Almost Done With 2021, and #TheACDC is Coming in January! – #TuesdayNewsday 12/21/21

Every week, #TuesdayNewsday gives you a digest of what’s important in the strategy gaming world  >>>

This Week’s Headline:

This is our penultimate Tuesday Newsday of the year.
What was the biggest story in wargaming this past year?  Sound off below, or in our forums.

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Last Week’s Headline:

Our next ACDC is coming up 14-16 January 2022. Schedule will be posted pretty quickly as most of the “big rocks” are in the jar.
Adding to last week’s preview, we’ve now also confirmed….

• A rolling three-part Kriegsspiel where subsequent sessions will depend on what happened in the previous battle
• Four-player COIN games
• At least 2 student presentation teams discussing their wargame design class projects
• Kickstarter-launch-week game of Swords Around the Throne
• A special military RPG event

to go with the previously-announced

• Pre-Kickstarter “learn from the designer” with David Thompson for his upcoming Lanzerath Ridge
• OCS Bootcamp with Ardwulf
• World at War ’85 and Lock ‘n Load Tactical with the development team
• Dogfights in space with Ad Astra Games
• White Eagle Defiant and Last One Standing with designers Shaw & Heilman
• Pre-publication sessions of Song for War (WW2 in the Med) with designers Seth & Chris
• Robotech Reconstruction with the design team
• Grognard-of-the-Year Jim O’s usual epic-scale Tabletop Simulator battle royales

 

This/Last Week’s Other Headline:

We’ve rebuilt the convention & event calendar.  And it’s getting attention, even from people who have no idea that it exists!

In addition to conventions, we’ve got the live-streaming schedule for folks like Gary & Moe & our own Saturday Night Fights, as well as regular club meetings for wargaming (or at least wargame-friendly) organizations that have public calendars we can access.  We’ve also got the Connections conferences, too, including the recently-scheduled Connections Online 2022 (19-22 April, and yes that’s the middle of the week).

 

Newly Released This Week:

• Avalanche Press is at it again, with a cool-sounding game – Great War at Sea: Caribbean Empires – that’s a Gold Club exclusive…
• For the rest of us less-than-Gold customers, Avalanche also brought back their SWWAS: Midway game in a deluxe edition, and yes, it’s still huge.
• Worthington have released their next “bookgame” – Waterloo Solitaire.  It’s available directly from Amazon.
• Steve Jackson released the Broken Clockwork World steampunk setting for download through W23.
• PSC has their Mortem et Gloriam book for ancient/medieval minis games back in stock.
• Battlefront Minis has some cool “gaming sets” that come in nice tin boxes, with dice, objective tokens, and such.  There’s a set each for the 101st and 82nd for their new Bulge line, as well as West German and Soviet for their Team Yankee line.

 

‘Tis The Season of Sales – This Week:

• The Lock ‘n Load Tactical Digital core game is on sale thru Steam right now at 50% off.  $4.99 gets you base game for either Mac or Windows.
• Easy Roller Dice Company has a free $25 digital gift card when you spend $60.  Buy some dice for you and give the card to someone else, or vice-versa.  You add the card from this link, and then use the code 25FREE at checkout.
• Kraken Dice also has a buy-3-get-1 deal going right now, too.  Put 4 items in your cart and the lowest price one will be free.
• Last minute holiday gift?  MMP Coffee Mugs are only $5 right now (normally $15).
• Holiday sale week 3 at Matrix Games covers all things Order of Battle.
• Compass Games has Operation Skorpion on sale for $27.
• Paradox has a crap-ton of stuff on sale from 20% to 50% or more.  That includes Surviving the Aftermath, and Imperator: Rome, and Empire of Sin.
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is S&T #280, with Soldiers: Decision in the Trenches about warfare in 1918.`

 

Newly Launched This Week:

• Assault Games are taking preorders for counter trays designed to fix their hex-shaped counters.
• VUCA Sims has The Chase of the Bismarck – Operation Rheinübung 1941 on pre-order
• There’s a handful of interesting RPG/fantasy adventure things out on Kickstarter right now
  • Tome of Wondrous Items for 5th Edition that includes a bunch of pretty nice stretch goals, and a leather-bound printing option
  • Ida’s Guide to Worlds Beyond our Own: Drakul’s Game with some, um…  “familiar” trade dress, and reimagined backgrounds for a lot of stock fantasy races
  • Call of Kilforth: A Fantasy Quest Game with very nice card art, and tie-ins to previous Killforth games.
• Warlord Games has  new Anglo-Zulu War line for their Black Powder games, with the Zulu Starter Army currently on pre-order at $80, and the British Starter Army on preorder at $120, presumably because of the need to ship tea to them.  And yes, they’re 28mm, and not some wackadoodle one-off nobody-else-makes-this scale…
• A while ago we told you about the Price of Crowns minis on Kickstarter.  Those guys are back with another campaign on Württemberg artillery & cavalry from the early 1800s.  And yes, those are dragoons by their German terminology.

 

This Week With The Armchair Dragoons:

• Mentioned in Dispatches wrapped up Season 7 with our holiday wargaming wishes
• Saturday Night Fights continued PQB with The Battle of Quatre Bras for “Polemos”
• My Own Worst Enemy is still fighting Pea Ridge in Across 5 Aprils Part 5
• This past Thursday was #UnboxingDay!
  • Imperium: Empires in Conflict – Worlds in the Balance
  • North Africa: Afrika Korps vs Desert Rats 1940-42 from Multi-Man Publishing (take 1!)
  • King Philip’s War from Multi-Man Publishing
  • NATO 1961: The Berlin Crisis by MIcrogame Design Group
  • Last Stand The Battle for Moscow 1941-42 by Multi-Man Publishing
  • Dreadful Circus
  • North Africa: Afrika Korps vs Desert Rats 1940-42 from Multi-Man Publishing (take 2!)
  • D&D Essentials by Wizards of the Coast
  • Monty’s Gamble by Multi-Man Publishing
• In our forums, everyone’s actually talking about Get Back, the new Beatles documentary on Disney+
• OK, also in our forums, Bawb’s still on his deep dive into Assault Red Horizon.
• Other online games with the Armchair Dragoons
  • GOTY Jim Owczarski went after The Battle of Rolica
  • Haz loaded up The Battle of Talavera for Blucher to the Steam Workshop
  • He also found time to share The Battle of Corunna for Blucher, too

 

News From The Wargame Industry:

• Here’s a great article about lessons in game design from classic games
• GMT Games’ website seems to have been going up & down a bunch over the past week or so. It’s been reported elsewhere on social media, plus our own difficulties pulling it just for the news.  Seems to be an ISP issue, but it’s causing intermittent issues with access.
• LNLP announced some new games on a recent livestream, and if you hit their site, they’re showing A Wing & A Prayer and All Things Zombie Reloaded out of print.
• Wargame Design Studio has a great article on “Blog Posts – Worth Reading” about wargame development.
• Good on Steve Jackson for shutting down Warehouse 23 for all shipping for the next 2 weeks.  Give folks time to spend with their families, during a window where nothing you order would get there in time at this point.
• Brian Train has a melancholy personal look back at his past year.
• This week on Twitter, the value of professional-focused wargames is reinforced

and the pirates are out in full force in the FMF wargame, too

 

Something From Our Partners:

• In solidarity with Ardwulf, Rocky took a look at some Traveller content this week
• Moe dug into The Siege of Orgun from Revolution Games
• Centurion’s Review took a look at Kill The Commie Bastards on his channel
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about Traveller, and the usual meandering ramblings based on the ongoing chat.

 

News From The 4X Gaming World:

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

 

The Professional & Practitioner Wargaming World:

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

• While not yet officially announced, Connections Online will be 19-21 April, with extended events running 18-24 April.
• Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, 1899-1913, by video…
• MORS are offering another one of their “Certificate in Wargaming” programs in January (in partnership with VaTech).  Some day someone will pony up for us to get registered, right?
• UK Fight Club are talking about DSET, which is coming up in early March of next year.
• GUWS will be taking a break over the holidays, but you can read about the recent game playtests for the wargame design class over at No Dice, No Glory
• PaxSims talked about a recent wargame on the “invasion” of Taiwan.  Yeah, and no one is surprised by the irredeemable communist comment on the article either, right?

 

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.
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