Announcing Connections Online 2022 – #TuesdayNewsday 2/15/22

Each week, #TuesdayNewsday is the essential primer for all your strategy gaming headlines

The “Official” Announcement:

As the newest addition to the Connections-Wargaming community, Connections Online will celebrate our second year addressing the theme “Growing your skillset – Ways to Become a Professional Wargamer.”  We are planning a diverse set of professionally focused “Core” panels/presentations between 10AM-4PM EST 19-21 Apr 2022.

Currently-planned core topics include:

• Recent Innovations in Wargaming
• How Wargamers Get Hired
• Designing a Professional Wargame
• Revisiting a Wargame That Helped Win WWII
• Methodologies for Designing Cyber Wargames

Registration will again be handled via tabletop.events and the link shared when registration opens.
We will once again stream video to registered users via YouTube and host additional chat using Discord before/after events.

As before, we are also planning “Extended” events, including games, niche topic panels/presentations, networking sessions, etc. These will be hosted using the tools deemed most useful by our volunteers and will run from 18-23 April, outside of the core event hours, and we will schedule to minimize ‘fratricide’ (“overlap”) between events.
If you want to volunteer to help with Connections Online (or provide an extended event) contact us at armchairdragoonsevents – at – gmail – dot – .com

Look for additional details in the next couple of weeks, including registration info. Discussion area in our forums is now open.

 

Want more hex-and-counter stuff in this section? Get the publishers to start spitting more of it out!

• TS Wargames tried to sneak Tolling of the Bell past us, as it wasn’t even on their wargames page as “coming soon” and is now released
• Hollandspiele released Eyelet – “the one with the shoelaces”
• Avalanche Press have re-released Defiant Russia as a playbook edition rather than a boxed game
• Really?  Munchkin Petting Zoo released this week?  There’s a Valentine’s Day joke in there somewhere, but we’re trying to keep things PG-13 here
• Free League have released their new Tales From The Loop boardgame, based on the extended franchise
• Ares Games has supposedly released 303 Squadron in the US as of 11 February, so you should start seeing it soon
• Did you get a kick out of the new trailer for Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel series?  Did you go frame-by-frame breaking it down like Ardwulf did?  If so, you’ll dig GW’s new LotR skirmish minis, including Galadriel, among others
• Keeping with the fantasy minis theme, Wizk!ds has a new Sahuagin warband for their “Icons of the Realms” line
• Remember when Warlord Games was rolling out that new “epic scale” Napoleonic line¹ and it was supposed to be the new “starter” line for getting into Napoleonic minis gaming?  How do you supposed a $440 price tag on sale, and for only half the battle of Waterloo is going to go down with new players? Anyhow, if you’re interested, you can scoop up the following, and further drive our guy Cyrano into madness.  To be fair, they are loaded bundles, with about a dozen boxed sets in each, but still…
  • D’Erlons First Corps: Epic Waterloo Bundle
  • British Army: Epic Waterloo Bundle

 

• Matrix Games gettin’ into the spirit of Valentines by brutally beating and torturing having a sale on the “games we love”
• Battlefront Minis has a big sale on their mid-war North Africa lines, with 20% off in-stock games thru mid-March, but only while that stock is in, so once it’s gone, sale over…
• Alternative Armies have a big 3-book bundle on sale
• Lock ‘n Load Publishing has a big PDF sale on their back issues of Line of Fire magazine
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is S&T #246, with Manila ’45: Stalingrad of the Pacific at 25% off

 

• The Wargaming Company has some nifty ESR Command Card Decks to support their Napoleonic minis games, now on pre-order
• Ares Games are taking pre-orders on 2 different big-ass boxes. The Thing is based on the movie, and includes some incredible minis. They better be incredible for $199, but it’s a loaded box of stuff.  Sword & Sorcery – Ancient Chronicles is getting ready to ship from the factory so they’re offering one last chance to buy into the Kickstarter bundles, ranging from $160 to $295, depending on just how much “stuff” you want in your set.
• Compass Games has War for America on Kickstarter for those of you that didn’t already pre-order it through their site.
• DiSumula Edizioni are taking pre-orders on their Give Us Victories game that was crowdfunded last year, and getting close to shipping
• Warlord Minis also has a new prehistoric fantasy skirmish game based on an IP from some adventure comics. The starter set for this new Sláine world is the awesomely-titles Kiss My Axe bundle
• How about a Goblin Civil War that’s loosely based on the Spanish one?  It’s a little pricey but that’s because you get the minis along with the rules.

 

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The 1809 Campaign for “Snappy Nappy”
• My Own Worst Enemy ~ Cruel Necessity Part 2
• This week’s classic article ~ Shining Path by One Small Step Games
• Mentioned in Dispatches talked about the Civ-series games
• First Impressions of Distant Worlds 2, and Distant Worlds 2 ~ Colonization After Action Report are the first of what should be several early looks at the new 4X game from Matrix
• Upcoming Dragoons Events
  • Next #UnboxingDay is 17 February – this week!
  • Next Virtual Convention is Connections Online, 19-21 April 2022
  • Next Real-World Convention that’s actually confirmed is Origins, 8-12 June 2022

 

• Another Run Up the Kop for “Bloody Big Battles” revisited a previous SNF shootout, but with some rules updates
• The Battle of Agincourt for “Field of Glory 2” with a sneak peek at the new Storm of Arrows expansion
• Big Board Gaming is fighting thru Stalingrad ’42
• Hethwill is looking for players for War of the Triple Alliance on Saturday

 

• CSW Expo Dallas registration is now open for the convention being held 12-15 May
• Steve Jackson’s annual “Report to Stakeholders” was released this week.  It’s an oddly-revealing deep dive into their own internal status
• MMP has some updates about their overseas shipping – particularly, places USPS won’t go right now. Although MMP are the only ones to specify it, it’ll affect other publishers, too
• Modiphius has a new blog post up about writing for the Star Trek Adventures game
• This week, Avalanche Press has nice articles on the Hungarians in the German army during Operation Barbarossa, and the French ‘colony’ of Tunisia

 

• This week in our forums
  • While waiting for DW2 to escape, our guys are also chatting about the early access for Nebulous Space Command
  • We’re following up our Civ-series podcast episode with some discussion on Civ 6 in particular
  • Similarly, following up last week’s Tuesday Newsday intro about “wargaming communities” spawned a thread in the forums
• Despite a lack of “Army” folks, Fred had a great discussion on “Wargames in the Army” over the weekend, including some guests that we’ve had multiple times at our conventions and on our podcasts
• Some interesting discussion on ACW figure painting over at Battlefields & Warriors
• If you’re not following the Too Fat Lardies onTwitter, you’re missing some great ‘action’ shots of their minis games. It’d be nice if they nested them into threads, but either way, it’s really nice photography of some great games.

 

• Rocky decided peeling back his own toenails with pliers wasn’t going to suck enough, and he decided to go back to the original T2K from 1984, and roll up a character to see how it went
• Can’t possible imagine why Moe would be previewing a game called Semper Fi….
• Dan & Ardwulf hosted our guy Cyrano for EYWTKAWBWATA
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about “no formal topic”, since he was on a day early and counter-programmed against the Super Bowl.

 

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

• Yes, they’re the Buzzfeed of the NatSec world, but 19FortyFive are bringing up an important point with “don’t forget about Kaliningrad” as Breaking Defense also tries to get some of the important modern warfare “questions” that might get answered if Ukraine goes hot
• Inclusive NatSec is holding an event in 2 weeks, over at CNA
• The Hoover Institution at Stanford has a series of wargaming talks over the next 8 weeks, starting tomorrow with “Wargames as Historical Data”
• GUWS is introducing you to their membership, so you can learn more about them and the organization as they look forward to next week’s Off the Hex Map with the Center for Army Analysis on 2-22
• PaxSims has been talking about this week’s Connections North conference

 

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. Pepperidge Farm remembers