Plenty of Post-Holiday Pre-Orders ~ #TuesdayNewsday

Join us every #TuesdayNewsday as we unveil the latest in tabletop warfare triumphs.

 

The ACDC is done & dusted.  Participants have been sent their follow-up surveys to let us know how we did, and the livestream archive is posted.  The next one will be 17-19 January 2025.

We’ve asked folks who did not attend The ACDC to give us some feedback on why not.  For some it was the events offered; for others it was time zone challenges.  A lot of people have just said “already busy that weekend” but that might’ve just been covering up that even if they weren’t busy they wouldn’t’ve attended.  If you’re just not in wargaming-through-a-screen, we get it.  If you didn’t even hear about it ’til it was too late, we get it¹.  If nothing seemed all that spectacular to you, we get that, too!

But drop us a line in the forums, or in the comments below, and let us know why you didn’t join us for The ACDC, and maybe we can help mitigate some of those issues in the future.

 

Ads for the reprint of Votes for Women seems to have run afoul of Facebook/Meta’s Stupidity Police™ as they’ve pulled all of Fort Circle’s advertising, claiming it’s a “sensitive topic”.  Since the dustup started, it’s now appearing in the wider gaming press.

• Facebook rejects ads for popular board game Votes for Women: ‘[It] may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation’ (PC Gamer)
• Board Game ‘Votes for Women’ Encounters Facebook Advertising Roadblock (BNN)
• Votes for Women’s second board game print run stymied by banned Facebook ads (Dicebreaker)
• Facebook bans ads for award-winning Votes for Women board game’s new Kickstarter, claims it is a “sensitive social issue” (BoardGameWire)

You can back the Kickstarter campaign here, or read Tory’s extended designer diary over on BGG

 

We’ve lost a couple of longtime hobby gaming industry stalwarts this past week…

Jennell Jaquays passed away, and there aren’t many people who were in the hobby as long as she was, going back to the early ’70s with tabletop designs for Judges Guild, and video game art & design for Coleco, ID, and more.

• Obituary
• GoFundMe to help w/ family expenses, including medical & funeral bills
• The Legacy of Jennell Jaquays

Brian Ansell, founder of Citadel minis and co-creator of Warhammer, passed away 2 weeks ago

• Family announcement on FB
• IGN’s retrospective

This week’s releases that you’ll want to know about

• Compass Games started shipping Europe in Turmoil: Prelude to The Great War, Deluxe Edition and Europe in Turmoil II: The Interbellum Years but you can still snag them at the pre-order discount right now
• The Fields of Normandy XL: A Solitaire Wargame from Mike Lambo is on Amazon
• Modiphius Games has released their sci-fi / non-Earth-post-still-post-apocalyptic Dreams & Machines game that’s been on pre-order for a while now
• The newest issue of Irregular Magazine is available for download
• We’ve been behind in tracking The Art of Wargames releases through Amazon, where the following are now available
  • The newest release, from this year – Glory or Death: Battle of Rorke’s Drift Solitaire Book Wargame
  • Men of War: Central America – CONTRAS: Solitaire Tactical Book Wargame
  • Delta Six Patrol: D6 Solitaire Tactical Book Wargame
  • Men of War: Indochina French Foreign Legion: Solitaire Tactical Book Wargame

 

Getcher orders in now and then either (a) wait for it impatiently, or (b) forget your ordered it and be surprised later!

• In case you were lacking in the category of “Board Games With Endless Built In Quotes During Gameplay” there’s a MONTY PYTHON and the HOLY GRAIL board game on Backerkit right now and it’s every bit as zany and amusing as you’d expect; oh, and it comes with working catapult to launch cows across the board
• By the time you’re reading this, VentoNuovo will have launched their Black Swan and Orange Swan expansions on Kickstarter
• Looks like La Bataille de Wagram from Legion Wargames is on pre-order
• Another new pre-order from the TSWargames crew – Friedland 1807
• Skies Above The Great War on sale on early access on Steam for $13.49
• Columbia Games has their Julius Caesar reprints inbound, so the pre-order price likely won’t last much longer
• The next expansion for the Imperium series from Osprey is on pre-order
• Catastrophe Games has a new one in their Valor Mountain line of non-wargames, Llamagedon (2nd ed) is on pre-order
• Print-&-play game Knight just launched today on Kickstarter
• Revolution Games was busy over the holidays, and are now dropping 3 new games, plus a reprint, all scheduled to ship the 2nd week of February
  • (NEW!) Manila: The Savage Streets, 1945 Solitaire Area Movement System #2
  • (NEW!) Prelude to Vicksburg Blind Swords series #9
  • (NEW!) Sedgwick Attacks Blind Swords series #10
  • (REPRINT!) Stalingrad: Advance to the Volga, 1942 Solitaire Area Movement System #1

 

Saving money? Spending just as much but getting more for it?

• Big cyberpunk bundle on Bundle of Holding
• Galloping Major has a big sale on their French & Indian War minis to start the year
• Alternative Armies has a set of dwarven warriors on sale
• Once We Moved Like The Wind, The Apache Wars, 1861-1886 on sale at Compass for just $35
• Stuka Leader is on sale at Miniature Market for over $20 off

This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world

• Rocky updates 2024 on the pre-order and delivery front
• Real & Simulated Wars looks at small unit tactics in digital games, using ARMA 3 as the sample
• Space Biff pokes at Empire’s End
• Avalanche Press has an article about the Japanese invasion of Borneo in 1942

 

The best videos this week from our wargaming friends

• Moe puts his CVC back on and pokes at Gunner, HEAT, PC
• My Own Worst Enemy goes back to Eutaw Springs
• Beyond Solitaire talks about education gaming, using Colonial Mexico as the exemplar
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about Wargame Aesthetics

 

 

Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world

• A fantastic year-end update from the guys over at Wargame Design Studio
• Columnist Scott Thorne offers up his 2024 game biz predictions over at ICv2
• The Battlefront minis folks (Flames of War and Team Yankee among others) are updating² the cost of their online “Forces” tool for building & planning armies and printing command cards
• Decision Games wants your feedback on boxed game reprints
• Deep cuts in the workforces at both Twitch and Unity
• Matrix released a new update for Shadow Empire that introduces a bunch of sub-cultures

 

It’s been a busy week for the regiment; here’s what you might’ve missed!

• The 2024 ACDC Livestream Archive-some highlights:
  • The 2024 ACDC Keynote
  • Volko’s new Coastwatchers game
  • Postcards of War
  • AWI Wargaming
• Your 2023 in Wargaming, Part 2 (follow up Your 2023 in Wargaming, Part 1)
• This week in our forums
  • The “tasks” of mythology
  • Talking about War and Peace
  • LnLP’s upcoming Blood & Fury
• Gameplay this week
  • The Great Rice Hunt (II) for “Charlie Don’t Surf!”
  • “General d’Armee” Returns and It’s the Battle of Gross Gorschen
  • The Battle of Wissembourg for “Valour and Fortitude”
• 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 ~ 4 February and 3 March
  • Next #UnboxingDay³ will be this week!
  • Next virtual event is Connections Online, 15-20 April 2024
  • Next confirmed live event is Buckeye Game Fest, 29 April – 5 May, 2024

 

Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.

The Serious Play Conference has been announced for 12-14 August in Toronto.

• • 15-28 January 2024 BellotaCon (Badajoz Spain)
  • 3 February 2024 SDHistCon 2024: ‘Winter Quarters’ (Online)
  • 10 February 2024 The Battle At The Crossroads (Cambridge OH)
  • 17 February 2024 Connections North (Montreal QC)
  • 4-7 April 2024 Circle DC (Washington DC)
  • 2-5 May 2024 BuckeyeGameFest (Columbus OH)
  • 16-20 May Compass Expo(Meriden CT)
  • 19-23 June 2024 Origins (Columbus OH)
  • 25-27 June 2024 Connections (Carlisle PA)

 

Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!

• Time to reassess the stats for the M2/M3 Bradleys in modern wargames?
• Defining “targeting” for Space Force
• The next GUWS webinar is Wargaming’s Influence on U.S. Navy Tactical Doctrine, 1906-1941 (Jan 23), followed by Saga: A Sub-threshold Conflict Wargaming System (Feb 6) and Integrating Scientific Experiments with Wargaming Mechanics (Feb 20)
• PaxSims has a rundown of sims & gaming pubs, which thankfully doesn’t include that idiot piece from CIMSEC
• Counting down to Connections Online – expect to see the call for proposals in the next few days

 

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.

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Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it.
(We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.)
You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

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On Tuesdays, the wargamers convene,
For news on each strategic scene,
With updates in tow,
They’re ready to go,
In battles on both tables and screens!

1. we’re gonna wonder ‘how’ since we’ve been promoting it like crazy here, but whatevs
2. “increasing”
3. 3rd Thursday of the month