, and even the t-shirt
- 12 Hours of Maleme from SNAFU Designs, is now available; it covers the battle around the titular airfield in Crete in WW2
- Going back to the bottomless well of Munchkin, SJG has both the new Squids expansion, and a variety of colors of polyhedral dice sets (with cards for integrating into regular Munchkin games)
- Oh yeah, and Munchkin goes mobile!
- The new dragon from Alternative Armies looks damned cool, but also damned pricey
- While we got one of HFD’s new releases last week, they actually threw out 2 others2!
- Based on GMT’s message last week, you should start seeing the following games in your mailbox this week
- Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East
- Atlantic Chase, 2nd Printing
- Clash of Sovereigns
- Grand Prix new Track Pack
Crowdfunding or pre-orders ~ if you can order it now, here it is
- The guys from Draco are back already with another crowdfunder, as they put Drums of War on Kickstarter. It looks like ONUS! but uses the cards as individual characters instead of using them in lieu of stands of minis
- Free League is hoping that zombie-mania hasn’t fully subsided with the end of the show, as they just launched their Walking Dead Universe RPG on Kickstarter last week
- We’re getting ahead of ourselves, because LNLP can’t properly time the launch of their crowdfunding campaigns to our convenience to match our Tuesday Newsday cycle, so here’s the link to the JU 87 Stuka Ace campaign that starts tomorrow
- Now that Winter is over, Warlord Games released the pre-orders for some Bolt Action weapons teams, in Winter gear
- German Heer (Winter) Weapons Teams
- US Army (Winter) Weapons Teams, including a borderline-Steampunk-looking flamethrower dude
- British Airborne Weapons Teams (not in Winter garb for some reason)
- Man, people are not going to stop trying to make Talislanta a ‘thing’ are they? Is something really a ‘good’ thing just because it’s been around over 30 years? Well, Everything Epic is hoping to find out, and they’ve got a lot of backers on Gamefound that think so
- This week’s winner of the “screw those Dragoons” sweepstakes for launching their campaign late on a Tuesday afternoon belongs to the Scharz guys, who have a sprawling multi-player world-domination game on Kickstarter
Save a few bucks with these deals
- Folks ordering from CSL can get free shipping on orders over $60 by using coupon code FREESHIPPINGSALE
- Steam’s Spring sale started this week; lots of stuff in here, including a variety of strategy/wargames
- Is it technically “on sale” if it’s free? Who cares! WH40K: Gladius – Relics of War is free right now on the Epic Games store
- Worthington still has their Band of Brothers 5-game back for $300. That $60/game average is about $10-15 lower than the per-game cost individually
- Miniature Market has Germania Magna: Border in Flames on clearance for $18
- S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is World at War #77 with Winter War: Finland vs The Soviet Union 1939
What’s happened with the Dragoons this past week
- Mentioned in Dispatches Season 10 Ep 6 ~ Wargaming Rules Formats
- The Giant Civ 6 AAR: Nubia, Part Eight
- FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ The Sentry Box, Calgary AB
- This week was #UnboxingDay!, including some first-time contributors!
- Saturday Night Fights ~ The Murmansk Run (part III) for “NIMITZ”
- Rocky got a little frisky in his review, Ameritrash Expressions with Task Force: Carrier Battles in the Pacific (Vuca Simulations, 2023)
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums
- What did the postman deliver today? And did he ring twice?
- Talking about BGF in our forums
- Agent Elvis on Netflix
- Don’t worry, we laugh at the funny ones!
- UCG is going to tell you all about his CK games, but never in its own thread for some reason
- Upcoming Dragoons Events (and don’t forget to check the event calendar for everything else)
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ April 2nd and May 7th
- Next #UnboxingDay3 was last week! Where were you?!
- Next Virtual Convention is The ACDC on 13-15 January
- Next Real-World Convention is going to be Buckeye Game Fest, in Columbus OH, 28-30 April (with the War Room opening up on 24 April for extended wargaming)
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
- 22-26 March Adepticon (Schaumburg, IL)
- 23-26 March PAX East (Boston,MA)
- 24-26 March Hotlead (Stratford, ON)
- 31 March – 2 April GMT East (Mount Kisko, NY)
- 31 March – 3 April, Circle DC (Washington, DC)
- 17-24 April Connections Online
- 24-30 April Buckeye Game Fest (incl The War Room) (Columbus, OH)
- 21-25 June ORIGINS (Columbus, OH)
Oh, and within a few weeks, we’re going to have a special event announcement for the weekend of 20-22 October, but maybe you should start looking for hotels in the Raleigh/Cary NC area…
The Connections Online executive committee is pleased to announce the theme of this year’s Connections Online conference: “The Enemy Gets a Vote — Playing Red.” We’ll look at playing Red in wargaming, as well as what various professional communities mean by the term “red teaming.” (Hint: The definitions overlap, more or less, but terms frequently has discipline-specific connotations that may not be entirely obvious.)
The Core of the conference will run from 18-20 April 2023, with events scheduled from 1000-1600 EDT. Extended events (including both games and workshops) will run from the weekend before to the weekend after. Core events will be accessed through YouTube; registration information will be forthcoming. Previous conferences are accessible through YouTube (2022 and 2021).
Among the 12 planned core events we will have: What Is Red-Teaming, Red-Teaming Acts of God, Advice for New Practitioners, Gaming & Red-Teaming the Pandemic, and the guys from The NSDM
Extended events will include the Wargame Bootcamp to learn to use Discord, VASSAL, and TTS; a Littoral Commander demo; a discussion of the state-of-the-art of the hobby wargaming space; and a multi-player Discord-driven Kriegsspiel with the International Kriegsspiel Society
Other great content creators from the wargaming world
- Rocky has an interesting take on fog of war, using World at War ’85 as the example
- Moe is live tonight with this month’s Whiskey Charlie show
- My Own Worst Enemy is fighting through Carrier Battle Philippine Sea – Scenario 4
- As noted on Ardwulf’s livestream, Stiglr tears into Highway to the Reich
- Canadian Wargamer Podcast ep 22 is now out
- Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about BGG’s ranking of “the best wargames of all time”
Don’t forget we’ve got a dedicated area of our forums for the professional wargamers.
- PaxSims is showing of a holographic gaming table
- The fighting continues to rage in Bakhmut
- NATO Wargame Design Challenge
- You thought the F35 took forever to go live? The UK finally got their Ajax IFV into service
- The next GUWS webinar is tonight with Wargaming at West Point, and after that, it’s Flux Capacity: Interactive Sims for Decision-making in Complex Environments on 4/4
- Connections North 2023 registration is open; it’ll be held on 9 June in Ottawa
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we wanted to share with you
How are scientists trying to explore the the remains of Doggerland, buried under the sea long ago.
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.
We appreciate you visiting the Armchair Dragoons and hope that you enjoy our weekly news dumps!
Please leave us your feedback in our discussion forum, or in the comment area below.
You can also find the regiment on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and occasionally at a convention near you.
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Even we at the Institute of World Politics joined the Littoral Commander party last weekend: https://twitter.com/SebastianBae/status/1637434553026461700