The Pros Are Catching Up– #TuesdayNewsday 11/9/21

Every week, #TuesdayNewsday gives you a digest of what’s important in the strategy gaming world  >>>

This Week’s Headline:

Fleet Marine Force.  Assassin’s Mace. 🇬🇧 UK Fight Club. 🇺🇸 US Fight Club.  Wargame design programs at Georgetown, CGSC, and MORS, and more.  Multiple Connections conferences year-round.

The pros are starting to catch up with the hobby game world, and engaging far more with the hobbyists for their recommendations, opinions, and ideas than we’ve seen in the past 20-25 years, at least.

Is that a good thing?  Remains to be seen.  But at least we’re trying something new.

 

Newly Released This Week:

• Assault: Red Horizon ’41 is now available for retail orders.
• Avalanche Press asks “What game has ever given you a helicopter and an elephant?”  And you know what?  We honestly don’t have an answer.
• Warlord Games’ “November Madness” item is a big Battle for Berlin Bolt Action box.  It’s got about a company each of Germans and Russians, a couple of tanks, some burned out houses, bomb craters, and other terrain, and it’s all at the low, low, low price of $385 (on sale!)
• Draco Ideas are now shipping both Tetrarchia and Scope Stalingrad.
• War Diary magazine #18 is now available.  Moe took a look at it.
• The second wave of BattleTech products from their last Kickstarter are now available to retail customers, including the Clan Invasion box set, and a bunch of battlemats, and a variety of card decks.
• Ares Games have a pair of Sword & Sorcery expansions releasing this week: Spawn Gates and Gods’ Shrines and Ancient Chronicles Minions both provide miniatures upgrades over the cardboard tokens in the base box sets.
• Cyrano can’t wait to plunk his shekels down for the Bismarck Solitaire ‘bookgame’ from Worthington Games. You have to order it through Amazon, but credit to Worthington for trying to find a creative away around all the ongoing supply chain headaches.
• Steve Jackson Games has a new TFT solo adventure out called Warlock’s Workshop.
• TS Wargames just went on a tear, with 3 new releases and another 4 announced.  The ones available now are
  • Piotrków 1939
  • Bzura 1939
  • Bastogne 1944

 

On Sale This Week:

• Decision Games has a Desert Fox Games deal for 25% off all of them, until the end of the month.
• Revolution Games has a sale on The Deadly Woods: Battle of the Bulge this weekend, for SDHISTCON. Use code N8B236T42T73 from Friday 11/12 thru Monday 11/15 for 40% off.
• Paradox has their Tyranny line of games on sale at 75% off
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is World at War #73, with Spring Awakening covering the German attack into Hungary at the end of WW2

 

Newly Launched This Week:

• Warlord Games are now taking preorders on their new epic-scale Black Powder series that launches with that obscure and wholly-forgotten battle of Waterlue… or Watreloo… something like that.  Maybe we can ask the Prussians how to spell it when we stop to get directions from them.
• Preorder the new Hazardous Movement Scenario Pack #2: The Un-Civil Wars 1936-1949 for ASL from The Gamer’s Armory.  You get scenarios for Spain, Greece, and China all in one pack.
• Paper Wars #99, with the Assault on Tobruk game, should start shipping soon, but you can still grab it at the pre-order price.
• Modiphius have the Skyrim boardgame on Gamefound, another crowdsourcing platform that’s not Kickstarter.
• Paradox is now taking pre-orders on the Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back expansion
• Zurmat has about a week left on the Kickstarter campaign.
• Titania Ascending is an interesting-looking twist on solo/co-op games.  It’s not a roll-and-write, but rather a flip-and-write that incorporates cards and tiles pulled from a bag for a fantasy adventure.
• Bellica 3rd Generation are taking preorders on Vienna or Death, the third game in the “Age of Muskets” series.
• The Troops of the Napoleonic Wars – Grand Duchy of Warsaw Kickstarter campaign.  Yes, these are .stl files, and yes that’s a pain in the ass.  But you know what?  They are 28mm figs, which are not – repeat, not – those awkward off-putting 12mm ones.

 

This Week With The Armchair Dragoons:

• Saturday Night Fights is continuing their Battle of Trafalgar, as everyone contemplates how to set the ocean on fire.
• My Own Worst Enemy started up a campaign using the Across 5 Aprils game.
• The final installment of our weekly AAR covering Canvas Temple’s Stalingrad Solitaire was this past weekend
• This month’s history of wargaming article looks at Jack Scruby’s age-of-gunpowder rules from one of his newsletters in the 1960s.
• Mentioned in Dispatches had a chat with Amabel from Hollandspiele.
• Other online games with the Armchair Dragoons
  • Thursday Night Throwdown opened up with a significant “old man yells at cloud” moment about the new Warlord epic scale Napoleonics games before diving back into their Chain of Command series.
  • Hethwill’s got a nice series of videos playing thru the Battle of Pelusium from Down of Battle.
• Interested in writing for the Armchair Dragoons?  Drop a line through either our forums or our Discord to bayonetbrant or bbmike

 

News From The Wargame Industry:

• There was a fascinating discussion over the weekend on the Homo Ludens Youtube Channel about civilian victimization in wargames.  Brian Train, John Poniske, and others had a great chat about it.
• Get ready for COMPLEX: The COMmand PLayers EXercise PBEM tournament, in December.  Details in the Matrix forums.
• According to Battlefront minis, the Bulge American shipments to the US should be hitting stores tomorrow.
• Yes, MMP are still packing your sale orders.  Also yes, we’ll brag about having received ours already.
• This week on Twitter some folks were discussing various facets of urban operations

 

Something From Our Partners:

• Rocky took No Motherland Without to the office, and got all sorts of interesting feedback.
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about WW2 West Front (and Compass Expo), and he also cracked the lid on War in the Desert.
• Moe is playing through La Resistance from Flying Pig Games.
• Solosaurus checked out Donning the Purple.

 

News From The 4X Gaming World:

We’ve also got a 4X-specific area in the forums to discuss any of these, too.

• Humankind’s Fabius Maximus update released last week, with the mod tools beta coming out a couple days later.
• The sixth developer diary for Distant Worlds 2 dropped last week.  It covers the economy, including the private economy — a unique feature that made the original Distant Worlds stand out among the crowd of other 4x games, and it looks to do so in the sequel as well.
• Void Eclipse, a 4x/grand-strategy game that was successfully funded on Kickstarter, finally launched last week after several years in development.
• Paradox dropped their latest dev diary for Victoria 3, which takes a look at how war will be handled.  It appears to be a fairly major departure from how warfare is conducted in their previous grand-strategy titles, so it will be interesting to see how well it works, and whether or not they choose to use a similar concept in future games.
• During Thursday’s Tea-Time video, Slitherine announced that Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War is getting a new DLC, Adeptus Mechanicus.
• Sega and The Creative Assembly revealed the Ogre Kingdoms as the early-adopter bonus for Total War: Warhammer III, along with announcing the game is now releasing February 17, 2022.

 

The Professional & Practitioner Wargaming World:

Don’t forget we’ve got a dedicated area of our forums for the professional wargamers.

• The Cobra will never die…  First fielded in the Vietnam War, they’re now selling AH-1Z’s to Bahrain.
• The US Fight Club is now taking off and look for some collaborations between them and the Armchair Dragoons over the next several months.
• UK Fight Club is showing off a custom scenario for Combat Mission: Black Sea that’s pretty heavily urbanized.
• This week, GUWS got nuthin’!  But over the next 2 weeks, there’s How Diversity Won the War: the Western Approaches Tactical Unit wargame and Sand Tables: The Archaeology of a Platform
• PaxSims took a look at the Hungarian conference on serious games.
• Building more wargamers out at CGSC

 

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.

---

We appreciate you visiting the Armchair Dragoons and hope that you enjoy our weekly news dumps!
Please leave us your feedback in our discussion forum, or in the comment area below.
You can also find the regiment on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and occasionally at a convention near you.