Changes Coming! – #TuesdayNewsday 6/21/22

Each week, #TuesdayNewsday gives you the whirlwind tour of the strategy gaming headlines

We’ve got some updates, tweaks, and changes coming to some of our regular coverage here at Armchair Dragoons, including some further evolutions of Tuesday Newsday.  We’ll also be posting a major update to the event calendar & convention listing.  We’re looking at some options for upcoming recurring content.  So we’re asking you – what would you like to see from Armchair Dragoons? More gameplay?  More reviews¹ or AARs?  Talk to us!  You can comment below, or in our forums…

 

• As seen in this past week’s #UnboxingDay, Compass Games shipped Paper Wars #101, with Case Geld
• Fellowship of Simulations has followed-up their award-winning Verdun game with the new Wars of Religion that covers 14th century France
• It’s labeled as a “special edition” and numbered as 2/2022 but the latest magazine from TS Wargames sure looks like its just reprinting their previously-released Mariupol 2014/2015
• Slitherine has released Starship Troopers: Terran Command and we might have something coming up by the end of the week for it
• Steve Jackson (re?)released GURPS Adaptations for you to convert any of your favorite settings to the GURPS rules
• Avalanche Press has another “campaign study” (linked scenarios), and this one is Eastern Fleet: Gulf of Aden, covering the Japanese planned forays into the Indian Ocean and beyond, which was curtailed by Doolittle’s bombing of Tokyo
• Castles in the Sky is flying out of Osprey’s warehouse, for all your dreadnoughts-in-the-air fun
• Ares Games started shipping Successors earlier this month, so US retailers should have it by now
• Noble Knight has a new edition of Sam Mustafa’s Blücher minis rules in hardcover, and you know that’s a favorite around here, along with a pair of expansions
  • Blücher – The Last Hundred Days (you can guess the campaign)
  • Blücher – War to the Death (the Peninsular campaigns)

 

• Lock ‘n Load Publishing has a pretty kick-ass “Blitzkrieg Sale” right now, with 20-40% off some of their biggest hits, like World at War ’85: Storming the Gap
• Strategic Command: European Theater is on sale at GOG for less than the price of a small latte
• For a couple of days, Kraken Dice has their 14-piece dice sets on sale for $14
• Slitherine’s Summer sale has almost their entire catalog at 30% off until the 27th of June
• Robin Hood is on sale at Worthington for $25
• Tactical Combat Department is on sale at Steam right now at 30% off
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is S&T #268 with When Lions Sailed for naval conflict in the 17th century
• Wargame Design Studio has their Summer sale running 6/17-7/4 with everything knocked down to $30 except the 2 most recent titles and bulk orders (over $199) eligible for a discount on top of that. Lots of great digital games at good prices.

 

• OK, we might finally take the pre-order plunge on SPECTRE: The Board Game from Modiphius, and play some Bond villains
• Legendary Kingdoms book 3, Pirates of the Splintered Isles is now on Kickstarter, and look for some coverage of books 1 & 2 coming soon here at Armchair Dragoons
• The Umbrella Academy boardgame is on Gamefound
• Phalanx Games has Bretwalda on Gamefound, for your Dark-Ages-in-Saxon-England gaming, and its solo-compatible out of the box
• Legion Wargames has Werwolf up for pre-order
• Warlord Games has a bunch of pre-orders this week for both Black Seas and for Blood Red Skies but it’s all smaller individual products and we’re not going to link them all here
• Worthington’s got the 2nd edition of their Braveheart bookgame on Kickstarter
• Huh.  No idea how long The Berlin Airlift has been on pre-order at Legion Wargames, but it is
• Steve Jackson has a couple of dice games on Kickstarter that hasn’t quite hit its goal, but might by the time you read this

 

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The 1815 Campaign (Yes, All of it) for “Snappy Nappy”
• This week was #UnboxingDay
  • Case Geld from Compass Games
  • A Most Fearful Sacrifice by Flying Pig Games
  • Iwo, Bloodbath in the Bonins by Decision Games
  • Les Quatre-Bras & Waterloo 1815- The Empire’s Final Blows from Vae Victis
  • Kaiserkrieg from White Dog Games
  • Secrets of the Lost Station from Everything Epic Games
  • Margaret Thatcher’s War by White Dog Games
• Upcoming Dragoons Events
  • Next #UnboxingDay is 21 July
  • Next Virtual Convention that’s confirmed is still The ACDC in January
  • Next Real-World Convention is probably ForJeffCon, the Last MACE, in November

 

You can probably imagine what we spent most of this past week playing

• The Battle of Waterloo for “Blucher”
• Resupply Hougoumont for “Sharp Practice 2”
• The Battle of Quatre Bras (part 2) for “Lasalle 2”
• Campaign Carnival: Scenario #1
• Hethwill is continuing his naval wargame development in our Discord server

 

• Once there was only Kickstarter, then Indiegogo, and the Gamefound threw their hats into the ring to catch up on crowdfunding games like the wargamers had been doing since Kickstarter’s founders were in middle school.  Now, Backerkit is going to be offering their own crowdfunding platform in addition to managing pledges for other people, and they’ve got an A-list of game publishers lined up to help launch it
• Steve Jackson interview from LibertyCon
• Avalanche Press is going to be bumping up some of their prices effective today thanks to some increased materials & shipping costs
• Grognard.com is changing over ownership / management and transitioning now. Yes, it still exists
• If you have an outstanding pre-order from the old MMP website, you will need to pre-order from the new website as all their old data has been flushed, and they’ve got details here
• Here’s a giant update on their upcoming France ’40 game from Wargame Design Studio

 

• This week in our forums
  • Now that folks saw some pics of it at Origins, people are talking about Academy’s upcoming Stellaris board game again
  • Some chatter about the old European Air War computer game
  • Yes, the weather sucks. Here’s somewhere you can bitch about it
• A circular wargame economy?
• Our Happy Hour this week included some show-&-tell on some 3mm minis wargaming; you should join us on Mondays at 5pm EST for a fun chat on our Discord server
• Sebastian Bae asked about under-served topics in wargaming, and a whole lot of the responses showed that nobody went looking before they assumed there wasn’t anything out there

 

• Rocky continues to burden your reading shelves with more great content
• Moe is unboxing his kitchen, so not much new from him
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream started out talking about game rooms and game tables and then veered off into small conventions, e-readers, and sci-fi games

 

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

• Paradox Interactive released the 3.4.4 patch for Stellaris.  In addition to the many, many changes, improvements, and bug-fixes, the patch also adds a couple key automation features long requested by the player community.
• Developer Shiro Games has added multiplayer to Dune: Spice Wars, their real-time 4x currently in Steam Early-Access (trailer).  Players can now engage in free-for-all’s of up to 4 players, or face off against each other in 2v2 matches.  In addition, the game is currently available at a 20% discount.
• Stardock released version 1.04 for Galactic Civilizations IV.  Along with numerous smaller changes and bug-fixes, this latest update adds new Executive Orders, a powerful defensive Colony Upgrade, and Military Starbases are (finally!) able to protect planets within their radius from invasion.
• Mohawk Games released Update #92 for Old World.  The update adds a number of balance changes and UI improvements, plus a number of bug-fixes.
• Kube Games has released Version 1.2.5 for Imperiums: Greek Wars.  This latest patch significantly tweaks the difficulty levels in the initial game setup screen, adds numerous quality-of-life improvements, balance changes, AI improvements, and more.
• Slitherine/Matrix have released the Steam Open Beta v1.0.5.0 on the Open Beta Branch for Distant Worlds 2.  While we typically don’t include beta patches/updates with the news, we’re making an exception in this case, as this latest open beta version upgrades the core game engine in a bid to significantly improve DW2’s performance.

 

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

• OK, so it’s not wargaming, but it’s a fun article about parachuting into a baseball stadium
• There’s a rambling article from StrategyPage about wargame development and the overlap with defense/intel professionals with some nuggets of interesting info, but overall not a lot of new material for long-time wargamers
• Hacking together an anti-ship arsenal, and Rocky is going to have fun stat’ing these out for Harpoon
• The Ukrainians are making progress in the South but losing ground in the Donbass – David Axe asks if that’s worth the trade off, but it’s also worth asking if that’s an acceptable trade-off for the Russians
• Tonight the GUWS webinar is David Thompson talking about From History to the Table: Modeling Skirmish-Level Engagements in Wargames and the next one is 7/7 talking about Mechanics & Theme: Synergies in Game Design

 

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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1. which means we need more writers!