Orbat Mapper, Looking Ahead to Fall Assembly ~ #TuesdayNewsday

Welcome to #TuesdayNewsday, your go-to source for the latest in wargaming news & insights!

 

Here’s a great tool for people to check out – the ORBAT Mapper.  It’s a webapp that helps you build accurate orders of battle for different historical scenarios, and has a pretty snazzy Twitter feed, too.  There’s a lot of GIS features built into the underlying map layer, plus a lot of different tools for overlaying units, locations, compositions, sub-unit lists, etc

click images to enlarge

 

Our survey with Beyond Solitaire is still running thru the 31st.  You’ll need the BGG URLs for your top 5 favorite solo/solitaire wargames, so we recommend you open them up in tabs to make it easier to cut & paste into the survey as you fill it out.

 

The 2024 Fall Assembly will be held 11-13 October 2024.  Registration will open 18 August, but event submissions are already open.  We will be back at The Gamer’s Armory again this year, in Cary, NC (just outside Raleigh).

These are the events that have been submitted so far, and we’d love to get another 10-15 or so submitted and approved by the weekend, when we open registration.

Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!

• Compass have released The Last Gamble: The Battle of the Bulge DSE
• Hey look, Hermann’s launched a new game series¹! Tattered Flags: Into The Whirlpool is now available from Blue Panther
• Ventonuovo has released Blitz in the East (and more on this below)
• Warlord Games has a new ABC Warriors: Wave Three Collection and it’s on a launch sale; they also have a very cool Grav Car for the game, too
• CSL has released the 2nd edition of their Sedan 1940 game
• Disimula Edizioni’s The Soft Underbelly 1943 1945 is now available
• There’s a new Quatre Bras DLC for the Scourge of War – Remastered game
• Steam has a new Operation Polygon Storm RTS that looks like state-of-the-art-1998 graphics, but not in a bad way; if you don’t like Steam, it’s also on GOG
• Maurice Suckling’s book Paper Time Machines: Critical Game Design and Historical Board Games has been released by Routledge

 

 

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

• Following its launch at GenCon, Undaunted 2200: Callisto is now available to pre-order from Osprey
• Warlord Games has a new Waffen-SS Tank Force on pre-order for Achtung Panzer!
• Easy Roller has a “sharp edge” Eternal Prism dice set on pre-order and you can save 40% off with PRE40 at checkout; and really who doesn’t want to a pyramid d4 with even sharper edges
• This Kickstarter campaign for armored trains of the Russian Civil War actually includes minis as well as STL options, and it is maybe one of the most micro-specific topics for a campaign we’ve seen in a long time

 

Looking for a deal? Getting more bang for your buck?

• WDS “Game of the week” is Campaign Peninsula for $29.95
• Dice Envy has their new Marvelous Pigments dice and they’re 10% with coupon code PALETTE at checkout
• Matrix Games has a stupid-cheap sale on a bunch of their games this week, including their adaptation of Conflict of Heroes and several Distant Worlds packages and a bunch of the Close Combat series; just don’t go looking for the Panthers in the Fog review to help you make your decision on that one
• Miniature Market has the new I, Napoleon for the unnecessarily-low price for $49
• This “starter package” from Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy Magazine is a pretty solid deal – you get a 6-issue sub, plus the 3 most recent back issues, for $67

 

This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world

• Rocky goes full Mandalorian
• Pushing Cardboard released his newest podcast, #35, with Andrew Rourke
• Wargaming Esoterica has an AAR of solo playthrough of the 1868 Boshin War game²
• Matrix Games’ latest Armory article is part 2 of their “pikes” articles

 

The best videos this week from our wargaming friends

• Moe cracks the lid on Compass Games’ The Last Gamble
• My Own Worst Enemy continues his Coral Sea campaign
• Justegarde is playing the Gaines Mill scenario from Worthington’s Seven Days Battles
• Beyond Solitaire talked with Connor Alexander about Coyote & Crow
• Gimpy Gamer opens up the new Blitz in the East from Ventonuovo
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about wargaming Ancient Rome and actually stayed largely on topic

 

 

Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world

• ICv2 has another GenCon followup from Scott Thorne; they also report that the graphic novel Blankets was one of the books that was caught up in the Utah book ban
• BoardGameWire talked to a bunch of publishers about what their views on this year’s GenCon
• Right after we hit “publish” last week, GMT dropped a neat article about the upcoming expansion for The British Way
• Rascal has an interesting article w/ the Critical Roll team, whose newest game/story is “a war story told by the bad guys”
• Here’s a deep dive into the upcoming under-the-hood improvements on WDS’s 4.05 engine for their Panzer Campaigns, Modern Campaigns, and First World War Campaigns series
• Matrix Games has an update on their Campaign Series: Middle East
• Slitherine has sign-ups open for a Field of Glory II tournament, using the Fall of Assyria scenario
• Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy are doing their annual “Great Wargaming Survey” for the minis wargamers out there

 

It’s been a busy week for the regiment; here’s what you might’ve missed!

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Bautzen (3) for “Bloody Big Battles”
• One More Moria for The One Ring Roleplaying Game
• FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ Sci-Fi City of Knoxville TN
• Don’t Fall In Love With Your Mental Model — Origins Edition
• Strategic Command – WWII: War In The Pacific
• Gameplay this week
  • Peter marshaled some players for a session of Modern Armor 2.3

Reminder than #UnboxingDay is on hiatus until 2025, when we’ll re-evaluate its potential return

 

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

Upcoming Dragoons Events

• Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ 8 September³ and 6 October⁴
• Next confirmed live event is The Fall Assembly, 11-13 October 2024 at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC
• Next planned virtual event is the ACDC⁵, 17-19, 2025

Other Conventions & Events

• 15-18 August 2024 HistoriKC Fest (Kansas City MO) <– THIS WEEKEND!
• 20-22 September 2024 Southern Front (Morrisville NC)
• 27-29 September 2024 Czech Consim 2024 (Prague CZ)
• 11-13 October 2024 Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly (Raleigh/Cary NC)
• 17-20 October 2024 GMT Fall Weekend at the Warehouse (Middle of Nowhere CA)
• 6-11 November 2024 Compass Game Fall Expo (Meriden CT)
• 7-10 November BottosCon (New Westminster BC)
• 8-10 November 2024 MythicCon (Charlotte NC)
• 8-11 November 2024 FoxCon (Dallas TX)
• 8-11 November 2024 SDHISTCON (San Diego CA)
• 15-17 November 2024 SCGCon (Liverpool UK)

 

 

Focusing on the practitioner world ~ don’t forget about our dedicated area in our forums for the wargame professionals!

• A look behind the scenes of the AGI Rising wargame, that was filmed for documentary purposes
• China joining Belarus/Russia exercises near Poland?  Weird
• Some info on the King’s College London crisis simulation team
• Ukrainian Troops Are Digging Trenches In Russia’s Kursk Oblast. It’s A Sign They Plan To Stay.
• Chinese Aircraft Carrier Shandong Deploys to Philippine Sea
• This week, Mick Ryan talks about what happens next in the Kursk attack
• The next GUWS webinar is Wargaming outside of War: How NGO’s use games and gaming to expand maritime on 20 August, followed by Communicating Uncertainty in Wargame Outcomes on 10 September
• PaxSims shares survey about wargames and gamification

 

Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing

shared in our forums, but worth re-sharing here

 

 

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. seems to be an annual occurrence
2. translated from Japanese
3. pushing back a weekend bc of Labor Day holiday
4. the weekend before the Fall Assembly
5. Armchair Dragoons Digital Convention