Big News from Slitherine; Lots of Pre-Orders ~ #TuesdayNewsday

It’s #TuesdayNewsday, & we’re here with your weekly dose of wargaming news & trends!

 

Hot off the press and just announced this morning (US time), digital wargame publisher Slitherine has acquired Battlefront, the publishers of the Combat Mission series of games.

The press release leads off with

August 27, 2024 – Epsom, UK. Slitherine, a leader in the development and publishing of wargames, proudly announces the acquisition of Battlefront, the renowned developers of the Combat Mission series. This strategic move underscores Slitherine’s commitment to expanding the wargaming market in a meaningful and sustainable manner while honoring the legacy of a franchise that has captivated thousands of fans worldwide for over two decades.

The Combat Mission series has gained some more recent traction in the professional wargaming world with its extensive use by the various Fight Club organizations, as well as some of the wargaming programs in higher education.

The downside, of course, is that it’s one fewer publisher of games overall, which concentrates control of the market and could result in diverting resources from development of CM games to support other titles from Slitherine, or vice versa.

Now, we’ll see if they can’t finally sort out the 9237456294 different forms of DRM that exist on the Combat Mission games.

 

You’d love for this to be your first day of class, wouldn’t you?

 

ENDS THIS WEEKEND!  GET YOUR VOTES IN NOW . . . 

 

The 2024 Fall Assembly will be held 11-13 October 2024.

Registration for badges & events are now open, so you can grab your badges and come join the fun.
Great games, great store, great attendees!

We will be back at The Gamer’s Armory again this year, in Cary, NC (just outside Raleigh).

 

Hitting the shelves (and webstores) near you now!

• Hard to figure out the best way to describe the new Tactical Breach Wizards on Steam, but go check it out and see if it tickles your fancy
• Dark City Games released SPQE: Isolation Station
• CSL released Risorgimento, the latest in their “Long Century Operations Series” games
• Remember when Steve Jackson Games got raided by the feds because they thought the gamers were actual hackers?  Like any bunch of way-too-smart-and-equally-subversive gamers, of course they made a game about it, and Hacker is now back in print with a deluxe edition
• Grunwald 2025 escaped the TS Wargames production line and can now be found in the wild
• Battlefront minis has a new World War III The Complete Starter Set with both US¹ and Soviet forces for their Team Yankee line
• Can we please get a book on how to read NATO symbols with a bunch of . . .  what are those things, anyway? whatever – cute fuzzy animals on the cover, in English instead of Japanese?

 

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

• Lords of Heaven from Phalanx just launched on Gamefound as we were prepping today’s news
• Through the Hedgerow is on pre-order at Osprey Games
• War Diary Magazine has Corvette Command on pre-order; price will change on 4 September
• Tier One: Direct Action is a multiplayer digital VR shooter game that keeps hyping “realism” without a lot of detail about what that’s supposed to mean; it’s very close to its funding goal with 3 days to go
• HAVOC: Gen ZERO looks like another card-battler, but doesn’t seem to be connected to the guys selling/demo’ing the Havoc game at Origins
• GMT’s August newsletter announced the following p500s
  • Stepping Into Hell (new GBACW game)
  • Downfall: Conquest of the Third Reich, 1942-1945, 2nd Printing
  • Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain, 2nd Printing
  • Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India, 1290-1398, 2nd Printing
• Warlord has some new minis sets on pre-order
  • US Army Infantry (Winter) Platoon
  • Fallschirmjäger (Winter) Platoon

 

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

• WDS “Game of the week” is Jutland for $29.95
• Until 3 September, everything from Alternative Armies is 20% off, no codes needed
• Dice Envy released their new “stormy seas” dice and you can save 10% with coupon code TEMPEST at checkout
• Easy Roller Dice has their collapsible snap-side dice trays back in stock and you can save 25% with coupon code SNAP25 at checkout
• HârnWorld : HârnMaster bundle from Columbia Games on DTRPG knocks $60 off the aggregate individual price
• Avalanche Press has a “Jutland Experience” bundle that knocks over $30 off the total price of the individual games and includes a few variants and expansions
• You can save about $15 on Air & Armor: Würzburg over at Miniature Market and bone up on the rules before playing it at the Fall Assembly with designer Bruce Maxwell
• Noble Knight has the new Decision Games’ Drive on Stalingrad on sale for about $20 off
• Hearts of Iron IV is 70% off on Steam right now
• Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy is 60% off at GOG right now

 

This week’s best written coverage from the wargaming world

• Rocky and the family tackle The Mandalorian: Adventures for Friday Family Game Night
• Brian Train is on a European Tour, with a gratuitous stop in California on the way
• Space Biff has a great article about bias in game reviews
• Avalanche Press has an article about their upcoming WW1 Baltic Sea game built on the Jutland mechanics
• Pushing Cardboard gives his thoughts on the latest GMT Games newsletter
• Here’s a nice cartography tutorial from one of the IKS folks

 

The best videos this week from our wargaming friends

• Cyrano talks about How I Build Tables for “Charlie Don’t Surf!”
• Moe is hosting his monthly Whiskey Charlie show tonight
• Justegarde recaps the Dragonflight con
• Beyond Solitaire talks with Merceline Leiman on designing solo modes for games and presumably took a lot of notes
• Zilla looks at the new Shiloh game from Revolution Games
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about The Best of GMT, Part II 1995-1999

 

 

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

• ICv2’s interview with Free League’s CEO Tomas Harenstam mentions a Humble Bundle deal with Alchemy, but says nothing about the Alchemy-PDF Access screw-up with Free League’s game PDFs from that bundle, where Free League cut access to them after a few weeks
• Nice article here from Matthew Denton about some of the challenges of marketing wargames
• GMT has an update on the changes coming to their big Thunderbolt re-release
• Rascal talks about the latest battleground in the D&D “edition wars” while most of us are over here enjoying out giant pile of perfectly good 2e material that’ll last through our grandkids’ lifetimes
• Amabel threw a note on social media that high demand for City of Six Moons is going to be screwing with their original production plans for the rest of the year, which is likely to ripple into 2025, too

 

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

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Teugn-Hausen for “General d’Armee 2”!
• Project: Quatre Bras VIII AAR
• Origins 2024! The Exhibit Hall ~ All Of It
• FL(W)GS Spotlight ~ Game Kastle of Santa Clara CA
• Gameplay this week
  • Abuse on the Meuse (3) for “O Group”
  • The Battle of Dresden (2) for “Bloody Big Battles”
  • Peter and Jan play The Collapse with Daniel, the designer

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 September² and 6 October³
• 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 ACDC⁴, 17-19, 2025

Other Conventions & Events

• 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)
• 26-28 October 2024 Auck Con (Auckland NZ)
• 6-11 November 2024 Compass Game Fall Expo (Meriden CT)
• 5-7 November 2024 Connections Oz (Virtual)
• 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!

• Register now for Friday’s GameNation MORS webinar with Ed McGrady and Betsy Joslyn
• Connections Oz will be virtual again this year, 5-7 November
• How would you model a “Theater Information Advantage detachment” in a wargame?
• The ever-shifting orders of battle of the war in Ukraine
• This week, Mick Ryan talks about a “lesson in strategic audacity”
• The next GUWS webinar is Communicating Uncertainty in Wargame Outcomes on 10 September and then they’ve got
  The Challenges and Pitfalls of an ‘Authentic’ Medieval Wargame on 8 October
• PaxSims talks about the Kurdish Chaos matrix game, and includes downloads to the game assets

 

 

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

It’s hard to over-estimate the enjoyable silliness of the Official Stick Review feed over on Instagram

 

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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Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
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1. absolutely no idea what that “US” tank on the right side of the cover image is supposed to be
2. pushing back a weekend bc of Labor Day holiday
3. the weekend before the Fall Assembly
4. Armchair Dragoons Digital Convention