Pre-Orders, Practitioners, and Prepping for The ACDC ~ #TuesdayNewsday

Catch up on all things wargaming with this week’s edition of #TuesdayNewsday!

 

With the Fall Assembly in our rear-view mirror, attention turns to January’s ACDC – the Armchair Dragoons Digital Convention – to be held 17-19 January 2025.  This is as close as we can get you to a real-world game convention while you’re hanging out in your pajamas.

We’ll have game sessions, watch-it-played demos, some historical talks, game panels, and more.

Want to get involved?  Drop a line in the forums here and we’ll figure out what works!  Event submissions will open in November, and badges will go on sale right after Thanksgiving.

 

TGN and Hethwill are among the people we saw sharing this bit of gaming history this past week

 

Clint & Jodi at Carolina Game Tables have roots up in the mountains, and are using their company to help the Hurricane Helene recovery efforts.  They’ve got a campaign for “relief buckets” that provide recovery supplies for each table sold, as well as offering customers a chance to donate relief buckets directly without a purchase. Details are on their site here, and check out the tables on sale while you’re there.

 

Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!

• Dark City Games released Bone Wars, the latest in their western skirmish-heavy RPG/adventure games
• Steve Jackson Games started shipping Hack & Slash Deluxe
• You can get Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ from Barnes & Noble
• If you missed them back when they were bonuses with rulebooks or supplements, Warlord Games are celebrating their birthday with a special collected Warlord Games Birthday Celebration Book Figure Bundle that gathers them all into one order
• Over on Wargame Vault, there’s a trio of new download-only products for Advanced Squad Leader from MMP; these are collecting articles and scenarios previously published, but hard-to-find since their original magazines are out of print
  • Special Ops ASLSK Scenario Bundle Vol. 1
  • Special Ops ASL Scenario Bundle Vol. 1
  • Out of the Attic #2
• Three new ASL third-party packages hit Gamer’s Armory while we were there this weekend for the Fall Assembly; these are all scenarios and historical notes, but not maps & counters
  • Schwerpunkt Vol 24
  • Rally Point #21
  • March Madness – The Korean War Pack

 

 

Time to get those orders in now and then either (a) complain that it’s 2 years late, and/or (b) be surprised when it gets here sooner than you thought

• Worthington’s got another batch of small-footprint/travel games on Kickstarter: Shogun Solitaire, and Europe at War 1944 Solitaire and French & Indian War Solitaire
• Dana Lombardy teamed up with Steve Jackson¹ to bring back Steve’s old One Page Bulge game and it cleared its Kickstarter funding in about 83 seconds
• Compass put Pontiac’s War on Kickstarter as we were prepping this edition of the news
• Renegade has a new version of Diplomacy called Era of Empire on pre-order; this one takes place in the Victorian 19th century
• Warlord Games has a nice set of Arthurian Knights and another of Heroes Of Camelot on pre-order
• Metus is a 1-2 player “grand strategy” game on Kickstarter that claims it’s a COIN-style game with no cards, ops/actions, or forces/bases dichotomy
• Modiphius launched the Kickstarter for their licensed Discworld RPG and it’ll be past a half-million dollars by the time you read this
• Last call for Caporetto 1917 pre-orders with Europa Simulazioni
• Warlord’s/Cyrano’s “Epic Scale” battles for their Black Powder series gets a couple of “big” pre-orders
  • Black Powder Epic Battles: Napoleonic Peninsular British Infantry Brigade
  • Black Powder Epic Battles: Napoleonic Peninsular British Infantry
  • Black Powder Epic Battles: Napoleonic British Foot Artillery (Peninsular Campaign)
  • Black Powder Epic Battles: Napoleonic British Light Infantry Brigade
  • Black Powder Epic Battles: Napoleonic British Light Infantry
  • Black Powder Epic Battles: Napoleonic Peninsular British Foot Artillery Park

 

Looking for a deal? Getting more bang for your buck?

• While we wait for the holiday catalogs to show up, Compass Games has gone ahead and updated their site with their annual holiday sale prices already
• WDS “Game of the week” is Panzer Campaigns – El Alamein ‘42 for $29.95
• Dice Envy’s latest release is a “court of fireflies” set and it’s 10% off with coupon code LAMPYRID at checkout
• Miniature Market has the new Divine Right at $76 (from $95) and Red Dust Rebellion at $67 (from $95)
• GOG has Medieval Battlefields under $5 right now
• Free League has the Vaesen RPG core rulebook at 50% off ahead of the Kickstarter launch of their upcoming expansions to the game
• Star Wars: Outer Rim is 20% off

 

This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world

• Rocky talks about the new toys he brought back from the Fall Assembly
• Brian Train is headed to Georgetown
• Space Biff tells you about the new Star Trek Lower Decks – Buffer Time game from Modiphius
• Avalanche Press has an article about Japan’s “semi-dreadnoughts” of WW2
• Wargaming Esoterica plays Case Blue² for a solo AAR

 

The best videos this week from our wargaming friends

• Meandering Mike continues the nostalgia trend with his Hex and Counter Memories – Panzer 44 from SPI
• My Own Worst Enemy says ‘hi’ from outside the Fall Assembly
• Bill Molyneaux attended A Call to Arms Wargame convention in Williamsburg
• Beyond Solitaire dropped Episode 172: Xoe Allred on Non-Hierarchical Games
• Fred & Ricardo did a “teach & play” with Ventonuovo for their Waterloo 200 game
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about “perspective in wargames”

 

 

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

• HissyCat’s “Postcards From The Front” game-jam for 2025 is coming up and you can read about it here as you get ready for it to start next month
• ICv2 reports that longtime industry vet Steve Horvath – officially now from Asmodee but many folks would remember him from FFG, pre-acquisition – is hanging up his spurs after 25 years in the game biz and calling it a career
• BoardGameWire talks about the growth of board games in Germany, countering a wider drop-off in toy sales there
• Rascal dropped their paywall for the article about the hurricanes have affected tabletop gaming
• Serious Historical Games has a survey about future game topics for development and they are VERY SERIOUS ABOUT USING THEIR CAPITAL LETTERS
• Using board games in history education, in Poland (article is in English)
• Some downloads for DiSimula’s 1943-1945 game over on their site, including some p-&-p counters

 

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

• Saturday Night Fights ~ Our Very Own Club Game for “Eisenhower”
• Mentioned In Dispatches Season 13 Ep 5 ~ The Shelf of Shame
• More Data Diving Into the 2024 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey
• Gameplay this week
  • Operation: CHARNWOOD the Battle of Galmanche (3) (IABSM)
  • The Battle of Hanau for “Bloody Big Battles”
  • Destiny 2 | Vespers Host Dungeon Race

Reminder than #UnboxingDay is on hiatus until 2025, when we’ll re-evaluate its potential return

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Our site rebuild is underway, but is going to be happening in stages.

You’ll start to see some things changing on the front of the site and other things moving around.
The first big technical hurdle is largely done, but there’s going to be another day in a few weeks where there could be some intermittent outages as we run part 2 of this change.

One of the key technical needs here is to give up more space on the server to create a clone of the site, which will allow us to test upgrades, plug-ins, UI changes, and such without impacting the main site until we’re sure they’ll work and be stable.  As the old IT gag goes: “everyone has a test server; some people are lucky enough to have a separate production server” and that’s what we’re setting ourselves up for.

 

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

Upcoming Dragoons Events

• Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 3 November and 1 December
• Next confirmed live event is BuckeyeGameFest, 1-4 May 2025
• Next planned virtual event is the ACDC³, 17-19 January, 2025

Other Conventions & Events

• 17-20 October 2024 GMT Fall Weekend at the Warehouse (Middle of Nowhere CA) <– THIS WEEKEND!
• 17-20 October GameholeCon (Madison WI)  <– THIS WEEKEND!
• 26-28 October 2024 Auck Con (Auckland NZ)
• 1-3 November  RockCon (Rockford IL)
• 6-11 November 2024 Compass Game Fall Expo (Meriden CT)
• 7-10 November BottosCon (New Westminster BC)
• 8-10 November 2024 MythicCon (Charlotte NC)
• 8-11 November 2024 FoxCon (Dallas TX)
• 8-11 November 2024 SDHISTCON (San Diego CA)
• 5-7 November2024 Connections Oz (virtual)
• 15-17 November 2024 SCGCon (Liverpool UK)

 

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

• Very interesting podcast here with Ed McGrady and others, talking about wargaming climate change impacts
• TRADOC’s MadSci blog continues their romp through professional wargaming, with a company-grade view from the US Army
• How do you mentor junior wargame practitioners?
• How do you integrate wargaming into unit professional military education? (Fight Club webinar)
• This week, Mick Ryan talks about the current state of several different ongoing wars
• The next GUWS webinar is Dungeons and Dragons: Next Generation Interactive TDGs on 22 October; after that, it’s
  Transforming Policy into Digital Games: From AI to Plastic Pollution on 4 November

Thread follows:

 

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 also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (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.

1. the US one
2. no, not that one
3. Armchair Dragoons Digital Convention