by Another Tuesday, another round of wargaming news! In this edition of #TuesdayNewsday, we’re bringing you the latest updates from the worlds of tabletop wargames, computer simulations, and professional defense wargaming. Let the games unfold!
ICv2 has a great columnist that we frequently reference, Scott Thorne, who is a game store owner and college instructor. This week’s column takes a look back at 35 years of pivotal game innovations, from a broad, industry-wide perspective. And it’s not a bad retrospective from that broad view. However, it’s easy to notice how it dovetails with the BGG “Hall of Fame” that was released over the past month or so in conjunction with BGG’s 25th anniversary1 and some themes are starting to emerge.
BGG’s Hall of Fame “Mission Statement” (games must be at least 10 years old to be eligible)
The games in the BGG Hall of Fame are recognized for being noteworthy and historically significant to board games. Many of the games on this list are great games, but beyond that, they are games which are important and influential. They are the groundbreakers and innovators and even when newer, shinier games catch our fancy, we cannot deny that these games formed the building blocks of our hobby.
BGG’s Hall of Fame includes games that predate BGG, in some cases by a LOT. It does notably leave out D&D, or any other RPG, since it is the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame. But it does include Diplomacy, and Twilight Struggle, which are probably the only two games that would be even wargame-adjacent2.
It’s interesting to see the non-wargaming broad view across the industry here, because there’s more than a few key innovations that seem to be continually given the short shrift across the industry that were all firmly rooted in the wargame corner of the hobby.
GMT launched their p500 system in 1997, predating Google, the iPhone, and BGG. Pokemon TCG was still a Japanese import. D&D3e and the OGL were still years away; hell TSR still existed! Kickstarter’s founders were in middle school. And yet over the past 10-15 years, there’s no one that can imagine the hobby games business without crowdfunding to support it, and board game crowdfunding found it’s first real foothold in the wargaming world.
The COIN series pioneered the multi-player asymmetric-victory-condition games that begat Root, and others.
Campaign games have been a regular feature of wargames going back to the 1960s.
Common rules sets & mechanics across multiple games in a series for wargamers pre-date Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride by 25-30 years.
Game-focused magazines, and “house organs” go back to your grandparents, as does structured league play.
The long-tenured ‘major’ game conventions in the US – GenCon and Origins – both launched as wargame conventions and the original programs featured multiple wargame tournaments of 16 or 32 or even 64 players for a single wargame title.
It would be nice to see today’s tabletop gaming world acknowledge the shoulders of the giants on which they stand, but sadly it’s just par for the course any more.
For the first time recorded history, MMP dropped major news before #TuesdayNewsday, which allows us to bring this update from the company
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Regardless of your views on politics, the reality is that uncertainty around tariffs is taking a toll on the board game business in the US. Here’s another example of an overseas company who lost their US distributor because of the ongoing lack of clarity
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Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!
- Columbia Games now reports Alliance is in stock
- New Ardennes DLC for Matrix Games’ Headquarters: World War II; more coming from us on this tomorrow!
- Looks like The Wars of the Sun King 1648-1713 from Serious Historical Games is now shipping
- New Tryphon 104 DLC for Avalon Digital’s Wars Across the World is now on Steam
- Dictator’s War: Strategy Battle just launched and is on sale on Steam for 60¢ as a part of the release sale
- New book for Free League’s Symbaroum RPG, as they’ve released Agrella – City of Eternal Euphoria
- The next 3 Kerry Anderson titles started shipping yesterday from Blue Panther
- A bunch of new Team Yankee minis and accessories, in the “Israel” line
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
- The UK Steve Jackson is bringing back the classic Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and they just launched today on Kickstarter
- MicroProse launched a “physical” edition of their upcoming Task Force Admiral game, which is a little misleading, because what you can get is a physical copy of a digital game (printed manual, game box, etc), but not a CD or DVD to install the game without a network connection; there’s also a free demo on Steam
- Gale Force 9 has launched their Star Trek Ascendancy: The Final Frontier on Gamefound
- Battle of the Seas just launched on Kickstarter and has almost no one backing it, but still looks kinda neat
- Some games from Compass on pre-order that we hadn’t linked to before
- After pulling their pre-order system in-house, Neva Wargames has finally started letting customers pledge
- Warlord Games getting into the buncha-pre-orders-all-at-once spirit of things
- Decision Games are putting out a last call for pledges on the three items that are arriving imminently
Looking for a deal? Getting more bang for your buck?
- WDS “Game of the week” is Modern Air Power: War Over the Mideast for $29.95
- Add one of the new metal oversized3 d20s from Easy Roller Dice and get a free mystery gift with coupon code D20 at checkout
- ASL Coffee Mugs at 59% off!
- These Mardi Gras-color dice from Dice Envy are 10% off with coupon code SHOWTIME at checkout
- Alternative Armies will ship you a free Flower of Evil monster plant with any order thru 10 March
- Through May 1st, Carolina Game Tables is having a tax-free sale on their furniture
- Breaking the Chains 2.0: The War in the South China Sea on sale at Miniature Market for $51
- B17: Twenty Five Missions (PDF) on sale at Wargame Vault
- Maximum Apocalypse from Tabletop Tycoon is 25% off with coupon code 0218MAXAPOC at checkout
It’s been a busy week for the regiment; here’s what you might’ve missed!
- Talking about WW2 air combat games
- Connections Online 2025, Coming 7-12 April
- Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Talavera for “Lasalle 2”
- Mentioned In Dispatches S14 E3 ~ Fantasy 4X Games
- Sinking an RPG tournament ~ Dragonbane: The Sinking Tower Quickstart
- Wednesday War Stories ~ The Battle of Chipyong-ni, 13 February 1951
- AARs
- Gameplay this week
The Best Thing We Saw On Another Site This Week Was
Sorry, But Rob Liefeld Is 100% Right About Creator Credits over on ICv2
Those things can both be true and totally beside the point. The issue is not that he deserves respect because he’s the mighty Rob Liefeld, or that he should be denied respect because he’s made some enemies. It’s that giving creators respect in media projects should not be optional. It shouldn’t be contingent on the creator being everyone’s favorite person, or kissing ass by being a “team player.”
Barring cases of personal conduct that shocks the sensibilities of audiences (like, say, allegedly sexually enslaving the nanny of your young child) that forces corporate IP owners to distance themselves from the creator, we the audience should normalize the expectation that media companies fully and prominently acknowledge the people whose imaginations created the underlying properties. Say their names.
Say their names whether it’s Siegel and Shuster, Simon and Kirby, Eastman and Laird, Robert Kirkman or Rob Liefeld.
Say their names whether they had good lawyers or not, whether they got paid or not, whether they kept quiet or spoke up, whether they were nice folks or pains in the ass.
Say their names in big letters. Up front in the credits. Where they belong.
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 was live at Winterfest
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Avalanche Press has a very generous offer for US gov’t civil servants getting yanked around by politics
- MMP’s launched their new website, so if you start seeing something very colorful, do not adjust your monitor
- BoardGameWire has an interesting article on how concentrated the Asmoborg’s profits are on a very few product lines
- Form Square Games are launching their own house convention, Square Bash!, coming in early 2026
- Update on the changes coming for Wargame Design Studios next “campaigns” engines
- The latest newsletter from On Military Matters with this week’s book releases
- Decision Games has a pair of feedback surveys open right now
- A solid interview here on what life’s like for someone in the indie game business
NUTS! Publishing posted this production update to their socials
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
- Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 2 March and 6 April
- Next confirmed live event is BuckeyeGameFest (and QUAD FEST!), 1-4 May 2025
- Next confirmed virtual event is Connections Online, 7-12 April, 2025
Other Conventions & Events
- 17-24 Feb PrezCon (Charlottesville VA) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 20-24 Feb Genghis Con (Aurora CO) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 20-24 Feb TotalCon (Marlborough MA) <– THIS WEEKEND!
- 23-28 Feb GAMA Trade Show / Expo (Louisville KY)
- 28 Feb-3 Mar CincyCon (Hamilton OH)
- 5-10 Mar Dice Tower West (Las Vegas NV)
Looking Ahead to Origins
While we have Connections Online coming in early April, and Buckeye Game Fest (including QUAD FEST!) coming at the start of May, we also had a deadline to get our Origins event submitted, and we’re bringing you this list now so you can start getting your travel plans in place to come join the Wargame HQ this Summer in Columbus, 18-22 June.
Here’s what’s submitted for the Wargame HQ, and note this is just the games in the main gaming hall and does NOT include our War College program, which we’ll post separately
(alpha by title, with publisher/source and number of iterations over the 5 days) |
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Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!
- MASCAL training wargame with the 28th Infantry Division
- Disaster Gaming (but pls ignore the abundance of AI “art” in use throughout)
- Another session of Hedgemony at the Institute for World Politics
- Maybe the 35-year-old Soviet flags were a bit much
- Summer Wargaming internship
- This week, Mick Ryan talks about the week when decades happened
- The next GUWS webinar is Professional Wargaming in France on 4 March and then Tactical Wargame Design on 18 March
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.
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