Another #TuesdayNewsday is here, delivering breaking news & insights from the wargaming scene
A few years ago, SDHistCon started awarding their “Summit Award” with the intention of
recognizing a historical board game published in the preceding year that most broadened the hobby through the ease of teaching and/or play, uniqueness of topic, or novel approach1
The nominees for this year are
- Halls of Hegra. Designed by Petter Schanke Olsen, published by Tompet Games.
- Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Designed by Alex Knight, published by Blue Panther LLC.
- The British Way: Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire. Designed by Stephen Rangazas, published by GMT Games.
- We Are Coming, Nineveh. Designed by Harrison Brewer, Rex Brynen, Juliette Le Ménahèze, and Brian Train, published by Nuts! Publishing.
All 4 games will be demo’ed at SDHistCon next month, and voting will take place at the convention. Previous winners included Red Flag Over Paris and Votes for Women. You can read more about the Summit Award over at the SDHist site
If you’re in the US, go vote.
We’re not worried about who.
Just learn a little something about your candidates – especially your local ones – and get out there and make your voice heard.
We’re starting to lay down the plans for January’s ACDC – the Armchair Dragoons Digital Convention – to be held 17-19 January 2025. This is as close as we can get you to a real-world game convention while you’re hanging out in your pajamas.
We’ll have game sessions, watch-it-played demos, some historical talks, game panels, and more. You can see 2024’s livestream archive and AAR here.
Want to get involved? Drop a line in the forums here and we’ll figure out what works! We’ll have some more info about the 2025 ACDC plans for next week’s #TuesdayNewsday.
Event submissions will open in November, and badges will go on sale right after Thanksgiving.
Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!
- Another David Thompson collaboration from Osprey, this time with Dave Neale, as War Story: Occupied France is now released
- Three Crowns Games released Mud & Blood covering the 1914 Lodz campaign
- Close the Atlantic is a new WW3 naval game that’s being printed by Blue Panther
- SNAFU finally got Operation Bøllebank on their site for order… finally
- There’s a cool new giant skeleton from Alternative Armies that stands 40mm tall
- Some expansion resources for 1943-1945 from DiSimula Edizioni are available either as p&p or printed for shipping
- Modiphius released a new Achtung! Cthulhu PDF scenario, as Operation Achilles his the
stree… digits - The Fallen Kingdoms just launched on Steam and it’s 10% off right now
- New terrain for Heroscape
- Some new Bolt Action minis from Warlord
Time to get those orders in now and then either (a) complain that it’s 2 years late, and/or (b) be surprised when it gets here sooner than you thought
- With the release of the latest edition of the game, Warlord now has a Bolt Action Introductory Set on pre-order
- Osprey are taking pre-orders on Paolo Mori’s new Battalion: War of the Ancients which is kind of dumb since the word originated in the 16th century and not ancient times
- Rex Britannorum from Shakos is over on Gamefound right now
- You wouldn’t think someone as big as Leder Games would need Kickstarter to get a Root expansion launched, but they are
- Tercios – Honor and Glory likely won’t make its Kickstarter goal, but it’s an interesting-looking army building game for 67th-17th century warfare
- Another HarnWorld novel – Slaughter at Sirion – is on Kickstarter
Looking for a deal? Getting more bang for your buck?
- WDS “Game of the week” is Campaign Waterloo for $29.95
- Avalanche Press has a “1967 Package” with a bunch of their Middle East Panzer Grenadier games and a Golden Journal for $130 (over $30 off)
- Dice Envy’s latest launch is the “circle of stars” and it’s 10% with coupon code ASTRAL at checkout
- Miniature Market has Crossbows & Catapults: Fortress War for over $20 off
- The launch sale is over, but you can still save a whole nickel if you order Lace Wars Series #16 – Dreams of Empire through Noble Knight
- GOG has WARNO on sale for 33% off
- Risk: Shadow Forces (the ‘other’ Risk legacy-style game) is over 50% off on Amazon right now
This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world
- Rocky is rolling cursed ship dice with his Pirate Borg games
- Pushing Cardboard released episode #38 of the podcast, with a Paul Hedere interview, and more
- Stuart reviews Masini’s Historical Simulation and Wargames book from Routledge
- Avalanche Press started a series about the South Pacific in WW2, in advance of their upcoming SWWAS reprint
The best videos this week from our wargaming friends
- My Own Worst Enemy was slacking off this week
- Zilla’s got a Stalingrad Roads First Look & Overview
- Beyond Solitaire Podcast 173: David Digby on Solo Mode Design and Dev
- Bill Molyneaux has a short video on the Charge of the Light Brigade by Paul Lawson and Kyle and Soldiers and Sailors museum in Pittsburgh
- Meandering Mike knocks out a Wagram Playthrough – Napoleon At War
- There’s a whole series of historical videos from Slitherine in support of their Field of Glory: Kingdoms games
- Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about The Best of GMT Part III, 2000-2003
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Tampa-based Fortress Games put out a news blurb that they survived Hurricane Milton, but some outbound shipments might be delayed as their inbound shipments are being held up until the logistics have cleared a bit
- Scott Thorne’s latest column from ICv2 talks about company “enforcement” of reseller policies
- BoardGameWire reports some of the lost nuance of Mythic Games’ (non-)liquidation
- DVG’s website is borked, going on 2-1/2 weeks now, and makes our couple of migration hiccups look positively tame by comparison
- Rascal are looking forward to the upcoming Netflix movie The Electric State, which is based on the same graphic novel as the game from Free League
- The Wargaming Company has a player map to help you find opponents for their ESR games
- WDS started updating their Panzer Campaigns engine (to 4.05.1), starting with the WW2 West Front games
- Accurate Simulations are running out of time to hit their posted “mid 2024” release dates
OK folks, who wants to pick out all the wargames that illustrate each of these threads about the American War of Independence?
A thread of threads. 20 misconceptions about the Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence). Americans (proud to be one) are often quite ill-informed about the military struggle which led to our independence from Great Britain.
This isn't your father's rev war. 1/25 pic.twitter.com/UY3y092R5o
— Dr. Alexander Burns (@KKriegeBlog) July 6, 2024
It’s been a busy week for the regiment; here’s what you might’ve missed!
ICYMI elsewhere, we’ve set up a new LinkTree for the Dragoons, which collects the links to all the varying places where you can mount up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
- Armchair Dragoons Reviews Smolensk ’43 from WDS
- Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Trafalgar for “Fighting Sail”
- Mentioned In Dispatches Season 13 Ep 6 ~ FOMO
- FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ Atomic Empire of Durham NC
- Gameplay this week
Reminder than #UnboxingDay is on hiatus until 2025, when we’ll re-evaluate its potential return
Don’t forget to check our recently-updated consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
Upcoming Dragoons Events
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 3 November and 1 December
- Next confirmed live event is BuckeyeGameFest, 1-4 May 2025
- Next planned virtual event is the ACDC3, 17-19 January, 2025
Other Conventions & Events
- 26-28 October Auck Con (Auckland NZ) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 1-3 November RockCon (Rockford IL)
- 2-3 November DC Victory Open4 (Georgetown/Washington DC)
- 6-11 November Compass Game Fall Expo (Meriden CT)
- 7-10 November BottosCon (New Westminster BC)
- 8-10 November MythicCon (Charlotte NC)
- 8-11 November FoxCon (Dallas TX)
- 8-11 November SDHISTCON (San Diego CA)
- 5-7 November Connections Oz (virtual)
- 15-17 November SCGCon (Liverpool UK)
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- The battle of artillery attrition, and how would you wargame it?
- “Whipping NATO Wargaming into SHAPE” – podcast with COL Arnel David from FCI
- Here are the slides from a presentation on the RAND games around the Russian invasion of Ukraine
- Nice article here about adapting Brian Train’s QUICK to a local scenario in Lithuania (and Brian Train has some links, too)
- Bunkering in for a Baltic defense line
- Sebastian & Ian talk about wargaming with the USMC “Scuttlebutt” podcast
- This week, Mick Ryan talks about the Norks arriving in Ukraine
- The next GUWS webinar is tonight! Dungeons and Dragons: Next Generation Interactive TDGs; after that, it’s
Transforming Policy into Digital Games: From AI to Plastic Pollution on 4 November
Fight Club’s group game using Command Ops 2 for a Nijmegen scenario
Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing
That’s all for this week!
Be sure to drop by our forums and join the fun, and next Tuesday we’ll drop some more news on you.
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.
Every time I see “SDHistCon” I read it as SHitCon for some reason.
hahahahaa
Yeah, take out two letters and that’s what you’ve got.
One thing I do like about you, Brant, is that you can see things in context and have a sense of humor. Another admin would have given me a warning for that silly comment, or worse. You don’t seem to take yourself too seriously, and I think that’s a rare and welcome trait in this hobby full of “ate-ups”.
That said, I’ve considered registering at your forum, but I know I wouldn’t last long. I’ve found over the years that I just don’t play well with others. Three times banned from BGG , although never for anything I wrote in the wargame subforum. It’s always the off-topic forums that do me in.
I do appreciate being able to occasionally comment here, so thank you for that and for tolerating me. No one prolly reads these comments anyway, haha.
Always happy to have folks join in the chatter, and hope to keep it as civil as possible.
There are plenty of ways for folk to interact with us even outside of the forums, so don’t feel like you’re “less than” for commenting here instead of there. It’s all part of the Dragoons “ecosphere” (which is a dumb term, but the best we really have)
Thanks for being a regular reader!