For the season 16 finale, Brant’s joined by David Thompson, Tim Densham, and Byron Collins to talk about game conventions coming up, some of our favorites, some we can’t stand, and what makes for good & bad conventions.

Oh, and Tim needs some advice, too, toward the end.

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant is joined by Dr Aggie Hirst of Kings College London to discuss her research that resulted in the book “Politics of Play” and her other explorations of professional wargaming

Links & References

• Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military
• Mentioned In Dispatches S16 E8 – The Wargamer’s Bookshelf
• Battle Lab ~ Another “Resurgence” of Military Wargaming and Battle Lab ~ Uses for (Professional) Wargaming
• Stackup.org – Combating Veteran Suicide Through Gaming
• “Videogames Saved My Life”: Everyday Resistance and Ludic Recovery among US Military Veterans
• What to Do When Mother Nature Plays for the Red Team
• Civilians on Hexagonal Battlefields

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Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant is joined by industry veterans Chris Pramas and Ross Thompson to talk about pathways into working in the tabletop game industry. Chris is one of the bigwigs at Green Ronin, and Ross just recently jumped on at Critical Role.

The Tabletop Game Jobs group is here (it’s public) and the Tabletop Game Job Talents group is here (it’s not).  They’re both on Facebook, so if you’re not on there, you might not be able to see much.

Also, as noted around the 53:00 minute mark, here’s the survey question about “how did you learn to play D&D”

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Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant, Rocky, Aaron, Austin, and Keith all team up to talk about sci-fi wargaming and barely scratch the surface. Hear what the designers are thinking as they’re developing their games, and we leave plenty of space for future episodes, too.

Of course there are links!

• Marine: 2002 – A Game of the First Lunar War (1979)
• Robotech: Reconstruction (2023)
• Raider Drop Zone (2024)
• Hammer’s Slammers (1984)
• Littoral Commander: Space Force (2026?)

Previous episodes on sci-fi wargaming (but not 4X games)

• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 10 Ep 3 ~ Sci-Fi Wargaming
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 9 Ep 6 ~ Scifi Gaming & Space Navies
• Mentioned in Dispatches, Season 5 Episode 8 – Science Fiction Warfare & Gaming

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Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant is joined by Dr James Sterrett and Jan Heinemann to revisit & update our earlier discussion way back in season 2 on The Essential Wargaming Library. In the past 5-6 years1 there’s been a veritable explosion of full-length, serious books about wargaming and those interested in these titles are now filling up a second shelf with them, instead of having room for fancy bookends and tchotchkes around the limited selection of wargaming tomes.

Linkdump

• Forging Wargamers by Sebastian Bae
• Wargames According to Mark by Mark Herman
• Eurowargames anthology from Nuts Publishing
• Wargaming Experiences: Soldiers, Scientists and Civilians and Wargaming Experiences II: Discussions by Natalia Wojtowicz
• UK MoD Wargaming Handbook (PDF)
• Paper Time Machines: Critical Game Design and Historical Board Games by Maurice Suckling
• Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems by Amabel Holland (and the Mechanisms as Metaphors video)
• Historical Simulation and Wargames: The Hexagon and the Sword by Ricardo Masini
• Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military by Aggie Hirst
• The Matrix Games Handbook: Professional Applications from Education to Analysis and Wargaming by John Curry
• Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design
• Peruvian Naval War College Journal issue on wargaming
• Journal of Advanced Military Studies wargaming issue
• Wargaming Handbooks panel from Connections Online

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Byron and Rocky join Brant to talk about all sorts of fights-in-the-skies, as we look up for this week’s podcast.

The mandatory list of references

• Like an (Air) Boss – A veritable Typhoon of Angels, Bears, Phantoms, Intruders and Mustangs all Fly(ing) to Fight and Win in a minis wargaming Danger Zone – Rocky’s article on Cold War jet-age aircraft combat
• Lee Brimmicombe-Wood on BGG
• JD Webster on BGG

(and probably a few we forgot)

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Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant is joined by a pair of professional wargaming educators (Ed McGrady and David Banks) to talk about the professional development options for those in the applied / practitioner / professional world as well as a bit about how hobbyists can cross over

Mandatory linkdump!

• Kings College War Studies Department
• MORS Certificates, including their wargaming courses
• Dragoons playlists, where you’ll find the Connections Online playlists
• Wargaming and Resilience Planning MA at Brunel University in Uxbridge/London
• Georgetown University Wargaming Society
• Fundamentals of Wargaming Analysis at JHU
• John Curry at Bath Spa University
• Degree programs as the US Army Command & General Staff College

Got other links to wargaming curricula we should be linking here?  Drop them in the comments below!

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Ardwulf joins the podcast for a discussion about when the bifurcation of wargames and TTRPGs happened, and how & why.  Anecdotes aplenty and also assorted assholery abounds.

Links to some of what we discussed

• Old parlour games / proto-RPGs
• Flintlock’s shifty thread on Bluesky
• The Dicing With Dragons book
• The Defense Language Institute in Monterey / The Customs House Plaza
• Talking about megagames back in 2020

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Brant, Mike, and Bill are joined by Mark Miklos to talk about his BoAR series and the upcoming special event this Fall in Camden, SC, as well as RevCon in Charlottesville2, and more.  Mark gives players some insight into the history of the series, what’s coming next, and even some advice on gameplay.

Some of the key links for this episode

• Our last BoAR podcast episode, with Bill’s article series linked at the bottom
• Registration info for GMT’s Camden event
• RevCon at PrezCon 2026
• The start of Mike’s series on Battles of the American Revolution – Eutaw Springs

Battles of the American Revolution Series Mentioned in Dispatches Episode ~ Series Intro ~ Saratoga ~ Brandywine ~ Guilford Courthouse ~ Eutaw Springs ~ Savannah ~ Camden Event Podcast Episode Saratoga Digital ~ First Impressions ~ Gaming vs The AI

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Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant, Chris, and Merle3 gather ’round the virtual campfire to talk about why & how Connections Online came into being, a couple of standout panels & stories from the past 5 years of events, and the inevitable struggle to stay on topic whenever another shiny digression goes prancing across their view.

Some key links and references—

• 2021 – Distributed Wargaming
• 2022 – Developing Wargame Practitioners
• 2023 – The Enemy Gets A Vote
• 2024 – Distributed Wargaming — Recent Lessons Learned
• 2025 – Wargaming Future Technologies

The Connections Online homepage at Armchair Dragoons Some specific sessions that were also called out

• Connections Online 2021 Day 2, Session 4: Western Approaches Tactical Unit and CO22 D2S4: Western Approaches Tactical Unit, Revisited
• Connections Online 2021 Day 3, Session 2: Distributed Campaigns Over the Long Haul
• CO23 D1S2: What Exactly is “Red-Teaming” Anyway?
• CO25 D3S4: Concluding Remarks, & Reviving Dune — How the AH classic game came to be reborn
• CO24 D2S2: Urban Warfare Wargaming: Past, Present, Future

Also, pay no attention to the SETI intercepts in the background of Merle’s audio whenever he’s talking.

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Brant, Mike, and Gary look ahead to 2026 BGF and talk about The War Room, the other games & events there, and things they’d like to see.

There’s plenty of ground we cover in this episode, so here are some of the relevant links

• BGF homepage and registration page
• The 2025 BGF report and Mike’s video and The Player’s Aid debrief
• A Wargaming Panel with Mark Walker, David Thompson, and Hermann Luttmann from 2025

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Kicking off the new season, our erstwhile co-hosts take a deep dive into the wide world of wargaming and discuss what they think the wargaming hobby is missing.

So you can hear what our couple of wargaming yammerers think, but what do you—the educated & erudite audience—think we’re missing from the overall wargaming hobby?  Sound off below or in our forums or on any of the different service feeds where you hear our podcasts.

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Well, we asked for it . . .

ASK US ANYTHING!For our Season 15 finale of our podcast, you've got until Monday to get your questions in Jim, Mike & Brant will take their best swing at answering whatever you're wanting to know about wargaming, or the Dragoonsuse #AskMID15 & we'll collect them for the show

— Armchair Dragoons (@armchairdragoons.bsky.social) 2025-11-22T19:44:22.000Z

y’all did not disappoint…  we had around 40 or so questions overall, and got to as many as we realistically could and not end up with a 3-1/2 hour podcast.  As it is, you get the longest one of this season (and probably last, too).

So Mike, Jim, and Brant tackle a bunch of questions that are all over the map – from questions about disease, genres in wargaming, social media channels, recommendations for middle-schoolers, and even hockey.  We wrap up with some long-term forward-looking thoughts about the Dragoons, too.

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There are no shortage of game conventions held in the Fall each year, so we brought together some folks attended 3 of them to talk about the fun they had.  Christina Kahrl gives us the low-down on SDHist 2025; Grant Linneberg of Pushing Cardboard attended his first BottosCon; Aaron Danis dropped into Compass Expo, since FoxCon was cancelled.

What did they play?  What were their favorites? Were there any big games on hand?  What’s the vibe at each convention?  What were the highlights and what would they like to see in the future?  And now, which one are you wanting to attend next time?

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With yesterday’s launch of the latest Flashpoint Campaigns game, Cold War, we wanted a visit with our buddies from On Target Sims to talk about the changes in this game, the challenges of developing games on Cold War-era combat, how far you could stretch the system, and what lessons they learned along the way.

Brant’s joined this week by James Sterrett, as they interrogate Jim Snyder and Rob Crandall, and really, it’s mostly a reunion for the gang since they used to all work together running events at the Origins War College and still collaborate quite at bit on the Wargame HQ, too.  And speaking of War College events, here’s the AAR moment referenced around the 43:30 mark.  And if you think Rob should audition to be a play-by-play announcer for televised golf tournaments, let’s just say you wouldn’t be the first one to think that

Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War Preview ~ Mentioned in Dispatches Podcast ~ AAR set 1 ~ AAR set 2

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Brant & Jim are joined by (only a few of) the Riches of Wargame Design Studio to talk about their latest series of games – The Sword & Siege series – that covers medieval warfare

As always when Jim is present, or pretty much any time we record a podcast, things do get off-topic a bit, but always focused on Wargame Design Studio.  We get a preview of what’s coming later this month, along with some behind-the-scenes looks at the research process.  3D graphics?  Solo vs AI gaming?  Updates to the WW1 games?  We make an attempt to pester Mr’s Hamilton and Walker with these and more.

Mandatory Linkiness

• Sword & Siege Game Demo at WDS site
• First Impressions of Age Of Longbow I – Sword & Siege Series by Wargame Design Studio
• Bonus Gallery of Age Of Longbow I – Sword & Siege Series by Wargame Design Studio
• First Impressions of Crusades : Book I by Wargame Design Studio

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OK, so we’re getting wacky4 this week as we bring in a pair of game designers/professional musicians on board to talk about the parallels between the wargaming business (and hobby gaming as a whole) and the music business – creating your own music, finding a publisher, going on tour, market segmentation, storytelling, and more

Let’s welcome aboard Wes Crawford of Wharf Rat Games and Dan Bullock, both designers who have self-published a variety of games as well as selling designs to other publishers.  You get back-stories from both designers of pitching games to publishers, developing their games with player feedback, and the inspirations behind some of their upcoming designs.  And of course, we find as many connections to their experiences in the music business as we can along the way.

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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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

For the first time on Mentioned in Dispatches, we’re joined by designer James M. Day, who partnered with Fernando Sola Ramos in designing this year’s multiple-CSR-award-winning Panzer: North Africa.

So Brant & Mike barrage Mr Day with a variety of questions about his history of designing tank-heavy games, the local newspaper covering his win, some history in the computer gaming world, and solo adaptations of his games.  We also spend a little time talking about the background behind Mr Day’s upcoming man-to-man sci-fi game ARC.

Huge thanks to Mr Day for taking the time out of his schedule to join us, and we’ll definitely clear the schedule for him to join us again in the future.

A couple of our links to CSR-related content

• Announcement of the winners, from Origins
• Our podcast episode discussing the awards

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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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant, Mike, and Keith have a discussion about the 2025 Fall Assembly, just in case you weren’t already sick of hearing about the best convention that you haven’t yet attended.

What got played?  What stuck out for us?  What about the new location?  What did we like or not?  What about next year5?  Plenty of wargaming crammed into a pretty tightly-packed weekend with a great crew of gamers.

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

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The Game Manufacturers Association, which has now been renamed GAMA: The Tabletop Games Association, has been a bit of a flashpoint for wargamers over the past dozen years or more. With some real questions about why wargamers should care about GAMA, it’s often been tough to make the case that they should.  But with all the changes at GAMA since the pandemic6 there’s the potential for real value for publishers beyond just discounts on Origins booths.

So Brant & Ardwulf are joined by Jason Matthews to talk about GAMA as a whole, but specifically what wargamers & wargame companies should be getting out of the organization.  What does GAMA offer everyone and how does that apply to wargamers?  What about Origins and the wargaming program there?  What can a publisher get out of GAMA Expo?  And how many times will someone’s browser crash and knock them out of Streamyard?7

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After 3 years, Brian’s back to join us to talk about his latest releases, both Brief Border Wars 2, and China’s War, which have been in extended development and both just happen to hit your porch at about the same time.

Brant, Mike, and Brian talk about quad games overall, d66 dice mechanics, development & history of the Brief Border Wars oeuvre, other ‘quad’-like sets that Brian’s worked on, when WW2 actually started, and some of Brian’s recent gallivanting through Europe for professional wargaming purposes.

Brian’s always a great guest, so sick back and enjoy!

The mandatory list of links

• Brian’s website with his game design musings and occasional new material
• China’s War (GMT Games)
• Brief Border Wars 2 (Compass Games)
• Brief Border Wars (Compass Games from the Wayback Machine)
• Deep Fried Happy Mice site referenced by Brian for d66 mechanic that’s undergoing a move/migration
• The District Commander series at Hollandspiele (Binh Dinh, Kandahar, Maracas, and ZNO)
• Brian’s previous appearance on Mentioned in Dispatches:  Wargaming Ukraine; The Essential Wargaming Library

Mike’s copies of the Fiery Dragon versions of Battle for China

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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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

For our third consecutive Summer, we teamed up with Beyond Solitaire for a big survey about people’s solo/solitaire war & historical gaming.  We were interested in both purpose-designed solitaire games as well as games people played solo regardless of how they were designed.  We had a Google form open for a month towards the end of the Summer for people to vote.  We tallied the results, and here is the top of the list, with links to the entire list and our other data diving linked down below.

So here we have Brant joined by Liz (from Beyond Solitaire) and our usual semi-irregular occasional co-host who-actually-loves-solo-wargaming Mike (My Own Worst Enemy) to talk about what’s on the list this year, what’s new, what’s surprising, and what’s expected.  We also talk some about how different demographic segments of the audience have different preferences.  The top 26 games are below (there was a tie at the 25th spot) and the entire list can be found here.

And audience – talk back to us!  Use the comment fields below and let us know what we coulda/shoulda asked of our respondents and let us know what to put into next year’s survey.

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

2025 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey Results ANNOUNCEMENT | MASTER LIST | DATA DIVING | BEYOND SOLITAIRE YOUTUBE DISCUSSION BGG GEEKLIST | MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES EPISODE | MORE DATA DIVING

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

2024 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey Results ANNOUNCEMENT | MASTER LIST | DATA DIVING | BEYOND SOLITAIRE YOUTUBE DISCUSSION | BGG Geeklist | Historical Rankings MORE DATA DIVING | MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES EPISODE

2023 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey Results ANNOUNCEMENT | MASTER LIST | DATA DIVING | BEYOND SOLITAIRE YOUTUBE DISCUSSION | MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES EPISODE

The 2024 Charles S Roberts Awards were presented over the Summer at Origins8 but we didn’t get a chance to weigh in with our opinions until now.  Look, you already know who won, because you read our site religiously and saw the list we published back in June, right? Right?!

But what you haven’t heard is Jim chime in with his outrageous French accent, or Mike complain about conflating solo and co-op games9, or Brant give a bit of behind-the-scenes insight, or how The Doors factor into all of this10.

Some of the links & lists that we discussed during the show

• The winners of the 2024 CSR’s
• Mentioned In Dispatches S14 E10 ~ Wargame Awards
• The CSR category descriptions
• 2022 episode about changes to the CSR Awards
• The record-setting marathon episode discussing the CSRs from 2021 (not the U-Boat year)
• Discussing the 2020 CSRs for games released in 2019 (the year they came back)

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Annnnnnnnnnd, we’re back!  Brant is joined by fellow Dragoon Jim/Cyrano, and regular guests Gary/Ardwulf & Liz from Beyond Solitaire, for a discussion inspired by Liz’s comments last year about “what’s in the Wargaming Canon of those games that you expect people to have played if they’re claiming to be a wargamer”

So we brought some smart people together, and let Brant crash the party since he runs the console, and tried to figure out what games we would’ve expected wargamers to have played at some point — not their favorites, or the most influential, or the most popular — if you’re trying to earn that Grognard Merit Badge.

Give the show a listen for the rationale behind the choices, especially since some of them were merely exemplars of wider series/families of games; there’s four different Commands & Colors series games in the table below, but as explained it’s really about picking out the era of interest to you and then giving it a whirl.

We even explain why we left some particular choices off the list, so don’t go ballistic until you hear it all!

There were some other things mentioned during the show, so here’s some / most / almost all of them

• The Virgin Queen Unboxing
• Luftwaffe
• Starship Troopers the AH wargame, and Starship Troopers the ‘satirical’ movie

And yes, Ardwulf was constructing and testing a plastic speedcoaster for his marble collection in the background.

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant, Jim, and Mike just talk about games – mostly wargames, some classic computer games, some good, some bad, and everything in between!

There’s no real agenda here, we’re just babbling about random wargame stuff, from ooooold computer wargames to upcoming battle anniversaries to the SALUTE show over in London.

Some of the links we promised in the episode

• Tanktics
• Air Combat Emulator  (and video!12 )
• Temple of Apshai
• Balance of Power
• Intellivision
• Battlezone at SALUTE

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant & Jim are joined by first-time Dispatchers Achilles & Robert to talk about Adepticon 2025.  Minis, minis, and more minis, with all sorts of Star Wars, Battletech, and WH40K everywhere, and some occasional real battles too.

What did our guys enjoy?  What surprised them?  What loot did they bring home?  Coolest thing they so?  How many solo games were being played?  And why were there Muppets everywhere?!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Rocky and Mike and Brant do their best to muddle through a discussion around why we do/n’t care about wargame awards, what’s wrong with popularity contests, and how you would design the “right” kinds of wargame awards.

We certainly don’t discuss all of the possible awards out there, and we don’t do a deep dive on each of them, but we try to cover a variety of ways in which these different awards approach their categories, participation, scope, and scale.

So what did we miss?  What awards didn’t we cover that we should have?  How would you organize a set of wargaming awards – categories, voters, scope & scale – if you were going to do so?  Sound off below!

Here’s a bunch of links to some of the wargame awards discussed on the show

• The Charles S Roberts Awards
• Wargames Illustrated Awards (reader survey)
• Golden Geek Awards
• SDHISTCON Summit Award
• The Homo Ludens Golden Luddite announcement
• Origins Awards archive
• Tabletop Games Blog (for the interesting category names)
• History on the Table Awards (from a few years ago on BGG, their own site seems to be messed up)

And this was from the question we asked at the end of 2024 about your wargame-acquisition decision-making

And we also asked whether or not awards had any bearing on purchase decisions.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant is joined by Dr James Sterrett and one of his students, US Army MAJ Alex Adkins, to discuss the wargaming curriculum at the US Army Command & General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth, KS, and MAJ Adkins Master’s thesis wargame Overmatch.

The discussion includes some info about the program (more info below) and pivots to MAJ Adkins experiences in the program.  There’s a bunch of discussion about Overmatch and its development and purpose.  There’s also a brief discussion of the uses of wargaming in the military decision-making process.

A couple of links to things that were discussed in the show

• Unfortunately, LTC(R) Neil Garra’s book about MDMP wargaming is out of print
• US Army publication How to Master Wargaming (PDF download)
• Some discussion of MDMP wargaming in this podcast episode
• Overview of the MMAS wargaming program at CGSC
  • Season 4 interview with an MMAS student
  • Season 6 interview with a pair of MMAS students
• Logistics in wargaming, including classes of supply

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Friend-of-the-Dragoons Rex Brynen (of Paxsims, among other places) and fellow Canadian Ben Taylor join Brant for a discussion about serious games that don’t involve all the shooty-bangy things.

What are some of the tools that overlap from wargaming into the non-kinetic world?  What are some success stories in using wargaming techniques in these contexts?  What are some of the third rails to avoid when using wargaming techniques with other audiences?  When do you push back on requests for a wargame?  All these, and more, in the best hour of podcasting you’ll get this week.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Mike & Bill join Brant to talk about GMT’s long-running Battles of the American Revolution series, as we continue this season’s focus on digging into some different game series in a bunch of our episodes.

At over 25 years old, it’s one of the longest-running, still-active series that started after TAHGC’s crash & burn back in the 1990s.  We talk about the scope of the series across all the games, some nuances of a few specific games, whether (or how) the game could expand beyond the AWI, and games from other publishers that might operate in a similar space.

Some links for this show:

• Series page at GMT
• Series page at BGG
• Bill as the GM at the Fall Assembly (about halfway down the page)
• Flintlock series
• Hold the Line series

You can chat about this series in the Age of Gunpowder section of our discussion forums

Battles of the American Revolution Series Mentioned in Dispatches Episode ~ Series Intro ~ Saratoga ~ Brandywine ~ Guilford Courthouse ~ Eutaw Springs ~ Savannah ~ Camden Event Podcast Episode Saratoga Digital ~ First Impressions ~ Gaming vs The AI

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Similar to what we did last year at the Expo, rather than try to organize a full-hour episode on a particular topic, we grabbed a couple of different guests to join us for a consolidated Expo episode.  Also, rather than focus exclusively on publishers this year, we cast a slightly wider net.

We start out with a wonderful discussion with Steve Jackson13 to discuss their latest Kickstarter, trends in the gaming industry, blazing new trails, and evergreen hits.  For this conversation, we were joined by Jason Matthews.  We start off that discussion talking about the Kickstarter campaign for the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that are being reprinted.   Steve also shows off some very neat minis tiles from Lorescape that he’s backing and can be used for a variety of hex-based games.

click images to enlarge

Our second guest was Mike Dunn of Gaming Trend, who is one of the key drivers behind the recent push in the GAMA Media & Events division to improve the quality of content, and capabilities of the members.  We talk about media coverage of overall industry and some of his specific initiatives within the organization.  This might seem a little bit like media navel-gazing, but we thought it good perspective on what forces are shaping potential coverage of the industry.

Finally, with both of the folks that lead Buckeye Game Fest at the Expo, we snagged Kate and Kristin to talk about the background of BGF, as well as some upcoming plans for the next few years as BGF is looking to broaden their appeal to a wider audience. Plus, don’t forget Quad Fest at BGF this year!

Overall, we think this offers a fair cross-section of the kinds of industry folks you encounter at the GAMA Expo, as we try to situate our niche of the wargaming hobby within the broader context of the overall game industry.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant, Jim, Gus, and (eventually) Sam get together to discuss CA’s Total War series of wargames.  Starting with Shogun and continuing through multiple iterations of Rome and Warhammer as well as such off-the-wall games as Attila and Pharoah, plus Jim favorites Napoleon and Empire, among others.

What did we love and/or hate?  What was awesome, ugly, fun, or stupid?  Who is shadowboxing, and why?  What would we fix?  What do we think is superfluous, and what do we think is essential?  And how exasperated will Jim get with it all?

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

The OCS games are one of the current standards of the industry for large-scale ‘monster’ games with a reputation for both complexity and consistency.  Series rules are usable across almost all of the 20-odd games, and veteran players have literally hundreds of hours under their belts.

We talk about the scope of the series, how far before/after WW2 you could reasonably extend the series and why, the logistics model, the surprise mechanic, splitting roles across multiple players, and even a digression about bad dice.

A couple of relevant links

• The logistics column mentioned around the 10-minute mark
• The OCS home page
• Ardwulf’s “How to Play OCS” video from the ACDC several years ago
• BGG series page
• The OCS Depot

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day; no, it’s not that kind of XXXX fantasy!  Brant, Mike, and Sam chat about their favorite 4X games in the fantasy genre (as opposed to historical or space).

What distinguishes a fantasy 4X game from the other kinds?  What are some hallmarks of the genre?  Which games were our favorites and why?  Which ones had particularly good graphics?  Most of these are digital, but what about on the tabletop?  What parts would we pull from different games to create our ultimate fantasy 4X game?

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant & Mike are joined by Ardwulf, and Bill is back again, to talk about the classic quadrigames from SPI, and their later evolutions through TSR and Decision Games, as well as other emulations of the form by Compass Games, GMT, and others.

We talk about the history of the games and the designers who were ‘trained’ on quads, and the underlying ‘schtick’ of fast-playing, quick-learning, low-overhead, small(er)-footprint combo packs.  We also cover some of our favorites, some recent multi-pack games that fit the “quad” ethos, and the fifth-wheel games later published in S&T.  Are series wargames more of a thing now than back then?  And which quads showed up in single packs, as well?

All of this is leading up to this year’s Buckeye Game Fest 14, where we’ll be sponsoring/participating in Quad Fest!  In partnership with Ardwulf’s Lair and My Own Worst Enemy, we’re putting 6 classic SPI quads on the table in The War Room at BGF, from Wednesday through Saturday (with Friday as the main day).  There’s even room for more GMs to add a couple of Quad Fest events – just get in touch with us about scheduling so we don’t overlap each other!

What are your thoughts on the old quad games?  Any particular favorites, or ones you hated?

What about Quad Fest?  Is that enough to get you to come join us / game with us at Buckeye Game Fest?  Is there a game you want to see added, or one you’re willing to come join as a GM?  Sound off below, or tell us in our forums!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Kicking off our 14th season with episode 164!  Brant is joined by Keith Tracton and Tim Densham, a pair of designers who were also GMs for our most recent ArmChair Dragoons Digital Convention (The ACDC).

We talk about how this year’s ACDC shook out and what they enjoyed during the show and what could’ve been improved.  We compare digital conventions to in-person ones, too – what are the dis/advantages of digital setup & prep vs in-person teaching of games.  What’s different with an in-person presentation vs a digital broadcast on-line?  And whatever happened to that guy the city watch hauled off for going through the dead guy’s pockets back in 2018?

More shenanigans to come as this season unfolds!  For now, rejoice and be happy, as Mentioned in Dispatches with The Armchair Dragoons returns

The 2025 ACDC ––  ORIGINAL OPORD ~ REGISTRATION ~  LIVESTREAM ARCHIVE ~ AAR ~ PODCAST

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, 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.

Brant & Mike are joined by Jim & Bill to talk about all the things for which we are thankful in the world of wargaming and our wider hobby ecosphere.

Let’s talk about conventions, content creators, how technology has changed wargaming, and more.  Chime in below, or in our forums, and let us know what you are thankful for in the wargaming world!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Over Veteran’s Day weekend, a bunch of wargamers gathered in San Diego, where they started each morning by scraping 3 inches of sunshine off their windshields before cruising over to the Portuguese Hall for several full days of games, panels, interviews, special events, and other general frivolity at SDHISTCON.

So join Brant has he chats with Grant from Pushing Cardboard, Liz from Beyond Solitaire, and our buddy Ardwulf, about what they played, who they met & chatted with, and most importantly, about the outstanding food they ate while there.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

It’s time to blast off to the outer reaches of strategy gaming as we spend some time discussing 4X games that are set in space.  Brant & Mike are joined by Sam and a different Mike to talk about gameplay in 4X games, classic tropes, processor power, and more

Sam’s also been playing the latest DLC for Distant Worlds 2 from Slitherine Games – Return of the Shakturi, and he gives us his initial impressions of the content as well as his overall thoughts after 2 years of continued improvements for DW2.  Of course we make fun of how late the Stellaris board game is running, but we also spend a few minutes on other 4X board games, too, like Stellar Horizons and Space Empires 4X.  Enjoy!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

We’re back to computer wargaming, as we pick up where we left off and start shifting up in echelon away from tactical to operational and strategic level games.  This isn’t some “all-time top 10” or anything; it’s just games we’ve enjoyed over the years and some commentary on them, from ancients to modern, and everywhere in between.

So join Brant, Bryan, and Cyrano for a rambling romp through our digital wargaming as we call out some of the better games we’ve played over the years.  And no, Bryan is not from Ohio, but still likes adding a “s” on all the titles anyway.

Here are some of the other episodes referenced in this discussion, too

• Mentioned in Dispatches, Season 5 Episode 10 – The Charles S Roberts “Awards”
• Mentioned in Dispatches, S3E6 – On Target Simulations & Flashpoint Campaigns
• Shadow Empire AAR and forum thread

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Ian and Mike15 join Brant to talk about the ‘aha!’ moments of wargaming in military classrooms, what games they’ve used for different purposes, and wargame interfaces, among plenty of other things.

Some links & Info

• Ian’s #ManeuverWarfare and the essay he references in the episode
• Lessons learned from playtesting at Origins
• Orange Crush has been overcome by events, but was used back in 2014
• Wall Street Journal article about Command: Modern Operations
• USMC Wargaming Cloud
• Connections Online will be held 7-12 April 2025

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Let’s talk digits!  Bryan and Gus join the show to talk about some of their favorite computer games over the past 20-25 years, with a focus on this show starting at the tactical level and drifting slightly into the operational level of combat.

We cover a lot of different ground as we tackle Battletech and the Russo-Japanese War and vampires and WW2 and the Aliens universe, all in one show.  There’s bemoaning of bad DRM decisions and nostalgia for turn-based games back when that was all the computers could handle.  We talk about some favorite media licenses and game worlds, and some not-so-favorite sales practices.  And plenty of other babbling.

• Press Announcement of Slitherine acquiring Battlefront
• Fight Club International
• Classic Reviews ~ Aliens versus Predator 2 – Primal Hunt
• Peter & Jan playing Field of Glory Kingdoms
• Rule The Waves 3 coverage from our site
• Velker vs Boyerwulf in Blood Bowl

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Is there a positive word for “browbeating”?  How mad should your opponents be when you blow up the city block that they’re occupying?  How much table space is too much, too little, or just right?

Brant & Mike are joined by Fall Assembly attendees Rocky and Bill to talk about what they enjoyed, what needs improvement, and what they learned.  You can also read our AAR here and keep up with the playlist of videos from the convention16.  As you’re doing all of this, you can start planning now for next 10-12 October, and whether you’re going to attend for 2 days, 3 days, or the full weekend plus the Thursday night social!

On this episode, we talk about the overall convention, but also about a couple of particular games we played as well:

• GMT’s Rebel Fury
• Keith Tracton’s Raider Drop Zone
• Fight Club International’s Take That Street
• GMT’s Battles of the American Revolution
• . . .   and more

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Brant, Mike, Bryan, and not Gary talk about things that contribute FOMO in wargaming, and how FOMO has applied to their own gaming acquisitions.  Which companies create that “fear of missing out” among their customers?  How does crowdfunding contribute?  Where are there games that are perpetually available and never really create any sort of FOMO?

What about you, dear audience?  What contributes to any FOMO for you, and how do you17 combat it?

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Shelf of “Shame” or a Shelf of “Opportunity”?  Brant & Mike are joined by Rocky and “The Other Mike” (OJsDad for those of your who watch Saturday Night Fights) to talk about all those games you’ve stacked up on your shelf that are still waiting to hit the table.

What have you had the longest without getting it to the table?  Do you have more than one of the same game and neither of them have been played yet?  Are you collecting all of a particular line of games (or expansions) but never get them played?

And then there are the edge cases:  if you’ve played someone else‘s copy of the game, does that count for checking it off of your shelf of shame?  If you’ve played it thru VASSAL / TTS / etc is that enough to knock it off the list?  What about games that you were gifted or otherwise didn’t really intend to acquire but are now on your shelves?

There are no hard-&-fast rules here, but what’s still lingering in your game collection that you keep meaning to play but never seem to find the time to get to?  Go ahead and confess your shames!  Comments below or in the forums

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Time to shoot up some truth serum and sharpen the knives!  Bryan wanted to talk about the “worst” of wargaming, so Brant dragged Jim & Mike into the fray and here we go ––

Worst game name?  Computer game?  Rulebook?  Category of games?  Which game was so bad the 1st edition was unplayable as written18? There’s plenty of rough & tumble thoughts here to go around, so jump into the discussion and let us know what some of your “worsts” are. What did we have to say about Hearts of Iron or Maneouvre or I, Napoleon or Fields of Fire or Balance of Power.  What do 60s classic rock songs have to do with this episode?  Why is(n’t?) Mike angry at the CSRs and is this the only time Jim will ever agree with him about solo wargaming?  Is there actually a Napoleonic game that Jim hates worse than the Ridley Scott movie?  Have we asked enough questions?  Why aren’t you listening yet?!

And yes, we do get off-topic – we have tradition to uphold!  At this point, Jim has dropped from the 3rd hit to 4th on Google, when searching “Teugn-Hausen”.  But . . . one of their videos of the battle is up to 5th, so he’s got 40% of the top hits on the world’s biggest search engine when you go looking for a major Napoleonic battle!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Last Summer, we teamed up with Beyond Solitaire for a big survey about people’s solo/solitaire war & historical gaming.  We were interested in both purpose-designed solo games as well as games people played solitaire regardless of how they were designed.  The plan was always to repeat this each Summer and see how it changed over time, so we did it again!

You can see the links to the rest of the 2024 survey content below, but on this episode of Mentioned in Dispatches, we talk about some of the big rise & fall games from last year, how the top games compared based on how long you’ve been wargaming, and finding new-to-you gems in the data.

The results of our 2024 survey can be found here:

2024 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey Results ANNOUNCEMENT | RESULTS | DATA DIVING | BEYOND SOLITAIRE YOUTUBE DISCUSSION | BGG Geeklist | Historical Rankings MORE DATA DIVING | MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES EPISODE

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

David Thompson joins Brant for a wide-ranging discussion around the uses of AI for creative purposes in tabletop gaming, whether for art or text.  Note that the “AI” we’re talking about this week is for the creation of the game content, and not as a ‘bot’ or automata in place of an opponent.

Under what conditions might AI usage be OK?   Assuming it’s legal, is it automatically ethical?  As a consumer, what sort of usage are you comfortable with?  What disclosures do you want regarding the usages of “creative” AI in tabletop gaming?  What’s black and white and how big are the gray areas in between?

Some of the headlines we mention in this episode

• This Kurosawa Movie Inspired George Lucas’ Original ‘Star Wars’ Script
• Terraforming Mars and AI artwork
• Scythe art and “tracing”

The Chasing Amy reference19 with language that is sooooo NSFW

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Season 13 is here!  Brant, Mike, and Rocky spend this episode talking about what motivates people to play a wargame, how to keep your motivation up when it’s flagging, and how to get engaged with a topic that’s outside your wheelhouse.

Let’s kick off this new season with discussions of Divine Right and other reprints, boosting your opponents’ motivation to play, how to engage with your game topic, similarities to RPG reprints, why to keep playing your way through a game that’s no longer fun, and more.

• Barthheart’s post that inspired this episode
• Rocky’s Banzai Magazine explorations (with more to come here, too!)
• Mike’s unboxing of Divine Right

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Wrapping up season 12, we’ve got a full house here to talk about the current state of hobby wargaming, what we’d like to improve, and some predictions for the near future.

So let’s join Brant & Mike and welcome back Moe (of Moe’s Game Table) and Grant (of Pushing Cardboard) and settle in for our season finale to discuss the current state of hobby wargaming in 2024.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

How are “historical RPGs” different from other RPGs and how can you use them to explore various points in history?  And far back (or forward?) do they look?

So let’s join Rocky and Byron and Brant talking about different eras & periods, some underlying mechanics, what they can (and can’t) do, and some of our favorites.  We obviously reference Nations & Cannons, and here are Pat Mooney’s previous apperances in our 5Q interviews, podcast episode, and ACDC panel.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Ardwulf comes back to the show and brings fellow Origins GM Lee along with him, to talk about our Origins events and Buckeye Game Fest, interspersed with some guidance and advice about how to register for and attend most game conventions out there.

So we talk about our experiences with both conventions, as well as some of the differences in focus between the gameplay-focused conventions (like BGF) and the larger, and more broad-based cons like Origins or GenCon.  And anywhere Brant references a 10×20 space, it’s actually 20×4020, and this year’s space at Origins is actually 40×40.

Some links that’ll help you out:

• Go find a convention through tabletop.events!
• Buckeye Game Fest 2024
• Origins Game Fair 2024
• Brant & Peter and the We Are Coming Nineveh livestream
• BGF ’22 coverage with the Artemis videos
• BGF ’23 coverage with a lot of input from other gamers

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

In preparation for Connections Online next week, we’re joined by a pair of wargame practitioners: Kevin Williamson, and Mitch Reed, both up in the DC area. Mitch is well-known to the hobby world as the lead sled-dog of the No Dice No Glory team, but he’s also on his third different professional wargaming gig, after an extended military career.  Kevin’s hobby background is more digital than tabletop, but it’s serving him well in his current wargames-in-military-education role.

With a focus on the overlap between hobby and pro wargames, both of our guests talk about places where they’ve seen hobby wargames used in the pro realm, the ideas they steal from the hobbyists for their day jobs, and the perils & pitfalls of using hobby wargames in a practitioner context.  And because this is Mentioned in Dispatches, we definitely wander off topic in a few places.

Here’s a list of stray links mentioned in the show

• No Dice No Glory (Mitch’s site)
• Fight Club US
• Near Peer Simulations
• GAO report on wargaming (2023)
• Flashpoint Campaigns

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

We’re joined this week by designer Darin Leviloff, who designed the first States of Siege game (Israeli Independence) and has since designed several more that have found new homes with other publishers.

Ironically, the original game is the only of Darin’s current designs that isn’t back in print, although he does take a moment to explain why not.  We also discuss Darin’s background in wargaming, how he stumbled into designing, and what’s on the drawing board.

You can read Brant’s Hapsburg Eclipse AAR here.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Brant is joined by Chris Weuve (chair of the Connections Online committee) and Pete Pellegrino, longtime professional wargamer and instructor.  This slightly-rambling episode looks at some of the history of wargaming at the Naval War College, how and why it’s withered today, and what we can do about it.

We also talk about how Pete came to wargaming and how its indicative of other people wandering into the wargaming practitioner field, and Chris (of course) tells us about a test-to-destruction as a valid type of wargame.  And we unironically use the term “ambiguity horizon”.  Of course, we wander off-topic here and there, because this is Mentioned in Dispatches and that’s our schtick.

A handful of references (look, there were a lot)

• The Bob Work Memo (or at least Bob Work talking about it) and some of our commentary on it
• Wargaming Pathologies
• That Nimitz quote
• CAPT William McCarty Little
  • collected essays (midway down on the page)
  • The Strategic Naval War Game Or Chart Maneuver
• Millennium Challenge
  • the official report (PDF)
  • “the real story”
  • “lost lessons”

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Fresh off of GAMA Expo, Fort Circle Honcho Kevin Bertram joins us to talk about what’s up with the company, as well as their upcoming CircleDC convention.

Kevin fills us in on the current production plans for Fort Circle Games, which run out over a half dozen games and through the end of 2025 (at least).  We discuss some of the production & development process, including the visual art & design piece.  We talk about Kevin’s Substack wherein he divulges waaaaay more info than a lot of other companies probably would.  And we also spend a bit of time talking about what’s coming up at CircleDC – the designers he’s expecting, the venue, and the non-gaming activities they’ve got planned to go along, too.

• CircleDC convention info
• Behind the Fort Circle scenes
• The Fort Circle homepage

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

We spent last week at GAMA Expo, and rather than try to set up a 90-minute chat with someone there, we tackled a handful of people to come talk to us.

So kick back & relax and enjoy this patchwork episode of many different guests, as we run well past the hour mark, but give you a smorgasbord of people here (in no particular order):

• Jim Dietz, The Dietz Foundation
• Cole Wehrle, Leder Games and Wehrlegig Games
• James Buckley, Phalanx Games
• Drew Wehrle, Wehrlegig Games
• Jason Matthews, Fort Circle Games and the GAMA board

Plus, here’s the link to the GUWS talk from Ian T Brown that we reference while talking with Jim

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Moe’s back!  And the Molotov Cockatiel joins us, too, as we take a spin through some classic wargames – how far back they go, why we love them, which ones we can’t stand, and how classic wargames might be like your favorite musical artists.

We also take some time to discuss how the business has changed a bit from in-house design & development teams to freelance designers and occasional development teams.  We learn a bit by cracking open some old rulebooks.  We talk about what’s still on our shelves decades later.  And since Moe’s here, we can’t help but talk a little hockey.

Some references

• Rocky looks into Tactics II
• Alexander The Great
• Russian Campaign vs Russian Campaign
• Luftwaffe
• HOCKEY!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Inspired by this thread on BGG, our panel tackles the idea of “how would you improve the wargaming hobby if you had $1 million to do it?”  So join Brant, Mike, Rocky, and new voice21 Byron (Jack Nastyface in the forums) as they go as bluesky as they can with some ideas.

Endowed faculty chairs.  The giant Blue Panther-tron Dr Seuss Grog-Print-O-Matic game printer to bring back old-school out-of-print wargames.  Hire some goddamn editors!  Supported play programs.  Bling out the games!  Can you tie into a much-loved media license to bring in a ready-made audience?

So are we trying to broaden the hobby?  Are we trying to better serve the people already in the hobby?  Are we trying to preserve the existing body of knowledge for future wargamers?  There’s a bunch of courses of action and none of them are necessarily wrong, but all come down to personal preferences.

The Weekly References (Non-Tolstoi-Edition)

• The #ManeuverWarfare card game
• Evil Genius Games
• Mentioned In Dispatches Season 6 Ep 7 – Teaching Game Design
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 10 Ep 1 ~ The OGL For Wargaming

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Amabel is back!  One of our favorite designers comes back to Mentioned in Dispatches to talk about what’s going with Hollandspiele and tell a few tales of designing off-the-wall games.

So chill & enjoy as she gives us the low-down on Hollandspiele’s best-sellers, what’s coming soon (Comet, Ides of March, Striking Flint, and more), and what she’s enjoyed working on. Custom dragon meeples?  Game reviews as literature?  A game with no rulebook?  Small-box games that are even more experimental?!  Yep, we covered that too!  And stay tuned ’til the end when Amabel starts pestering Brant with some questions of her own.

Oh, and of course we talk a bunch about the New Yorker article where Amabel was the star of a long read about modern boardgaming and game design.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

Liz drops by to talk to Brant & Mike about her upcoming Night Witches game (designed with David Thompson).  Hexes, counters, aircraft and AAA shooting at each other, and managing aircraft damage all combine for a fun little solo/co-op wargaming experience.

We also talk about some of her other work in the wargaming world, whether it’s additional designs kicking around in her head, or the editing work she’s done for other people.  We also talk a bit about some conventions – BGF, Circle DC, and Origins are all among them.  And yes, Brant does actually play wargames, too.

References & Links

• Night Witches on BGG
• White Tribe AAR
• Hapsburg Eclipse AAR
• Buckeye Game Fest 2023 w/ the La Bat games
• Buckeye Game Fest 2022 w/ the Artemis videos
• Liz’s channel

And you’ll understand the point of this one around the 55 minute mark or so

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

What the heck is an “adventure wargame”?  OK, so we’re not going to get into the parsing of specific definitional details, but we’re going to try to give you a sense of what makes them different than you average wargame and why you might enjoy playing them

So help us launch season 12 with a discussion of where RPGs and wargames overlap and how you can adapt some of those experience & campaign ideas to your more traditional hex-&-counter wargames down the line.

Some references?

• The Drive on Gießen for World at War ’85
• Striker (RPG rules)
• Five Parsecs From Home / Five Leagues From the Borderlands
• The Birthright setting
• Polyhedron 156 / V for Victory RPG

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

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.

So we’re cutting it pretty close to Christmas22 but here are some wide-&-varied suggestions for gifts to put under your favorite wargamer’s tree, with Rocky, Brant, Mike, and Bryan

It’s not just games, but a bunch of game accessories and add-ons, protective tools, tracking tools, and more.  And, yeah, we recommend a few games, too.

A, uh… ‘curated’ version of the different stuff we talked about on the show

• Ultrapro top-loader map protectors
• Cube4Me wargame sets
• Black Oak Workshop Advent-ure calendars
• Easy Roller dice bags
• Etsy game counters
• Board Butler on Kickstarter
• Gunner-Heat-PC
• Decisive Campaigns Ardennes Offensive
• Gift certificates?  We specifically call out both Enterprise Games and Gamer’s Armory
• Napoleon’s Eagles 2
• For the People on p500
• Dragoons logo merch

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

The fine folks at Wargame Design Studio just recently released their latest game – Thirty Years’ War – in their Musket & Pike series.  Rich stops in with Brant & Jim to talk about their recent releases, the company’s current design plans, and what they’re currently excited about.

What’s the company’s design and release philosophy – tablets?  Macs?  Steam?  Long-term patching & support?  What’s the breakdown of their different series and how widely are their historical nets cast?  How did they get sychronous online multiplayer functionality “right” 20 years ahead of a bunch of other companies that still haven’t figured it out?  What’s up with the graphics?    Why don’t they announce games until they’re actually launching?  And yes, we cram it all into a 1-hour show.

Links & References

• Tim Stone’s interview at Tally-Ho Corner
• WDS’s news page

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Here’s the game that Jim referenced in the show, as they streamed one of the Thirty Years War scenarios

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

The Autumn convention season has come, and (largely) gone23 and we’ve got some attendees of those conventions here to regale us with their adventures.

So let’s welcome in Ardwulf, Grant from Pushing Cardboard, and Tim from Catastrophe Games and talk about Compass Expo, SDHistCon, and the (then-upcoming) U-Con.  We discuss the games played, the ‘other’ events – panels/seminars, social gatherings, etc – pre-press or playtest games on tables, and what was for sale at the shows.  What did we like about the conventions?  How’d they compare to other conventions?  What are we looking forward to next?

Tell us about your recent convention experiences!  Which ones did you attend and what did you like (or not) about them?  What’s next on your convention calendar?  Discuss below, or in our forums!

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

History doesn’t always repeat, but it does often rhyme.  Brant, Liz, and Jim dig into some wargaming history to talk about the things that were going around and are now coming back around.

And of course we’re going to get off topic and not just talk about production form factors and themes that come back into vogue.  Liz is always24 going to pimp her Night Witches game (co-designed with one of David Thompson’s 11 clones).  Jim’s going to continue to slag on solo wargames.  Brant’s going to ramble on topics only he cares about.  But hey, we’re having fun, right?  Right?!

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

We’re a little behind on getting this one recorded & released, but our annual deep dive into the Compass Catalog is here!  Brant, Mike, Mike, and (eventually) Jim take their time going through the catalog and pick out the games they want, the ones they have, and the ones they’re trying to figure out the raison d’etre.

So join the crew as we go, literally, page by page through the catalog, question the existence of some games, sing the praises of others, try to do math in our heads on discounts, rankle at shipping costs and plan a game smuggling ring using airline couriers, and wonder why Jim hates solo games25.  Have fun as a bunch of old dudes26 celebrate a form of media whose heyday is clearly behind us, but that these guys can’t get enough of.

Go check out this year’s catalog in PDF here Past episodes talking about the Compass catalog? 2020, 2021, 2022

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

It’s not like you have to go too far to find problems with crowdfunding campaigns.  Heck, our man Gimpy has made it a personal quest to root out Kickstarter scammers and put them on blast on YouTube.  And while we’re not going to spend any time trying to excuse someone’s bad behavior over a crowdfunding campaign, we did think it’d be interesting to grab a couple of folks who have been heavily involved in them over the past few years to give us an extended peek behind the curtain.

So we welcome back Tim Densham of Catastrophe Games and Jeff Tidball of Prolific Games & Left Justified Studios to give us the inside scoop on prepping that campaign, pricing it out, the comms plan, the execution of a crowdfunding campaign, and what happens after it all ends. How do you find your customers?  How do stretch goals affect your pricing model?  How quickly does the money get to you?  How long should you keep a campaign open?  There’s a lot to dig through as both of these gentlemen are happy to explain.

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

Hey look, if Gary & Rocky are here together, there’s at least a +3 DRM to the “discuss Traveller” check, so we figured this week we’d just lean into it.

So Brant & Mike are largely along for the ride as we talk some about the publication history of the system, some of the different development forks, and the current state of Traveller with the various OGL/Cepheus Engine versions as well as the ‘original’ as it currently stands.  We definitely discuss the “Third Imperium” setting and whether the game is ‘setting agnostic’ or not.  We do compare a few parts of Traveller to some other sci-fi games, and discuss what we do/n’t like about them compared to the original.  There’s also a bit of chatter about the graphic design of the game, too.

Were you a Traveller player?  What did you like (or not) about the game?  What other sci-fi RPGs have you played?  What are some of your favorite sci-fi RPG settings?  What settings do you think would work well with Traveller?

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

Brant and Justin27 take some time to talk about the Levy & Campaign system overall, as well as the specific implementation is his Seljuk game.

We spend some time talking about hockey, of course, because it’s Brant & Justin, but we save it for the end.  Leading up to that, we talk about how the overall L&C system forces more planning onto the players: for their availability of forces, the logistical support (and transport of those supplies!), and route throughput.  We also cover the research that Justin did for his design, and what did/n’t survive playtesting and development.  We opened up the show talking about some games Justin’s played recently, and Brant almost bought a copy of 1812: War on the Great Lakes Frontier during the podcast.

Go get your pledge in for Seljuk to lock in the p500 price, and let us know what, if any, other L&C games you’ve played and what you thought of them

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

As our inaugural Fall Assembly kicks off this weekend, we’ve got a pair of our special guests from the convention who are joining us on the podcast: Hermann Luttmann and Keith Tracton.

Brant & Mike try to get the occasional word in edgewise as these two romp their way through co-op wargame design, fantasy wargame design, sci-fi wargame design, historical wargame design, and, well…  wargame design.  Research, back-stories, how far to deviate from history, eliminating movement rates, an air game for the World at War ’85 universe (), forgetting your own rules, and Magic: the Gathering all show up somewhere in the show, too.

And then there’s this:

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Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

As we hit that luckiest of days, we’re joined by a pair of MiD first-timers: Ali Kocho-Williams from Clarkson University and Pijus Kruminas of ISM University of Management & Economics.  Both are here to talk about their use of wargames in their college classes

Saddle up as we discuss how they developed their own love of gaming, and when they started to bring it into the classroom with them.  What effects have the games had on student engagement?  How do their fellow faculty members view their use of games in the classroom?  How would you compare learning about what did happen to what could have happened?  What’s coming up next in their game-based lessons?

Some other discussions around games in classroom?

• Games in College Classrooms FB group
• Pijus’ substack newsletter
• Designer Bruno Faidutti being as wrong as possible about learning from games
• Games & Sims for Training & Learning

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

Cole Wehrle is back to raise the overall intelligence of our podcast, as he joins Brant & Jim for a discussion about his recent designs, and what he’d do if Jim backed up a Brinks truck of cash and told him to go to town on a historical design. Also, this is a shameless plea for folks to please give us a rating over on our iTunes page for the podcast; we’re still a few ratings short of what’s needed for us to show up in their recommendations.

So let’s talk about open world video games, “what is a game?”, post-ACW reconstruction, leeching the energy out of a game as its played, Arcs and long-term game development, where the Beatles rank on you list of favorite pastas, meta-plots & legacy games, historical biographies, and more.  And huge thanks to Cole for joining us again and bringing some intellectual discourse to our usual Friday ramblings.

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

Brant, Mike, and Gary start off talking about the wargaming and game shopping they did over the Summer, and what’s next on the table and in their travels.  Of course, given who this is, they quickly veer off-topic into a combination of RPG dice, types of barbecue, yelling online about games sight unseen, cannibalism28, and paying for convention travel.  And yes, Brant has admitted to playing an ACW game.

Which Hollywood celebrities are the equivalent of which wargaming personalities? We have some thoughts!  Rebuying games you previously dumped?  Youbetcha!  Moving out some games you’re never gonna play?  Let’s start paying it forward!  Wargames that start before / extend beyond the “official” start and end dates of WW2?  Let’s change history!  Making a road trip to Louisville on purpose?  Why not!  How do we tie sportswriter Bomani Jones to Hollandspiele?  You’ll just have to listen. Since this was recorded about 2 weeks ago, when we get around to talking about who we buy from & who we game with – or don’t!  – you can almost guarantee that we are not talking about whoever you think we’re thinking of…

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

Back in the Summer, we partnered with Beyond Solitaire for a short survey on solo wargames and historical games, whether purpose-designed for solitaire play, or just ones you enjoy playing on your own.  The survey was up for all of August, and a few days on either side of that month, too, for about 7 weeks total.  We had over 250 replies and over 450 different games receive votes.

So we’re kicking off Season 11 with a new contributor to the podcast, as Liz Davidson joins us to discuss the results of the survey, how we designed it and what we were after, the surprises on the list, and the ones we wished were higher.  We do spend a few minutes on the optional descriptive questions we asked about our audience, and some of the questions we’d like to explore in the future.

• The full table of responses, along with our basic writeup, can be found on the Armchair Dragoons site here.
• You can also watch a video of Brant & Liz discussing this survey with some other solo wargaming content creators.
• Liz, not that long ago, trying to deny the obvious (and even using the two-word form of “war gamer”!)
• And finally, there’s a Geeklist on BGG with the top responses from the survey.

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

The results of our 2023 research can be found here:

2023 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey Results ANNOUNCEMENT ~ RESULTS ~ DATA DIVING ~ BEYOND SOLITAIRE YOUTUBE DISCUSSION ~ MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES EPISODE

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.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

And you thought we were done for the Summer29 but then The Wargaming Company popped up with some very snazzy new 10mm Napoleonic minis and we reconvened to talk with David Ensteness about them and what the rollout plan is.

So let’s enjoy our guy Cyrano geeking out of some new toys, and trying to figure out how to avoid the arts-&-crafts of the hobby while still getting to play with these remarkable new figures.  Let’s also enjoy David explaining the trial and error process of learning the ways to manufacture these figures, with a remarkably candid look inside the production side of this industry.  And then let’s all take a break so our guys can focus on Origins and get back to you in the Fall.

click the images below to really zoom in and get a detailed look at these new minis, and let us know when you spot the horizontal pockets.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

Brant, Gary, and Mike are talking conventions!  First, Brant & Gary take some time to discuss Buckeye Game Fest, with the events, experiences, and fun to be found at that one.  Then, it’s time to talk Origins (and see below for the directory for all of our Origins coverage, both current & projected).

So let’s talk about Origins as a whole, some attendance numbers through the years, the annual hilarity that is the (complaining about) event registration, and then some detailed discussions of the events we’ll have at the Wargame HQ from Catastrophe Games & Fort Circle & PicoArmor (all of whom are planning to be there with us), plus GMT Games (who always offers a huge amount of support to our area), and folks like Invicta Rex Games (Song for War), On Target Sims (our Command Post Exercises), and more. We spend some time discussing the expected shopping we’ll do at the exhibit hall, other events we’ll look for, and where we’re probably going to lose our wallets.  Plus, what Gary’s show is going to do when all wargames start shipping with pre-rounded counters.

We also spend some time looking forward to some other events over the Summer that we probably won’t make, but would like to some time.  We also take a few minutes to discuss the upcoming Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly in October of 2023.  And yes, after Brant says “last thing” we go on for another 10+ minutes.

And thus wraps season 10 of Mentioned in Dispatches, and we’ll see y’all in the Fall when we start season 11!

• Yes, this happened at Buckeye Game Fest, and it’s all Gary’s fault
• Voting for the Golden Geek Awards – specifically Liz Davidson’s Beyond Solitaire podcast
• New dice “advent-ure” calendars from Black Oak Workshop
• The Inaugural Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023, 20-22 October 2023, The Gamer’s Armory, Cary NC

ORIGINS 2023 COVERAGE WARGAME HQ EVENTS ~ MiD PREVIEW EPISODE ~ WARGAME HQ EVENT PREVIEWS ~ ADVICE FOR ROOKIES ~ CONSOLIDATED WARGAMING EVENT GRID ~ EXHIBITOR SPOTLIGHT ~ THE MAILBAG SETUP & FIRST GAMES ~ ABOVE THE SHOW ~ DAY 1 REPORT ~ DAY 2 REPORT ~ DAYS 3 & 4 REPORT ~ EXHIBIT HALL ~ GAMEPLAY PHOTOS ~ WARGAME HQ EVENT REPORT  ~ THE SPIRITUAL SOJOURN ~ SPOTLIGHT ~ THE RAFFLE ~ CONVENTION PHOTOS  ~ AAR DISCUSSION FORUM THREAD

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

At the Origins fair, I did see, Gamers playing wargames with glee, But one player’s luck, Was worse than a duck, His army was defeated by a flea.

Yes, a flea had managed to sneak, Into his box, so sly and so meek, And as he set up his board, It jumped and ignored, His pleas for it to take a back seat.

The flea’s moves were swift and were bold, And soon the player’s fate was foretold, For his army was weak, And he couldn’t even speak, As the flea won, and the game was sold.

So remember, at Origins beware, Of fleas that might be lurking somewhere, For they might just disrupt, And leave you feeling stuck, In a wargaming nightmare.

Pat Mooney of Flagbearer Games joins the show to talk about Nations & Cannons, and specifically, their latest Kickstarter campaign, as Merle Robinson of the NSDM also tags in as a guest co-host.

So how do players fit into the setting?  What sorts of adventures do they find?  We talk about these, as well as the genesis of Nations & Cannons as an educational tool and their current crossovers into some optional light fantasy theatrics.  There’s a variety of products already available, and we’ll find out in a few weeks if Merle was able to successfully talk Pat into coming to Origins 2023.

Links that matter!

• CPT Allen McLain
• Flagbearer Games Discord server
• Nations & Cannons: The American Crisis for DnD 5E
• Educator Program for those looking to use the campaign in schools
• 5 Questions with Pat Mooney

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

]]> 28 April 2023

Pat Mooney of Flagbearer Games joins the show to talk about Nations & Cannons, and specifically, their latest Kickstarter campaign, as Merle Robinson of the NSDM also tags in as a guest co-host.

So how do players fit into the setting?  What sorts of adventures do they find?  We talk about these, as well as the genesis of Nations & Cannons as an educational tool and their current crossovers into some optional light fantasy theatrics.  There’s a variety of products already available, and we’ll find out in a few weeks if Merle was able to successfully talk Pat into coming to Origins 2023.

Links that matter!

• CPT Allen McLain
• Flagbearer Games Discord server
• Nations & Cannons: The American Crisis for DnD 5E
• Educator Program for those looking to use the campaign in schools
• 5 Questions with Pat Mooney

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

]]> https://i0.wp.com/armchairdragoons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/DRAGOONS-Podcast-10-x500.png?fit=500%2C500&ssl=1 false no 1:25:20 No no https://armchairdragoons.com/podcast/mid-s10-e11/ Fri, 21 Apr 2023 14:36:00 +0000 https://www.armchairdragoons.com/?post_type=podcast&p=20367 21 April 2023

Moe & Grant pop in to join Brant on a discussion of what we’re playing now, and what we’re looking forward to, whether it’s upcoming games, or events, or games at events!

Yes, we ramble a bit on this one, but that’s kind of our schtick, isn’t it?  We talk about Canadians wargaming the ACW and how awesome Bruce Maxwell is.  We cover some upcoming games we’re excited for and the events we’re going to hit for the rest of 2023 – like Weekend at the Warehouse, Origins, Compass Expo (both of them!), and the Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly.

We’re winding down season 10, so catch us while we’re still recording before our usual Summer break!

We told you last week that nominations are open at BoardGameGeek for the Golden Geek Awards, including the podcast category.  There’s no chance in hell that Mentioned in Dispatches would ever win for Best Podcast because we’re not called “Meepled in Dispatched” or “Mentioned in Meeplepatches” or something, but it would be awesome to get a wargaming podcast into the final round of voting. Throw us a bone a give us a nomination, eh?

While you’re there, give some love to Hexy Talk, Beyond Solitaire, History on the Table, Homo Ludens, and Harold on Games.  We’d tell you to vote for Pushing Cardboard, too, but Grant isn’t in the list

If you can’t vote b/c you don’t have enough GeekGold to spend on it, shoot Brant a PM on BGG and he’ll send some your way.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

It’s been forever since we had a chat with our guy David Heath of Lock ‘n Load Publishing but he’s here to talk about “tabletop AI” and solo assistants for tabletop wargames.  Think of this as a third piece of our solo gaming puzzle from this season, after talking solo wargames as a whole, plus digital AI, earlier in the Spring.

So what’s the difference between an “AI” and a “solo assistant”? We’ll make you listen to David’s explanation   We also discuss some of the new games they’ve got on the horizon, how a production screwup got you a giant box of goodies for a Kickstarter, support for Tabletop Simulator and other digital implementations, and why you never want to exit “early access” on Steam.  Let us know what you think!

Some of the other things we get to:

• Purple Haze
• Mansions of Madness
• D-Day at (fill in the blank) series
• JU-87 Stuka Ace campaign
• Mapping the CYOA books
• The meme
• How many RPG systems?

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

We brought in a couple of guys that actually know about naval wargaming to tell us all about what goes wrong when wargaming naval warfare.  Chris Weuve and our guy Rocky have both spent many more days afloat than Brant has even spent on the beach, so we let them steer the ship30.  We even bring marines into the conversation (and then rapidly dismiss them. . . )

So let’s talk about how much the players get wrong, fighting to the last ship, gamey-ness on the tabletop rather than in the real world, and how much “doctrine” belongs in the game.  We’ll run the gamut from age of sail up to the modern day, but keep ourselves firmly in the water and avoid any ‘space navy’ discussions. Also, we need to ensure that any actual, potential, or hypothetical employer of Chris31 are fully insulated from anything said (or not) during this podcast, as he doesn’t speak for them and they don’t speak for him. All of his (rather strong) opinions are his own and utterly unaffected in any fashion by any potential connection to any hypothetical employer.

Here are some links to some things we talked about

• Every naval wargaming action ever
• Avalanche Press’ Second World War at Sea and Great War at Sea series
• Sim Canada’s WW2 and WW1 capital ship combat games
• CONSIM-L has now migrated into a groups.io instance
• Connections Online 2023 Registration info and past conference archives
• Seven Days to the Rhine thread with non-doctrinal unit usage

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

Buckeye Game Fest is coming up in a few weeks, and we brought in War Room Commandanté Ardwulf to tell us all about it, plus we dragged in designer-extraordinaire David Thompson for his take on his favorite convention, too.  We also talk about some of our other favorite smaller conventions, and have a special Armchair Dragoons convention announcement of our own at the end.  And yes, our Convention & Event Calendar is still chugging along.

While the convention itself opens up on Thursday the 27th of April, the War Room opens up on Monday the 24th, for a whole bunch of bigger games, like this year’s multiple games of La Bataille, and the Marshall Enterprises guys will be there, too.  OCS table?  Certainly!  Bunch of COIN games with The Player’s Aid?  Absolutely.  Tim from Catastrophe Games?  We tried to bribe him to stay away, to no avail.  Heck, even Russ from Cardboard Conflicts is going to be there!

You get the CABS library – 1500ish games – plus a good-sized main gaming room with all the other tabletop games of Euro/Ameritrash productions, and also the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator (with a shorter waiting list and no extra price!), plus a great downtown location.

No, it’s not a ‘big’ convention, but that’s exactly why a lot of people prefer these – not too expensive, not too crowded, and not too insane.  Well, except for us.

To give you a sense of what you’re in for, here’s a look at our coverage from last year.

Also, this episode has a little more off-color language than usual, so maybe don’t put it on a speaker at work.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

Brant and Rocky are joined by special guest Sebastian Bae to talk about how the hobby wargaming world has approached contemporary / near-future conflicts with China and in the modern PTO.

Whether you’re flipping the map on its head, or trying to project near-future weapons capabilities, it’s a unique set of challenges.  How might political shakeups change the “start condition” of the conflict?  What role is played by strategic logistics?  How would you put a multi-player model in place without relegating some players to being tag-along siblings?  What assumptions are you bringing to your design, and maybe shouldn’t?

We’ve got some links for you!

• Rocky’s Bibliography
• CSIS presentation of their wargame report (PDF)
• CNAS wargame on NBC News
• Go order Littoral Commander!
• Warfighter 101: Movement to Contact (Ft Irwin wargame mentioned in the show)

Preview of a new wall map in work. Adapting a perspective I have used before but going for high-resolution, large-format, and a lot more detail. Struggling to find the right colors and balance for topography, population density, and lots of labels. pic.twitter.com/Orz7Nkohd8

— Rhodes Cartography (@RhodesCartogra1) February 18, 2023

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

OK look, we all have rulebooks we love, and ones we hate.  Formats we love, and formats we hate.  Podcast guests we love, and…  well, you get the idea32.  So let’s talk about rules, and the rules that govern rules-writing.

Case system?  Conversational style? Learn-to-play vs quick reference? “Did you read what I wrote?” Programmed learning to slowly roll out the rules, or just throw players in the deep end?

We tackle all of these topics, as well as why you don’t want to be the person who gets a rule named after them, why you should always have blind playtesters33, and the breast & worst typos you can make.

Soon, I think, the @ADragoons will drop a podcast where I rant about the need for the better editing of rules. Perhaps I undervalue the present. Working my way through "Charlie Company" (2e), somebody's getting a belated kick in the painfuls. pic.twitter.com/nWyH1LWtVV

— Jim Owczarski (@TheGascon) March 13, 2023

Just for kicks, we did ask Chat GPT for the definition of a “rules lawyer” and this is what we got

A "rules lawyer" is a term used to describe someone who focuses more on the technicalities and specifics of the rules of a game, system, or situation than on the actual intended outcome or spirit of those rules. This term is often used to describe individuals who use their knowledge of rules to gain an advantage over others or to argue their case in a situation where the rules are unclear or contested. While knowing and following the rules is important, being a "rules lawyer" can be seen as negative because it often involves using technicalities to manipulate the system or win at all costs, rather than playing in the spirit of the game or situation.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

Brant, Bryan, Jim, and James all gang up to talk about different facets of artificial intelligence in wargaming, and other digital games.  How “intelligent” do you really want it to be?  A dedicated opponent?  A shadowboxer?

While talking through the options, we cover a variety of games and AIs, from Tiller to Panther to Elder Scrolls to semi-legal free-on-the-web adaptations of game.  We talk about indicators that we see in games of in/competent AIs and the level of details we would ideally want when playing.

Why are you gaming with an AI?  What do you expect from the AI?  How can those requirements be baked in up front?  And what do Pop-tarts have to do with any of this?  All that and more, right now on… {announcer voice} MENNNNNN-tioned in DISPATCHES! {/announcer voice}

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

A full house on this episode, as Brant, Mike, Michael, and Wayne Hansen get together to discuss solo wargaming, and yes, we’re aware of the irony.

So let’s bring together the guys from My Own Worst Enemy and Solosaurus to join our guest and talk about the solo wargaming experience, tower defense games vs narrative procedurals, games that claim solo compatibility but really aren’t, and how much agency the player has in a game. Do you play many wargames solo?  If so, do you use a dedicated solo mode with some form of procedural AI, or do you just ‘two-hand’ the game and play as best you can?  How much of your wargaming is solo vs opposed?  Talk back to us below in the comments, or pop into our forums.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

Brant, Rocky, and Moe talk about where & how the theme matters in sci-fi wargaming, and at what point (if at all) you aggregate your forces too high to really “feel” like a sci-fi game.  We start off with Hammer’s Slammers and Star Fleet Battles and the recent Alien games and then wander around all sorts of laser guns, jet packs, transporters, and more.

So how much do the graphics matter?  How much do the toys matter34?  How much does the pre-existing media license matter?  How much do these endless questions matter? Obviously we talk about a couple of favorite games over the years35 as well as some other recent titles.  We do steer clear of most RPGs, as the real questions we’re after here have to do with keeping the ‘feel’ of sci-fi in our wargames.  And yes, Rocky is dialing in from one of the moons of Mars.

What do you think?  Give us a shout in the comments at the end of the page, or in our forums.

Also, we didn’t make a big deal about it last Fall when it happened, but we did open up some additional slots on our various Patreon tiers, so if you want to hear yourself name-checked on the podcast, this is your chance.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

Another first-timer for Mentioned in Dispatches, celebrated game designer Cole Wehrle joins Brant and Jim to talk about all sorts of historical wargaming, and a wide variety of other things, too.

Inspired by this Twitter thread about his view on Napoleonic wargames, we reached to Cole about joining the podcast, and then spent almost half the show not talking about them!  Never fear, though, with GOTY Cyrano in the house, we got back on track and covered plenty of Zuckerisms.

So come for Cole holding court on his designs like John Company and Arcs and Oath, and of course, the war-in-the-petting-zoo that was Root, but stay for his thoughts on the Bavarian Campaign, telescoping scales of command, the Russo-French alliance landing in Ireland, and more.  If you’re interested in that Discord server that Cole talked about, you can find it here.  And yes, there really was an article about Orange Crush is Foreign Policy.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

With Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro’s ridiculous mishandling of the Open Game License since the new year, gaming omnivores who cross between RPGs & wargames have had plenty of ‘entertainment.’  BUT it also go us to thinking “what would an open game license or system reference document for wargaming look like and are there use cases that could serve as an example of how an open rules system might work?”  Don’t know what “the OGL” is?  Don’t worry; we explain it.

Well, Brant & Gary are never short of opinions, but in this case they were a little short of expertise.  So we brought in Chris Pramas of Green Ronin Publishing to join the conversation.  Chris worked at WotC back when the OGL was first put in place, and Green Ronin was one of the first companies to publish content under that license.  In the 20 years since, his company has published OGL compatible material, created their own game engine, and an accompanying process for creators to release their own content for it, and signed on to one of the OGL alternatives currently being developed by the non-WotC members of the industry (Paizo’s ORC license). Oh, and Chris is also a long-time wargamer with a deep knowledge of both minis and hex-&-counter wargaming.  So he seemed like a great person to bring in and discuss this wacky idea of an OGL for the wargaming world, with a few examples of how it might work.

What do you think, listeners?  Are there some legs here?  What are some examples of game systems that have crossed eras, scales, or genres that could make for an open system upon which others could build?

Oh, and the usual references

• Fifth Season campaign from Green Ronin
• The C&C “family” of games
• Chris’s “Curated Quarantine” series from Facebook

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.) 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.

Now that we’ve done it a second time, it’s officially a “tradition” – the Holiday Wargaming Wishes that our crew bestows upon the wargaming world are here, as we wrap up our Fall season.

Brant & Mike are joined by Bryan & Mike36 as we discuss the games we played in 2022, the conventions we attended, the sales where we didn’t buy anything, and all of those magic wishes we’d love to make if the Hallmark movies were actually documentaries.

Oh, and the mandatory references….

• Taking the LSATs at Origins?  Or double-blind Kriegsspiel?
• Cyrano & Brant talking game conventions
• Where to get involved in Saturday Night Fights (and more)

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can also find our regiment’s social media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)  We have our Patreon, where you can support The Armchair Dragoons activities and maybe get name-checked on the podcast, too! Feel free to talk back to us either in our site forums, or in the discussion area below.

Brant & Jim corner Ardwulf into answering a bunch of questions about the changes to the Charles S Roberts Awards, and the crew also pontificate on awards and industry recognition as a whole.  Yes, this one’s running a little late; you’ve been sleeping off turkey dinner anyway.

What categories?  How to split them?  How to combine them?  How to rewrite the charter for the CSRs?  How to decide where games fall on the Revolutionary Calendar?  What to do with miniatures rules?  What goes in the “Narnia” category?  Does Ty Bomba even listen to Mentioned in Dispatches?37  What about all those other awards?  What is “The Process” that Gary keeps referring to?  Enjoy our penultimate episode of season 9, as you relax off your Thanksgiving leftovers.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can also find our regiment’s social media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)  We have our Patreon, where you can support The Armchair Dragoons activities and maybe get name-checked on the podcast, too! Feel free to talk back to us either in our site forums, or in the discussion area below.

Following up an earlier couple of podcasts that covered dice, and game mods, Brant & Rocky are here to talk about all sorts of game accessories, and other enhancements that aren’t necessary for game play, but definitely make it nicer.

We talk all about tables, dice towers, tweezers, counter sleds, map covers, box inserts, and more.  There’s a lot to cover and plenty we missed because we only have an hour(ish) in an episode.  Obviously there’s plenty more to talk about, but here are the at least some of the links to the things that we covered, and remember if you point the audience to something cool, make sure to give us a link!

• Dice episode
• Origins Tabletoppers
• Carolina Game Tables • Boardgame Tables • Wyrmwood
• Cube4Me
• Folded Space

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can also find our regiment’s social media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)  We have our Patreon, where you can support The Armchair Dragoons activities and maybe get name-checked on the podcast, too! Feel free to talk back to us either in our site forums, or in the discussion area below.

Another first-time guest for Mentioned in Dispatches, as award-winning designer David Thompson joins us for a discussion about solo wargaming, both the ones he designs and the ones he plays.

Of course, we can’t talk solo wargaming without the lead Dragoon of the solo wargaming world, so BBMike, of My Own Worst Enemy, is here to tell us why everything we think about solo wargaming is wrong.  We talk about playing dedicated solo games, solo play of multiplayer games, the various mechanics of solo wargaming, and also a bit about solo RPG gaming.  David also spills the beans and lets us know about some of his upcoming projects, while simultaneously telling us that he can’t tell us about them.  So sit back and relax, or take the dog for a stroll, and enjoy hanging out with the David, and the Dragoons for an hour or so.

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can also find our regiment’s social media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)  We have our Patreon, where you can support The Armchair Dragoons activities and maybe get name-checked on the podcast, too! Feel free to talk back to us either in our site forums, or in the discussion area below.

We’re joined this week by Tim Densham of Catastrophe Games, as we discuss his company, their recent games, what’s coming up, and the lessons he’s learned as a publisher over the last few years.

So let’s talk about Gallipoli, and playing the entire Eastern Front in one sitting, and the history behind the games, and why they’re not all “wargames” but rather “historical games”.  Tim explains how his experiences working with Academy Games helped shape his business approach, and how his deployments to Afghanistan helped shape the design of Zurmat and let’s all make fun of how bad at the business side of things Brant was.  Oh yeah, and Tim needs some graphics / arts folks, so if that’s your thing, shoot him a line!

Please trot on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can also find our regiment’s social media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)  We have our Patreon, where you can support The Armchair Dragoons activities and maybe get name-checked on the podcast, too! Feel free to talk back to us either in our site forums, or in the discussion area below.

One of the great events of the wargaming calendar each year is the GMT Weekend at the Warehouse.  The great folks at GMT Games open the building up for a few hundred of their closest friends and spend all weekend gaming, and of course – shopping directly in the warehouse!

So we invited a couple of Weekend at the Warehouse attendees to join us and make us all jealous about the great time they had.  Justin (Justegarde on Youtube) and Grant (from Pushing Cardboard) regaled us with the tales of great games, great friends, and great discounts, as well as traveling great distances.  Prototypes, 8-player throwdowns, games from other publishers, the taco truck, and GMT’s reserve stock in the warehouse are all part of the discussion, but if we list every game we talked about, then Tolstoi wouldn’t have anything to do for his listener’s guide to the episode!

Justegarde’s videos

• • Day 1 (Pendragon and walk around)
  • Day 2 (No Retreat France, Barbarians at the Gates)
  • Day 3 (Blitzkrieg to Moscow 2, Space Corp, shopping)

Pushing Cardboard coverage

• • Article about Grant’s trip there
  • Interview with Kai Jensen (more interviews to come, too)

Please mosey on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! We’re still a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for joining us for  Mentioned in Dispatches and checking out the official podcast of The Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can also find our regiment’s social media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)  We have our Patreon, where you can support The Armchair Dragoons activities and maybe get name-checked on the podcast, too! Feel free to talk back to us either in our site forums, or in the discussion area below.