Recovery in Hawaii, Zenobia Awards, and more! ~ #TuesdayNewsday 8/15/23

Here’s our #TuesdayNewsday recon at the strategy gaming headlines of the week

Among the many, many victims of the wildfires in Maui is a hobby game shop in Lahaina that was obliterated.  There’s a GoFundMe set up to assist the folks from Game Odyssey in recovering from the fire and (we hope) eventually being able to re-open the store.

This was a locally-owned store that wasn’t run for the benefit of the tourists, but for the locals there in Maui, so they could definitely use some help to get back on their feet in recovering from this tragedy.

 

The next iteration of the Zenobia Awards are coming, with the contest opening 1 October 2023.

You can check out the previous winners here, and several of them have been slated for commercial publication, too.

 

The Fall Assembly is coming!

Registration & events are both live for the Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023!
We’ve got around 20 scheduled events, with plenty of empty table-space for pickup games in between.  We’d like to add another big event or two, but until we start filling up the existing ones, it’s not a priority.

The latest update?  A couple of designers are going to be joining us!  Hermann Luttmann is coming to town.  So is Bruce Maxwell.  And Keith Tracton is going to make the trek, too!  We’ll let you know if any others commit, as well.

Current Confirmed Game Sessions NATO: The Cold War Goes Hot – learn with designer Bruce Maxwell Learn to play Great Battles of the American Civil War Playtest sessions of the upcoming Maneuver Warfare professional development / USMC card game All-day Saturday game of It Never Snows, split into two 5-hour sessions. You don’t need to play in both, but are welcome to if you’d like Triumph & Tragedy, with one session each day over the weekend Bayonets & Tomahawks, with one session each day over the weekend Littoral Commander, the USMC training-game-turned-hobby-game Brief Border Wars for some conflicts you’ve never heard of Gunfight Royale for a Wild West shootout and more coming!

Convention Details Badges are $40 for the weekend, which include some munchies, custom Armchair Dragoons swag, and whatever other prizes or giveaways we’re able to gather before the event. Attendance is capped on this one because of the limited floorspace we’ve got inside the store and we want to make sure every player gets plenty of time on the tables. Gamer’s Armory is planning to open early on Sunday just for us, so we can get an additional game session or two in, before the general public gets in the doors. As noted on the convention site, we do not have a hotel attached to the facility.  You can find local hotels here.  We’re looking into a potential block deal with some local hotels, but with the State Fair in town it’s tough. As a reminder, Regimental Patron-level Patreon supporters get a free badge for all Armchair Dragoons-hosted events.

 

Games released in the past week that you’ll want to check out

• Compass Games’ Alexandros and Spartacus is starting to sneak out of the warehouse, and can still be snagged at the pre-order price of $65
• Global War, a new solitaire game from R Ben Madison, is now available from White Dog Games
• High Flying Dice Games released #7 in their Battles for Canada series, A Feeble and Negligent Action
• Free League’s latest edition of the Dragonbane RPG is now available
• Warlord Games released some new stuff for their ACW Black Powder Epic Battles line: a siege mortar battery and a field ambulance
• Avalanche Press released Western Desert Force as a PDF download
• Holy crap!  Hexwar finally released something that was due in (checks notes…) November of 2022!  Anyway, you can grab Civil War: Atlanta 1864 at 10% off for the launch sale
• Bastogne Breakout is on itch.io from BruinBear Games for a whole $6; these guys have also adapted at least one Brian Train game to digits, too
• The latest Nordic Forces releases for Team Yankee from Battlefront Minis this past week
  • Norwegian Unit Cards
  • M113 Storm Group
  • NM135 Transports
  • NM142 Anti-tank Troop
  • Feltvogn Recon Troop

 

Crowdfunding, p500, pledge programs, whatevs yo! ~ if you can order it now & get it later, here it is

• CSL has 1854: The Alma on pre-order
• Pre-orders are out for the small indie card game CardRunners, a co-op cyberpunk game where you’re trying to take down the man
• Some pretty neat vintage monster cards on Kickstarter
• Build your own HIMARS!  (ok, ok, it’s a wooden model, but it’s an articulated one!)

 

Here to help you save a few bucks, or, y’know… spend more than you were planning if it wasn’t for a good deal

• Draco Ideas has a sale right with coupon code loquiero at checkout – if you buy 2 games, the second one is 50%, and they send a few copy of Marshals Academy
• Battles of Medieval Britain: A Solitaire Wargame is on sale at Wargame Vault for $10.50
• The latest version of Diplomacy is on sale at Miniature Market for $32
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is S&T #288 with Hindenburg’s War: Decision in the Trenches, 1918

 

There’s always something going on with The Dragoons, so we’ve always got plenty to tell you about!

• Coming up at the end of the month?  A live show on 31 August from Armchair Dragoons
• Saturday Night Fights took the week off while the ringmaster was on vacation
• Going back through our own archives? Global Shipping’s Impact on Tabletop Gaming (as discussed on Ardwulf’s stream on 14 August)
• New column! #TBT/Throwback Thursday ~ Early Computer Wargames
• The Giant Civ 6 AAR: Nubia, Part 29
• The Grand “Champions of Krynn” AAR ~ Part Seventeen
• This week in our forums
  • FOCUS ON . . . GMT’s No Retreat series
  • The continuing adventures of U-96
  • Starfield, anyone?
  • Yes, that’s Carrie Underwood covering Motorhead
• Upcoming Dragoons Events (and don’t forget to check the event calendar for everything else)
  • Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 10 September (skipping ahead bc of Labor Day) and 1 October
  • Next #UnboxingDay¹ will be THIS WEEK!
  • Next virtual event is The 2024 ACDC, 12-14 January 2024
  • Next live event is The Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023, 20-22 October 2023, The Gamer’s Armory, Cary NC

Don’t forget we are co-sponsoring a research project with Beyond Solitaire about your favorite solo wargames, and we’ve got over 150 participants so far.

 

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

• 17-20 August HistoriKC Fest (Kansas City, MO)
• 18-20 August SDHistEast (Portsmouth, RI)
• 25 August – 2 September ConSimWorld Expo (Tempe AZ)
• 31 August – 4 September DragonCon (Atlanta, GA)
• 1-4 September Pacificon (Santa Clara, CA)
• 1-4 September Strategicon: Gateway (Los Angeles, CA)
• 15-17 September Southern Front (Morrisville, NC)
• 1-8 October ASLOK (Cleveland, OH)
• 6-8 October Call To Arms (Williamsburg VA)
• 20-22 October The Inaugural Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023 (Cary, NC)

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Our fellow content creators from the wargaming world

• Rocky is working his way through the RPG-a-day lists of August, and talks about Behind Enemy Lines
• My Own Worst Enemy looks at Star Trek: The Adventure Game
• If you’re going to have someone tell you about Second Fallujah, then Gimpy is your guy
• Peter Robbins has an interview with John Curry from the History of Wargaming project
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about Ancient Rome in wargaming

 

 

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

• GMT Games will be charging cards for a crap-ton of C&C Napoleonics games this week, and shipping soon therafter; still no Le Grande Battles
• Podcast episode with Mark Herman, talking about his upcoming design on the attack on Kyiv from 2022, along with some other wargaming discussion over Herman’s career
• If you join Avalanche Press’ Gold Club at this point in the year, you’ll get the rest of this year, plus all of next year, in your membership

 

Hey, we’d LOVE to have some more action in the dedicated area of our forums for the wargame practitioners.

• Sand table training, tankside, in WW2
• Russian “terminators” getting terminated
• Poland’s vehicle mix will be evolving soon
• Clint Warren-Davey² ran a professional wargame for his native Aussies
• The next GUWS webinar is Intelligent Cardboard: Implementing AI in a Board Game on 29 August³ and after that it’s
  Ender’s Legacy: Digital Wargames in Professional Military Education on 5 September
• PaxSims looks at a recent space wargame
• From our Connections Online livestream archive

 

Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing

 

 

That’s all for this week!
Be sure to drop by our forums and join the fun, and next Tuesday we’ll drop some more news on you.

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Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
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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.

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In a world of wargaming so grand,
Tuesdays, news spreads ‘cross the land,
Updates each week,
For battles we seek,
On the tabletops, forces will stand!

1. 3rd Thursday of the month
2. designer of Werwolf
3. this one dovetails nicely with our podcast episode last season talking about tabletop AI