Back to the FL(W)GS! ~ #TuesdayNewsday 3/7/23

Our #TuesdayNewsday is your essential reading for the week’s strategy gaming headlines

We started this last year, and had a sputtering start, but it’s back!

We’re continuing to gather contributions for our FLG(W)S Spotlight, which will run every 2 weeks on Monday¹.  Right now, we’re focused on US / Canada, but will eventually get to the overseas stores, too.

Yes, we need your help to tell us about your local wargame store. We’ve got a short online form for you to give us the info about the store, and a way to contact you for follow-up questions if we have any.
Please note that you’ll need a Google account for this form because there’s a place on page 2 for you to upload some of your own photos of the store.  And please do not scrape photos from their website; give us your pictures of the store, especially ones that can showcase wargames there.

(As a note to store owners / managers: it is totally OK and not gauche at all to submit your own stores!  This is about building the directory, and it’s OK to toot your own horns)

 

Not a bad sentiment from Ross Want to see more designs and projects led by women in board games? Vote with your wallets folks. While you're at it, go and follow @torylynn and @fortcircle the designer and publisher of Vote for Women. — Ross 📷🎲 MoreGamesPlease 🔜 AireCon (@MoreGamesPls) March 7, 2023

Our thoughts on the matter @AmabelHolland, who all the mainstream designers keep forgetting about bc she does a lot of #wargames for her own small press company, but they're freakin' awesome — The Armchair Dragoons (@ADragoons) March 7, 2023

 

What’s shipped this past week that you’ll find interesting

• Wargame Design Studio released Panzer Campaigns Philippines ’44
• Ares Games got Fights of the Pacific out this week
• Le Franc Tireur #15 has arrived at The Gamer’s Armory, if you’re looking for a bunch of new ASL material
• Matrix Games has a new Command DLC out that’s the Command: Showcase Ford-Class that posits a hypothetical 2026 scenario between the Russians and Africa as a backstory for a US carrier group intervention.
• Osprey’s latest for Stargrave, Side Hustle, is out now
• Avalanche Press has (re)released their Great Pacific War, which is a pretty stacked box of gaming goodness (3 maps + 560 counters)
• Sheesh, by the time OSG gets Napoleon’s End up on their front page, it’s already sold out!
• If you’re a fan of Draco’s ONUS! series, they’ve also got coasters w/ artwork from the game you can use to protect your table
• There’s a new expansion for 7 Wonders called Edifice, and look, Brant is on the record as loving the 7 Wonders games, so we had to include it
• Steve Jackson Games got busy this week, with several new releases: Munchkin Side Quests 2, Calo’s Book of Monsters², and Gelatinous where players get to be the biggest cube of them all
• Speaking of Mörk Borg, there’s a new Ikhon “mystery box” from Free League out this week
• Second Chance Games in the UK has been posting all over social media that they’ve got a big shipment of stuff in from Worthington, so you old-worlders can get ’em without a fortune in shipping costs

 

Crowdfunding or pre-orders ~ if you can order it now, here it is

• MMP announced a pair of new pre-orders over the weekend³
  • Reprint of Armies of Oblivion with the Axis minor nations, but not the Brit/German/Russian counters that were already reprinted in other sets since then
  • ASL Journal #14, full of all sorts of ANZAC-y goodness
• More of you guys need to be backing Song for War: Mediterranean Theater as it’s a great game
• Columbia Games has Hârn World: Medieval Fantasy RPG setting hardcover up on Kickstarter and is well past their goal; Ardwulf had an interview with them, too

Yes, this list a little light, but let’s face it, there will be at least 3 other pre-orders announced within 2 hours of this article going live

 

Save a few bucks with these deals

• Field of Arms: Tactics is on sale on Steam for 20% off; 18th century battles in the Caribbean
• Kraken Dice has a bunch of their stone / glass dice on 20% off this week
• Decision Games’ “deal of the month” is on back issues of magazines, with 5 for $30 and 10 for $50. You’re using a PDF for right now while they clean up some technical issues on their site.
• The new freebie from Alternative Armies is a “war bot” that ships free with every order until 1 May
• Miniature Market has Levee En Masse: Deluxe Edition on sale for $53, down from $75
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is Modern War #6 with Decision: Iraq about the early years of the post-2003 insurgency
• Lock ‘n Load Publishing has a sale this week for Dave’s birthday, plug in coupon code BDAY58 and see what kind of bonus applies

 

What’s happened with the Dragoons this past week

• Saturday Night Fights ~ Operation: FREYA for “Nimitz”, a game system that was just released that day
• FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ The Soldiery, Columbus OH
• The Giant Civ 6 AAR: Nubia, Part Six (and discuss it here)
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 10 Ep 4 ~ Solo Wargaming
• Gameplay this week
  • The Battle of Corunna (part II) for “Valour and Fortitude”
  • A Big “CoC” Punch from Wunsche (part III)
  • Looking for an online C&C opponent
• This week in our forums
  • JD showing off his latest model build
  • Frosthaven, and aftermarket accessories
  • The late John Prados talks about the Guadalcanal campaign
• 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 ~ April 2nd and May 7th
  • Next #UnboxingDay⁴ will be 16 March
  • The next virtual event is Connections Online, 18-20 April
  • Next Real-World Convention is going to be Buckeye Game Fest, in Columbus OH, 28-30 April (with the War Room opening up on 24 April for extended wargaming)

 

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

• 8-12 March Dice Tower West (Las Vegas, NV)
• 18 March SDHISTCON Spring Deployment (Online)
• 18-19 March Playthrough (Raleigh, NC)
• 22-26 March Adepticon (Schaumburg, IL)
• 23-26 March PAX East (Boston,MA)
• 24-26 March Hotlead (Stratford, ON)
• 31 March – 2 April GMT East (Mount Kisko, NY)
• 31 March – 3 April, Circle DC (Washington, DC)
• 17-24 April Connections Online
• 24-30 April Buckeye Game Fest (incl The War Room) (Columbus, OH)⁵
• 21-25 June ORIGINS (Columbus, OH)

Oh, and within a few weeks, we’re going to have a special event announcement for the weekend of 20-22 October, but maybe you should start looking for hotels in the Raleigh/Cary NC area…

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The Connections Online executive committee is pleased to announce the theme of this year’s Connections Online conference: “The Enemy Gets a Vote — Playing Red.” We’ll look at playing Red in wargaming, as well as what various professional communities mean by the term “red teaming.” (Hint: The definitions overlap, more or less, but terms frequently has discipline-specific connotations that may not be entirely obvious.)

The Core of the conference will run from 18-20 April 2023, with events scheduled from 1000-1600 EDT. Extended events (including both games and workshops) will run from the weekend before to the weekend after. Core events will be accessed through YouTube; registration information will be forthcoming. Previous conferences are accessible through YouTube (2022 and 2021).

Among the 12 planned core events we will have: What Is Red-Teaming, Red-Teaming Acts of God, The Ethics of Playing The Bad Guys, Advice for New Practitioners, at least one session on cyber warfare & red-teaming

 

Other great content creators from the wargaming world

• Rocky looks at his current crowd-funding
• Moe looks inside Land And Freedom from Blue Panther
• Gimpy takes a look at the upcoming expansion for Assault Red Horizon, which is being worked on by our very own Bawb!
• Hethwill talking about the ‘density’ of decision-making with the assets you’re using in a game
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about transformative wargames

 

News & notes from the business end of the gaming world

• This week, Avalanche Press has an interesting article about the Russian machine guns of WW1
• “You’re gonna need a bigger monitor” – Thin Red Line Games has a new combined VASSAL module that puts Less Than 60 Miles, The Dogs of War, and Die Festung Hamburg all in one insanely-large map
• Hey guys, “coming soon” in December 2022 isn’t a good look for your site; “coming soon” in November of 2022 is worse

• Oh yeah, and this!

 

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

• Connections UK 2023 will be 5-7 September at Sandhurst
• Debating the legality of “autonomous weapons” in international law
• Mad Max meets the Russian armor force
• The next GUWS webinar tonight with Malign: Gaming Influence in the Information Age, and on the 21st, they’re covering Wargaming at West Point

 

Something neat from outside the wargaming world we wanted to share with you

As we’d shared in our forums, here are the 2 different types of gas tank people

 

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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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.

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WE USE COOKIES TO IMPROVE OUR PERFORMANCE
WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THE SITE; WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE STAFF

1. if you guys submit enough stores, we can go weekly!
2. Mörk Borg compatible!
3. thanks for not doing it on Tuesday afternoon, guys!
4. 3rd Thursday of the month
5. you happy now, Gary?!