by The Armchair Dragoons’ #TuesdayNewsday is required reading for this week’s strategy gaming headlines
Alongside the Origins Awards (see below), here are the new inductees into the AGAD Hall of Fame
Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame Class of 2023:
- HOF Inductee – Mark Rosewater Started at Wizards of the Coast in 1995. Published a number of articles in early trade magazines titled Insider Trading, which talked about the process of game design. In 2002 he started a web column called Making Magic, which also talks about game design and has been running for many years. Has run a podcast, Drive to Work, for a number of years, which talks about the history of Magic and interviews individuals who contributed over the years. Has had cards he designed in every set since 1996 to present, with thousands of cards designed and well over a dozen mechanics. Created Magic the Puzzling, a series of play problem puzzles featuring intricate combinations of Magic cards that often required extensive time and dozens of steps to solve. A compilation was published in a book.
- HOF Inductee – Jeff Easley Prolific artist. Started at TSR in 1982. Jeff did a large amount of artwork for Dungeons and Dragons, including many of the cover art pieces from the 80s and 90s. Recently he has transitioned to trading card game art, with over 50 Magic card art pieces. He also did work for Gamma World, Battle System, and recently even did work for Hearthstone. Still active doing fantasy art and trading card game art. Unrelated to our field, but he has also done several book covers and even a rock album cover.
- HOF Inductee – Martin Wallace Prolific European game designer Known for the Brass and Steam series of games. He ran Treefrog Games for a number of years before going back to being a full time freelance designer. He had a popular entry in the deckbuilder category with Few Acres of Snow. Aside from Brass and Steam, Diskworld: Ankh Morpork and London were among his many hits.
- HOF Product Inductee – 1829 Considered the grandfather of “train games” and was one of the first games to introduce a “tech tree” structure into a board game. 1829 came out in 1974 and was designed by Frank Tresham, who passed away in 2019. It is a classic Eurogame, with no luck other than who is the starting player. 1830 came out in 1986 and 1829 was basically retired in place of the new update.
- HOF Product Inductee – Cyberpunk Designed by Mike Pondsmith, Cyberpunk featured an unusual combat and advancement system that distinguished it from other RPG entries and the genre brought in a number of new players to the RPG scene. It is maintained a following since its launch in 1988 and recently was adapted to the Cyberpunk 2077 video game in 2020
- Rising Star – Mathias Wigge First published game is Ark Nova in 2021, which is currently in the BGG all time list at number 4. Magic the Gathering tournament player. Getting a top game on your first game is an impressive feat, although it seems to be happening more frequently with Gloomhaven, Wingspan, and now Ark Nova in recent years.
ICV2 was given the numbers for this year’s Origins by the GAMA folks, and attendance is up 38% from last year.
Origins 2023 hosted 16,082 attendees from June 21-25, 2023. This is up from last year’s attendance totals, which was 11,689 people, representing a steady return toward pre-pandemic attendance numbers. At the last pre-pandemic show in 2019, Origins drew 20,642 people…
Additionally, GAMA released data that included exhibitor, volunteer, and event numbers. The 2022 show had 330 Origins exhibitors, up 63 from last year, and around 125 volunteers. They also hosted 6,400 events, which is up 1400 from last year
We’ve got a couple of great long-form articles coming from our writers that were at Origins, and look for an AAR in a few days once we get feedback from our players, too.
- Wargame HQ Events
- MiD Preview Episode
- Wargame HQ Event Previews
- Advice For Rookies
- Consolidated Wargaming Event Grid
- Exhibitor Spotlight
- The Mailbag
- Setup & First Games
New games released in the past week that you’ll find interesting
- Three Crown Games released Iskra, about the WW2 battles around Leningrad
- New issue of Wargames Illustrated is out
- The weather dice from Steve Jackson aren’t all that special, but naming the individual dice after cities that exemplify the weather on each die is clever
- Warlord has a new quad-50 gun truck for Bolt Action
- Catalyst’s new BattleTech Essentials is out, and (get this!) only available at Target. Yes, Target 🎯
- The latest version of the free BrickAction rules for mini-brick wargaming can be downloaded here
Crowdfunding or pre-orders ~ if you can pre-order it now, here it is
- Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty on pre-order at GOG.com
- The zombie apocalypse comes to WW2 through some supernatural experiments, in Escape from Projekt Riese, in Kickstarter now
- Skies Above The Great War is a digital WW1 aerial game that ‘zooms out’ to look at more strategic/operational aspects like airfield management, aircraft manufacturing, and more, which all seem to be very ambitious for the relatively low funding goal
- Air Raid 34/46 – a WW2 aerial game – is on Gamefound
- Draco Ideas has a deluxe (3rd) edition of 2GM Tactics on pre-order at 25% off right now; it’s already at the printer so grab it soon
- GMT’s latest monthly update included 3 new p500s
- Imperial Fever
- Fields of Fire Volume III: The Parachute Regiment
- American Revolution Tri-Pack, 2nd Printing
- Commands & Colors: Napoleonics Custom Dice – almost out of pre-orders on this one
Stretch your budget a little further with these deals
- Free League Summer Sale is thru 5 July, and some things up to 50% off, including (among others)
- S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is Modern War #37 with Putin Moves South
- Draco Ideas has a buy-one-get-one-50% off with not-at-all-obvious coupon code 50% at checkout, thru 2 July
What were the Dragoons up to this past week?
- Saturday Night Fights ~ WATERLOO! for Valour & Fortitude
- On-Site Origins 2023 ~ Setup & First Games
- Diving back into our own archives ~ Cyrano’s Pulpit: A Defense of My Formative Years Against the Imprecations of Professor Marco Arnaudo, et al.
- The Giant Civ 6 AAR: Nubia, Part 22
- The Grand “Champions of Krynn” AAR ~ Part 10
- Gameplay this week
- This week in our forums
- 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 ~ 2 July and 6 August
- Next #UnboxingDay1 will be 20 July
- Next virtual event is The 2024 ACDC, 12-14 January 2024
- Next Real-World Convention is ORIGINS in Columbus, OH, from 21-25 June, and here’s our discussion thread
Our fellow content creators from the wargaming world
- Rocky wades into the political maelstrom around 2040: An American Insurgency; might also be worth looking at the scenario used in 2012 for a US Army exercise on an internal insurrection as written about on Small Wars Journal, the comment section reaction to it, and your own internal assessment of how close it hews to 2040
- Moe looks inside Less Than 60 Miles
- Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream wrapped up Origins, among other things
News & notes from the business end of the gaming world
- Origins Awards Winners. One wargame: Lion Rampant from Osprey.
- MMP has an update about the Road to Richmond II maps
- Wargame Design Studio has a nice “how to play” intro page on their site
- Avalanche Press has an article about the design of Franz Josef’s Armies for the Infantry Attacks series
Getting set for Objective 1 Wargaming Convention at Modern Day Marine. Kicks off tomorrow. #objective1 #mdm23 pic.twitter.com/BwH3HJgRs1
— Wargaming (@BarrickTim) June 26, 2023
Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.
- 7-9 July Human Wave (Washington, DC)
- 19-23 July Historicon (Lancaster, PA)
- 22-30 July WBC (Seven Springs, PA)
- 3-6 August GenCon (Indianapolis, IN)
- 17-20 August HistoriKC Fest (Kansas City, MO)
- 18-20 August SDHistEast (Portsmouth, RI)
- 25 August-2 September ConSimWorld Expo 2023 (Phoenix, AZ)
- 20-22 October The Inaugural Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023 (Cary, NC)
As announced on our podcast on 3/31
The Inaugural Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023
20-22 October 2023
The Gamer’s Armory, Cary NC
Details will be announced after we get back from Buckeye Game Fest, and registration will open this Summer before we head off to Origins, and will be capped around 40 or so attendees.
In partnership with The Gamer’s Armory, we’ve got our first in-person convention coming up in October, where we’ll be taking over about half of the store. We’ll be playing games in probably the biggest vendor booth you’ll see at a convention, and making plenty of new friends.
Stay tuned for details!
As a reminder, Regimental Patron-level Patreon supporters get a free badge for all Armchair Dragoons-hosted events.
Don’t forget we’ve got a dedicated area of our forums for the professional wargamers.
- There’s a big NATO wargaming conference going on in Rome and it apparently involves a lot of hard work
- Wagner mercs shooting down Russian comand planes? What game effect would that have?
- WW2-style fortifications in Ukraine? How do you stat out your fortifications?
- The next GUWS webinar is Why You Should Be Megagaming on 15 August
- PaxSims has another, different, report on Connections North
- From our Connections Online livestream archive
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.
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.
In the weekly wargaming news,
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