by Every week, #TuesdayNewsday sifts through the strategy gaming world to dig out the headlines
Dicebreaker gave out their 2023 tabletop awards, their second year of doing so. If you look through their full jury panel, you won’t find a single person with any wargaming experience in there. At. All.
They announced the awards at PaxU last weekend, and the Designer of the Year was the tandem of David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin! To say this is stunning sounds disingenuous, because David & Trevor are absolutely awesome designers. It’s stunning because given the makeup of the jury it’s hard to believe any of them ever even deigned to grace their tables with something like Undaunted or General Orders.
The announcement at Dicebreaker read:
Accompanying Publisher of the Year is our award for Designer of the Year. This award looks to celebrate those individuals behind the heart of any game: its gameplay. With a number of published designs to their name, these designers continue to push the experience of players forward – whether that’s through groundbreaking new ideas, immaculately polished rules or simply just offering an incredible time with friends and family. From meaningful explorations of complex themes to taking familiar ideas in fresh directions, these designers each excel in defining and redefining what games can be.
This year’s Designer of the Year award goes to David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, the powerhouse design duo behind the critically acclaimed Undaunted series and General Orders: World War II.
From deck-building to worker-placement, Thompson and Benjamin’s games combine modern, exciting mechanics with an understanding of military history to provide entertaining, accessible and thoughtful gaming experiences. This year alone, their work on the air-combat game Undaunted: Battle of Britain, the solo card game Witchcraft! and worker-placement wargame General Orders: World War II have all launched to acclaim.
Games released in the past week that you’ll want to check out
- The Struggle for Zorn: The Red Blight dropped right after we published last week; Hermann brought this one with him to Fall Assembly for folks to see the almost-final version, and co-designers Fred Manzo and Ryan Heilman are all pretty hyped for it
- Two new releases this week from High Flying Dice Games
- Steve Jackson released GURPS Tactical Shooting: Extreme Conditions
- TBP released Blackhorse, a game named after an American unit with a bunch of Soviets on the cover ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- The new Drukhari expansion is out for Slitherine’s Warhammer 40,000: Gladius game, on Steam
- Panzer Corps2: Axis Operations 1946 is also out on Steam, too
Crowdfunding, p500, pledge programs, whatevs yo! ~ if you can order it now & get it later, here it is
- The Dietz Foundation launched the crowdfunding campaign for #Maneuver Warfare, a new deck-builder card game with asymmetric capabilities, abstract terrain, mixed capabilities, and highly-interactive gameplay
This one was on the table at our Fall Assembly1 and folks had a good time with it - Compass put The Enemy is at the Gates up on Kickstarter, so if you’re looking for the next game in Starkweather’s modern CSS system, here you go
- Colonial 1700-1800 is now up on Gamefound; it’s a 1-5 player game and cleared funding in its first 24 hours and is busy unlocking stretch goals
- Free League has launched The Electric State on Kickstarter
- More GMT p500s
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
- If you want any of the likely-going-away Heroes of Normandie series2 note that Miniature Market has a bunch of the product line all on sale right now
- SGS Battle for Madrid is on sale on Steam right now
- S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is World at War #81 with Balkans 1944
There’s always something going on with The Dragoons, so we’ve always got plenty to tell you about!
- Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Leipzig (VIII) for “Blucher”
- Mentioned in Dispatches Season 11 Ep 11 ~ Compass Expo & SDHISTCON
- #TBT / ThrowbackThursday ~ The Last Panzer Victory
- From Pearl Harbor to Midway with Mark Stille from Osprey and Vuca Sims’ Task Force
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums
- ‘Tis the season!
- Fire in the Lake (at #WargameDay)
- Taal’s Fury, a Littoral Commander scenario with pirates & irregulars
- Is Victoria 3 getting any better?
- 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 ~ 7 January and 4 February
- Next #UnboxingDay3 will be 21 December, and probably pretty light
- Next virtual event is The 2024 ACDC, 12-14 January 2024
- Next confirmed live event is Buckeye Game Fest, 29 April – 5 May, 2024
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
- 12-14 January 2024 The ACDC (Online)
- 12-14 January 2024 Winter Offensive (Baltimore MD)
- 10 February 2024 The Battle At The Crossroads (Cambridge OH)
- 4-7 April 2024 Circle DC (Washington DC)
- 2-5 May 2024 BuckeyeGameFest (Columbus OH)
- 16-20 May Compass Expo(Meriden CT)
- 19-23 June 2024 Origins (Columbus OH)
Our fellow content creators from the wargaming world
- Brian Train’s got it right
- Our buddy Jan at Let’s Play History wrote a nice intro to their Kriegsspiels for AHIKS
- Rocky gets booped
- Peter Robbins had a chat with the designer of Urban Operations, Sebastien de Peyret
- Beyond Solitaire had a discussion with Steven Dashiell on Gaming and Cultural Capital
- My Own Worst Enemy goes back to Federation Space with Byron Henderson
- Ardwul & Dan have a special show on Tuesday night with Cyrano talking about “that movie”
- Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about “The Wargame Argument” after the first 45 minutes of talking about scifi/fantasy TV shows and movies
Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- CoolStuffInc bailed on board games a while back; this article explains why they’re blaming Amazon
- Decision Games has a new “deluxe reprint” survey that’s over for another week or so
- Avalanche Press has another in their series about the scenarios in Fall of Empires
- WDS wraps up their intro to their Napoleonic Battles series, and announced some updates for both that one, and their Civil War Battles series
A very good thread here on how to ‘tune’ your game for particular skill levels
Thread on one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made (and continue to make) as a designer and three of the reasons why. The mistake is balancing/tuning games to highly skilled players. I’ve made this mistake in all of my games but (1/6) pic.twitter.com/N2XKidw2Vc
— Ryan Courtney (@rccgames) November 28, 2023
Please stop in and check out the dedicated area of our forums for the wargame practitioners.
- Commercial wargames worked into the curriculum at the Institute of World Politics
- Is there a better name for a night-bomb-dropping drone?
- The continual updating of the OOBs in the war in Ukraine
- Games as a historical medium
- An interesting monograph here from RAND about the development of one of their in-house wargames, covering nuclear weapons
- The last GUWS webinar of the year is 12 December (The Tyranny of Binaries: how wargame rules build narratives)
- Some wargame jobs through BAE, working with the USMC
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 Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
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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!
While most English-speaking wargamers probably know that the German word “Kriegsspiel” translates to “Wargame”, most apparently do not know that the plural is “Kriegsspiele”, not “Kriegsspiels”.
Yeah, I know, that’ll never catch on, but at least now you know.