by Happy New Year and welcome to the updated and evolved #TuesdayNewsday, where we’re still bringing you the news-you-can-use and updating the rest with some tweaks to the graphics, flow, and layout.
In case you missed last week’s “2024 Year In Review” with the Dragoons, it was a pretty good year for us. Here are a pair of excerpts for you
and also
We’ve updated the look & feel of our front page with a new line art version of the logo, some typography changes, and a few color tweaks, along with some changes to our widgets on the right side of our homepage. We also pulled together a linktree page to give people a single source to all of the different places you can find us on the web. We’ve added most of the 2025 conventions to our event calendar, and rebuilt the convention extract below the calendar.
A lot of wargaming sites around the web released their own 2024 Year in Review content, and here’s a handful of them for you to check out:
- Brian Train’s “Obligatory” Year In Review article
- Homo Ludens gives you their Best Games of 2024 in their recap
- Sound of Drums gives you some news with their look back at the year
- Space Biff stretched his year in review across multiple articles, and here’s the index to them
- Pushing Cardboard’s favorite games from this year
- The Chit Show did a big wrapup show with Dan & Ardy
- Rocky broke down his year in review articles into wargames, boardgames, crowdfunding, and RPGs
- ID Jester had a wrapup show
- Gimpy Gamer picks his best wargames of 2024
- Grant’s got a big look-back for The Player’s Aid
- Boardgames Chronicle has a look back at 2024’s most often-played games
Registration is still open for the 2025 ACDC, to be held online 17-19 January 2025.
As with our previous editions of the ArmChair Dragoons Digital Convention1, we’ll be wargaming all weekend long with a variety of games, seminars, panels, talks shows, pickup games, and more.
Brant will be on The Chit Show with Dan & Ardy to discuss The ACDC and digital conventions in general, on Thursday.
ORIGINAL OPORD ~ REGISTRATION ~ LIVESTREAM ARCHIVE ~ AAR
Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!
- Wargames Illustrated #445 (January 2025) is now available
- MMP released ASL Journal #15 and it’s even on sale right now
- World at War issue #100 has been mailed to subscribers and is now available for the public to order
- CSL has now released a boxed version of Prigozhin’s March of Justice
- Blue Panther should now be shipping Game of Drones from Historic Wings
- By the time anyone realized that Thin Red Line Games were taking orders for In A Dark Wood2 they were already sold out
- Tactics of World War I released on Steam, and is on intro sale (15% off) thru 19 January
- Ares Games has released both Mega Empires: The West and Mega Empires: The East to US channels
Time to get those orders in now and then either (a) complain that it’s 2 years late, and/or (b) be surprised when it gets here sooner than you thought
- Worthington has a big Kickstarter campaign for neoprene maps for a bunch of their recent releases
- Oppidum – a reimplementation of the classic Cry Havoc! – is now on pre-order thru mid-February
- C3i issue #38 is up for pre-order, featuring a new Korean War game from Trevor Bender
- Not only did Renegade bring back Risk 2210 AD but they’ve got the Frontline expansion (introduces Mars as a playable map) on pre-order right now
- Rapid Fire! has their Monty v Rommel scenario book available for pre-order
- Warlord’s got some nice Bolt Action! minis on pre-order
Looking for a deal? Getting more bang for your buck?
- WDS “Game of the week” is Napoleonic Battles series – Campaign 1814 for $29.95
- Kraken Dice has a free 7pc dice set if you pay the shipping but you have to put coupon code FREE25 on the page where you add the dice to the cart, and not at checkout
- Renegade Game Studios have all in-stock Axis & Allies series games 10% off for the month of January
- Miniature Market has Napoleon’s Eagles: Storm in the East on sale
- If you’re looking for some TSWW stuff, Noble Knight has Balkan Fury II in the “Stuka” box on “sale” for $280
- 25th Century Games has everything on their site on sale with coupon code HAPPYNEWYEAR at checkout
- NUTS! Publishing has some dent-&-ding copies of This War Without An Enemy on sale
- Wargames Illustrated magazine is having a back issue sale
Since we took last Tuesday “off”3 we’ve got some catching up to do this week!
- 2024 Year In Review
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Playing the Beanball” for “Charlie Don’t Surf!”
- Saturday Night Fights ~ “Playing the Beanball” (2) for “Charlie Don’t Surf!”
- Mentioned in Dispatches was selected as one of the top 10 Best Strategy Game Podcasts by FeedSpot
- Short Rounds! Cossacks 3 4
- Informationized Land Warfare the JADO Way (Joint All Domain Operation 01 Land East China Sea Block 01B)
- Your 2024 in Wargaming, Part 1 – The Initial Stats
- This week we’ve got a new Wednesday feature launching, so look for it tomorrow
- AARs5
- Gameplay
thisthe past 2 weeks- “The Struggle Begins” for “Squad Battles: First World War”
- “Encounter in the Mist” for “Midgard”
- Intro to “Star Wars Chain of Command”
- A “Quadrant 13” “Star Wars” Stumblethrough
- Stumble Through “The Mud and the Blood”
- Operation: CHARNWOOD Battle for St. Contest (IABSM)
- The Twin Battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras for “Bloody Big Battles”
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Rocky has written a pair of articles (so far) about the Chinese wargame series Joint All Domain Operations, and even had some exchanges with the designer on social media. In this article on his personal blog, he talks about wrangling the JADO series through a variety of translation issues as well as learning how to absorb someone else’s uses of ‘common’ wargaming terms
Translating JADO is a time-consuming task. I can certainly play the game without the additional burden, so why am I investing the time? The truth is that JADO has caught my interest and I want to explore the system more fully. To do so I need to digest the rules and the only way I can do so (to my personal satisfaction) is to work on my own translation. In the process I am internalizing more of the rules and discovering many more connections in the game system.
This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world
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The best videos this week from our wargaming friends
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Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about ID Jester’s 10 Wargame Challenge
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- ICYMI above, Mentioned in Dispatches was selected as one of the top 10 Best Strategy Game Podcasts by FeedSpot
- GMT just dropped a big announcement that a bunch of their inbound games arrived earlier than expected, so they’re going to be shipping out about 8 new games plus other stuff in the next few weeks, well ahead of schedule
- ICv2 reports that Hasbro has signed a gambling license for D&D-branded games, which pretty much no one had on any bingo card anywhere
- Game store owner Scott Thorne looks back at his 2024 predictions and grades himself and then offers his 2025 predictions, too
- BoardGameWire reports on changes to the Cardboard Edison Award
- Rascal News has an interesting article about a company that launched Braille RPG dice
- Decision Games is soliciting feedback on which magazine games to republish as deluxe editions
- Wargame Design Studio is launching a totally new series of medieval warfare games
- Firaxis are hiring an actual historian to work on the Civilization series games (see below)
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
Upcoming Dragoons Events
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 2 February and 2 March
- Next confirmed live event is BuckeyeGameFest, 1-4 May 2025
- Next planned virtual event is the ACDC6, 17-19 January, 2025
Other Conventions & Events
things are slowing down now that we’re getting to the holidays, so here are some for next year
- 17-19 January The ACDC (Armchair Dragoons Virtual HQ)
- 17-19 January ConQuest Ventura (Ventura CA)
- 17-19 January Marscon (Virginia Beach VA)
- 17-19 January Siege of Augusta (August GA)
- 23-26 January MMP Winter Offensive (Bowie MD)
- 24-26 January Winter War Con (Champaign IL)
- 30 Jan-2 Feb CascadeCon (Bellingham WA)
- 31 Jan-2 Feb Captain Con (Warwick RI)
- 8 February SDHistCon Winter Quarters (Online)
- 5-9 February Game-on (Bellevue WA)
Come join us at online convention SDHistCon Winter Quarters 2025 on Feb. 8! Badges are on sale now: https://t.co/aWE2ZNp7Sc. More information: https://t.co/ROPJzXDFbY. pic.twitter.com/A3nBIbTpj1
— SDHistCon (@SDHistCon) January 5, 2025
Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- Taiwan is wargaming a military escalation with China
- Another article from Roger Mason, Wargaming: Decisions and Synthetic Experience
- Good column here about training the trainers in the USMC formal learning centers that pretty much dead-on echoes what Brant was saying a decade ago
- Some year-in-review articles from Breaking Defense, including what happened in Europe, the Middle East, cyber warfare, and the US Space Force, among others
- Drones are operating in a target-rich environment in Ukraine right now
- This week, Mick Ryan talks about a bit of situational reset around the world and what might come next
- The next GUWS webinar is Wargaming for the Social & Cognitive Sciences on 21 January and then Nuclear Wargaming: It shouldn’t just be Game Over! on 4 February
- PaxSims points us to the post-exercise report for Exercise Trillium Cura, a preparedness exercise for mass casualties / pandemic care in Ontario
Recently finalized the design for “Violent Victory”, a co-designed #wargame exploring civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) with Rachel McVicker. Replaced civilian cubes with dice to allow for higher density and tweaked the influence meter to be more meaningful. #wargaming
— Sebastian Bae (@sebastianbae.bsky.social) January 4, 2025 at 10:35 AM
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 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.
Footnotes
- the middle “D” does Double Duty
- we were all watching the college football playoff games, probably
- we still had the 2024 look back at all those new releases!
- this is the second installment of a new column from longtime wargame writer Lloyd “Gus” Sabin
- yes, we’re bringing back the Sunday AARs!
- Armchair Dragoons Digital Convention
