It’s our last #TuesdayNewsday of the year! Catch up on the top headlines shaping the tabletop wargaming hobby, computer strategy games, and the defense wargaming community. We’re off next week, and we’ll see you in 2025.
Merry New Year, Happy Holidays, Joyous School Days Off, Fröliche Weihnachten, and a very Celebratory “Wish I Could Use Some of My Vacation to Play Games” to all!
This is the last #TuesdayNewsday of 2024 and we hope you’ve have a great year of wargaming
🎄
The latest GMT newsletter leads off with a discussion around some upcoming price increases and the reasons behind them
These costs add up, and we’re finally at the place where we’re going to have to make some increases. So these rising costs—many abrupt and unexpected—have made our journey much more difficult, especially in this last half of 2024. Along with anticipated upcoming tariff increases of even 10%, they are causing us to take a hard look at what we’re charging for our products and for shipping, as well as doing some internal “belt-tightening” on expenses, in order to keep GMT healthy in these challenging times.
So there are some prince increases, corrections on shipping weights, and some other tweaks. They’ve also found a distributor for Australian customers.
Lock ‘n Load Publishing’s long-awaited Kickstarters are in the warehouse and shipping is underway. Of course, we’ve got holiday mail traffic + days off to work around, but at least they’re starting to move!
Depending on what you ordered, there’s a combination of World at War ’85: Blood & Fury, Ju-87 Stuka Ace, Glory & Empire: First Victories, and even a Point Blank expansion all showing up
Registration is open for the 2025 ACDC, to be held online 17-19 January 2025.
As with our previous editions of the ArmChair Dragoons Digital Convention1, we’ll be wargaming all weekend long with a variety of games, seminars, panels, talks shows, pickup games, and more.
Folks, we’ve got a pretty impressive lineup of games for The ACDC, and seats still available in a bunch of them. Our surveys show that people would love to be playing more games, and now here’s a chance! Whether you’re checking out an upcoming game (Order & Opportunity, Queen of Spies, Epipolae, or one of the others) or learning something you can order by the end of the night (Raider Drop Zone, Stalingrad Roads, Oceans of Fire, Rebels & Patriots, or another one of several options), there’s a bunch to choose from, plus a couple of talk shows, seminars, and other frivolity between the games. It’ll be the best $4 you’ve spent all year
ORIGINAL OPORD ~ REGISTRATION ~ LIVESTREAM ARCHIVE ~ AAR
Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!
- Columbia Games announced that Alliance is now in-stock
- Minden Games released The Fall of Röhm: Turning Point, 1934
- Avalanche Press released the playbook edition of Panzer Grenadier: Liberation 1944 with the Brits in France & Belgium
- Warlord Games released The Wars Of The Roses – Hail Caesar Supplement With Richard III, King Of England Special Miniature
- Ultimate General: American Revolution just released last week on Steam and it’s still on launch sale
- Neva Wargames first release is a free print-&-play game covering Iwo Jima
- Worthington are wrapping up shipping on a couple of recent Kickstarters, so now they have put those games up for sale to the public, and there’s still a discount if you grab ’em quick
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
- The Wargaming Company are taking pre-orders on The First Battle Lost, 1809 in Germany, Series 3 for Et Sans Resultat
- Warlord Games put their Bad Santa Boxes on pre-order; you can also get a VW Beetle Staff Car
- Battlefront Minis has the new Flames of War Firestorm: Leviathans campaign pack on pre-order
- Operation Barbarossa: A WW2 Roll & Write Game is a solo game on Kickstarter right now
- Renegade Game Studios has a big-ass 9+ sq ft map for Axis & Allies 1914 on pre-order; this is just the map
- Pre-orders open imminently for Game of Drones, a solitaire game set in the ongoing Ukraine conflict2
- Miniature Market has a new 7 Empires on pre-order
- GMT’s latest newsletter announced 3 new p500s
- Ermine: Men of Iron Volume VII
- Thunderverse Track Pack (for Thunder Alley, Grand Prix, and Apocalypse Road)
- Rebel Fury, 2nd Printing
- MMP also announced something that didn’t end on a Monday night3 – 4 new pre-orders!
Looking for a deal? Getting more bang for your buck?
- WDS “Game of the week” is on hiatus while the Winter Sale is on thru 5 January
- Huge discount on Modiphius’ Spectre boardgame over on Amazon
This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world
- Rocky plans his way through Cadet Games’ Linebacker II
- Pushing Cardboard pulls 10 random games off the shelf
- Space Biff makes his first contact with A Message From The Stars
- Avalanche Press has an article about the battle of Brody-Dubno in Ukraine in 1941
- Wargaming Esoterica tells you about their game of VUCA’s Red Strike
The best videos this week from our wargaming friends
- My Own Worst Enemy is still playing Mr. Madison’s War The Incredible War of 1812 – Spring/Summer 1812
- Whiskey Charlie’s Episode 73 was their Christmas and End of the Year Party 2024!
- Justegarde’s First impressions of the Battles From the Age of Reason system
- HissyCat was playing World of Tanks
- Zilla went into the New & Improved Song for War
- Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream took the week off
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Wargames Illustrated opened voting for their year-end awards; reminder that they are a minis-focused magazine
- Scott Thorne’s column this week at ICv2 talks about the perils of re-ordering ‘hot’ games that sold out at first, but then languish on store shelves
- BoardGameWire talks with All About Games Consulting about the past year in the board game industry
- Catastrophe Games’ latest news update includes a look at why they cancelled the Kickstarter for Arabian Struggle and what they’ll likely do differently in future campaigns
- Remember the Street Fighter RPG? Rascal tells you how a bunch of Brazilian gamers are keeping it alive
- You can weigh in on potential upcoming games from Against The Odds Magazine
- ICv2 reports that Free RPG Day will again be held during Origins, this year on 21 June
- Visitors to LNL’s forum page were recently greeted with an update that at the end of 2024, they are closing the forums and shifting everything over to their Discord server
- There’s a new build of CMO from Matrix
Here is a sneak preview of the new maps for my "Littoral Commander Indo-Pacific" #wargame. They feature black hex numbers for better readability, hollow hexes to feature terrain underneath, and updated terrain analysis. Amazing work by @CascadiaMac once again! #wargaming pic.twitter.com/loSXqr52Ou
— Sebastian Bae (@SebastianBae) December 23, 2024
It’s been a lighter week here with the regiment as we slow down for the holidays; here’s what you might’ve missed!
- Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Ligny (5) for “Valour and Fortitude” 3.0
- Mentioned in Dispatches is on hiatus until January
- Thinky Simple Lions in Space Lion: Divide and Conquer
- Classic Reviews ~ Blue vs Gray Deluxe Edition: The Civil War Card Game
- Armchair Dragoons Reviews GMT’s Washington’s War
- Gameplay this week
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 ~ 5 January and 2 February
- Next confirmed live event is BuckeyeGameFest, 1-4 May 2025
- Next planned virtual event is the ACDC4, 17-19 January, 2025
Other Conventions & Events
things are slowing down now that we’re getting to the holidays, so here are some for next year
- 17-19 January The ACDC (Armchair Dragoons Virtual HQ)
- 17-19 January ConQuest Ventura (Ventura CA)
- 17-19 January Marscon (Virginia Beach VA)
- 17-19 January Siege of Augusta (August GA)
- 23-26 January MMP Winter Offensive (Bowie MD)
- 24-26 January Winter War Con (Champaign IL)
- 30 Jan-2 Feb CascadeCon (Bellingham WA)
- 31 Jan-2 Feb Captain Con (Warwick RI)
- 5-9 February Game-on (Bellevue WA)
Key SDHistCon 2025 dates:
-SDHist Winter Quarters (online): Feb. 8, tickets Jan. 2
-SDHist Second Front (online): June 7, tickets early May
-SDHist East (Newport, RI): Aug 7-10, tickets April 5
-SDHist Summit (San Diego): Nov. 7-10, tickets Aug. 13
More: https://t.co/kBTo84knQO pic.twitter.com/uKqdA9xmEr— SDHistCon (@SDHistCon) December 19, 2024
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Phil Pournelle’s guest article with CIMSEC talks about why wargaming terminology matters
- Five significant US Army stories from 2024
- They’re not plugged into SkyNet yet, but Ukraine’s “all-robot force” is winning battles
- This week, Mick Ryan’s Big 5 talks about peace thru strength, and nuclear deterrence (in separate bullets)
- The next GUWS webinar is Wargaming for the Social & Cognitive Sciences on 21 January and then Nuclear Wargaming: It shouldn’t just be Game Over! on 4 February
- PaxSims recaps the CNN Academy in Abu Dhabi
The US Army Command & General Staff College has been playtesting Herman & Dokter’s upcoming Defiance (from GMT)
click to enlarge
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
This one’s a favorite around the Dragoons HQ. Enjoy!
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.
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
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