The Wargaming “Community” – #TuesdayNewsday 2/8/22

Every week, #TuesdayNewsday is the intel briefing you need to keep up with the strategy gaming world

It’s interesting that the wargaming “community” is often lacking those last 5 letters.  And yet, over the past 5 years, even with the pandemic forcing us all into hiding, the combination of worldwide digital conventions, weekly/monthly media productions, and the increase in wargamers creating / sharing content seem to have ‘shrunk’ the world a bit as there have been more rallying points for the hobby.
Ardwulf’s counter clipping show is a staple of Monday nights, drawing at least 100 simultaneous viewers on a regular basis.  Moe’s Whiskey Charlie show does the same on Tuesdays, albeit monthly.  Our own #UnboxingDay is a huge high-traffic day for us.  The GUWS seminar series for the practitioners often results in just as much meaningful side-chatter as the formal presentations.  Saturday Night Fights doesn’t bring in a big live crowd, but the replays can run into the thousands.
Rather than the ‘family reunion’ feel of the Summer game convention season, we’re in touch with so many more fellow wargamers all year long that we don’t need to hold out until conventions to ‘hang out’ with each other.  The Dragoons host a weekly Monday happy hour that frequently includes wargamers from Europe.  SDHISTCON has pulled together some happy hours to put their convention server to use.  CSW has a Wednesday night chat on their Discord server that brings in a bunch of people.  And the Venn diagram overlaps of all of these audiences keeps getting more and more converged as the community continues to coalesce.

What does this mean long-term?  Who knows.  Maybe we’re all allowed to run free again by the Summer and a bunch of these community-building ‘events’ fall away as we start hanging out at the FL(W)GS again.  Maybe they stick around as they’re part of people’s weekly rhythms.  What is indisputable is that our awareness of the global breadth of the wargaming hobby has exploded exponentially.  What do we do with it?  Who knows.  What do you guys think?

The Other Headline

Still looking for more people to help us load up the entries for the FL(W)GS feature. That online form is still there for you to give us the info about the store, and a way to contact you for follow-up questions if we have any. (And store owners / managers: it’s still totally OK to submit your own stores!  This is about building the directory, and it’s OK to promote yourself)

 

• Compass Games are shipping Joseph Balkoski’s St-Lô and you can still save a few bucks if you buy it right now.
• Rise of Totalitarianism is available from 4 Dados Games
• S&T are shipping S&T Quarterly #17, which includes a map poster in support of the primary topic: Napoleon’s art of war.
• Lock ‘n Load Publishing has a bunch of novels in support of their wargames, and many are available on Kindle and audiobook. An Army of Two, Heroes of Normandy – The Untold Stories, and The Ghost Insurgency are among the new titles.
• MMP’s been busy!
  • The ASL Pocket rulebook now has a Chapter H (ordnance / vehicles)
  • There’s a bundle deal on the whole thing, too
  • Hell’s Corner (HASL module) has been re-released as a standalone product (previously in a magazine)
  • Winter Offensive Bonus Pack #13, from the unfortunately-canceled 2022 house convention
• TS Wargames have released El-Alamein 1942, and yes, the URL says 1943.
• Look, we could say that the Munchkin craze is getting out of hand with the release of the new Munchkin Petting Zoo but really, didn’t that ship sail long, long ago?

  

• High Flying Dice have released Depths of Courage 9 (WW2 raid on Alexandria harbor by the Italian min-subs) and Ram vs Stag on the Italian Arieti vs UK 22nd Armored Bde in the desert.
• Warlord Games has a new series of “start collecting” boxes.  If you want them all, you’ll have to “start selling a kidney” too
  • Greeks
  • Celts (and a chariot!)
  • Macedonians (with an elephant!)
  • Imperial Rome (including siege engines!)
  • Landsknechts
• And if you want some female landsknechts (landsknechtarines?) to go with them, Alternative Armies has you covered

 

• Matrix Games gettin’ medieval on yo’ ass!  It’s Field of Glory II Medieval week, and discounts up to 50% off
• Worthington Games big pre-order deal going is due into the warehouse any day now and after we just talked about both Worthington, and Civil War wargaming on this week’s podcast, we thought we’d call this one back to your attention.
• Paradox has rebuilt their website, and the sales are no longer collected onto a single page. Ugh.
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is World at War #30, with Hinge of Fate

 

• Go ahead and get you subscription for Against The Odds magazine in now, as the next game you’ll get is Hitler’s Stalingrad: Breslau 1945
• Patria Libre: The Struggle for Mexican Independence is an area-control game that’s hit its funding on Kickstarter and is just stretching for new goals now.  The AWI is covered by a lot of wargames, but the MWI hardly is at all.  Yes, the artillery ‘meeples’ look like leaves.  Leave it alone.
• The Last War is a standalone minis-agnostic skirmish game that also supports several different TTRPGs like Forbidden Psalm.  Pledge levels include the Forbidden Psalm game bundled with The Last War if you want the full meal deal.
• Space Aces: Voyages In Infinite Space is a ‘sandbox’ set to create a tabletop hex crawl galaxy for sci-fi exploration adventuring and includes the Space Aces: Accelerated 2E RPG rules
• Joe Manganiello (yes, him) runs a regular D&D group that includes Tom Morello, Vince Vaughn, and Weiss & Benioff, among others.  Their characters have been turned into a line of minis by Wizkids that you can now pre-order
• Preorders are up for Avalanche Press’ PanzerGrenadier Modern game 1967 Sword of Israel
• Someone made a boardgame out of the Southern Hudson Institute of Technology

 

Slow week here…

• Saturday Night Fights visited The Battle of Spion Kop for “Bloody Big Battles” and will do so again, soon
• My Own Worst Enemy started Cruel Necessity: The English Civil Wars
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 8 Ep 1 ~ US Civil War/gaming had to be re-loaded because of a feed problem
• Upcoming Dragoons Events
  • Next #UnboxingDay is 17 February
  • Next Virtual Convention is Connections Online, 19-21 April 2022
  • Next Real-World Convention that’s actually confirmed is Origins, 8-12 June 2022

 

• “Ruthless” Campaign Continued
• Pushing On for “Chain of Command”
• Hethwill’s looking for players for a game on Friday 11 Feb, for the Battles for Prydain game he’s in love with
• Still looking for players for a play-by-forum game of the new Twilight: 2000

 

• Columbia Games have a new PDF catalog you can download. It’s free, but you still have to go thru adding it to your shopping cart, registering for the site, and then “purchasing” it, instead of just a link to the PDF from the site.  It’s almost like they don’t want you to actually look at the catalog; they just want you to know it’s there.
• Avalanche Press’ daily content series is obviously geared toward driving sales of their games, but this historical articles are a lot of fun.  Here’s a look at the Russian armored cruisers of the Russo-Japanese War, and France’s monster tank of WW2
• Wargame Design Studio has an update on the Civil War Battles series
• Man…  over 80 (EIGHTY!) weeks into various lockdowns around the world, and the Battlefront Minis “share your hobby” series is still going on, with galleries of minis from across the globe (and for you flat-earthers, from under the planet, too)

Don’t forget!

 

• This week in our forums
  • Bawb’s deep dives into Assault: Red Horizon rumbles on
  • The importance of online communication security, Queen of England edition
  • Still chatting about Littoral Commander and it’s finally hit its funding
• Twin threads on BGG about the idea of a WW3 breaking out in Europe in 1945
• What percentage of your wargaming is solo vs opposed?
• The “blame-thank”
• Tolstoi was inspired by the OCS bootcamp at The ACDC and has now taken the OCS plunge

 

• Rocky did a deep dive into building out a sector in Traveller
• Moe takes a look at St-Lô.  Not the Balkoski one, but the import through Quarterdeck Games
• Big Board gives you a playthrough of Stand at Mortain
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about Monster Conventions.

 

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

• “The Joint Warfare Centre declares Full Operational Capability for wargame design“
• Intelligence Education and Wargaming (PDF) from the (digital) library at the National Intelligence University
• Poland aligning with Ukraine?  What are the implications for NATO?
• This month, GUWS has Off the Hex Map with the Center for Army Analysis on 2-22, and next month, they’ll have Principles of International Relations in Commercial Board Games
• Connections Online is coming up in April

 

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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