Help Wanted! – #TuesdayNewsday 1/25/22

Every week, #TuesdayNewsday comes back around to keep you abreast of what matters in the strategy gaming world

Help wanted!

We’re looking for some people to join the content staff at the Dragoons.  While any help is always appreciated, at the moment, we’re specifically in the market for writers & reviewers.  Whether it’s AARs, or how-to-play walkthroughs, or strategy guides, or straight-up detailed reviews of games, we want folks to join our content team.
Send Brant a note either in our forum, or through one of our social media channels, and get connected on what you might have to offer!

We’ve got plenty of experience helping writers get up to speed with our style of content, and fully expect to offer comments & guidance the first couple of times, so don’t even remotely think “I’m not good enough to write for publication” because odds are you’re better than you give yourself credit for.

The “Other” Headline

We’re starting to collect nominations / entries for our FLG(W)S Spotlight, in which we want to showcase the best of the brick-&-mortar wargaming stores around the US (we’ll get to the international folks later!).  We’re hoping to start this recurring feature in February, but we need your help to populate the queue for the feature, so we’ve got a short form for you to give us the info about the store, and a way to contact you for follow-up questions if we have any.
Please note that you’ll need a Google account for this form because there’s a place on page 2 for you to upload some of your own photos of the store.  Please don’t scrape photos from their website; give us your own shots of the store, especially if it includes wargames on shelves or tables.  If you’re not a fan of Google¹ then we totally understand, but we don’t have a good workaround.

 

• Warlord Games are selling the Feb/22 issue of Wargames Illustrated and if you order through them, you get a free stand of epic-scale infantry², either French or British³, thrown in with it.
• World at War issue #83, with Watch on the Oder: January 1945, a hypothetical game that sends forces used in the Bulge to the Eastern Front instead, is shipped to subscribers and now available for order.
• Avalanche Press are releasing The Great Pacific War (Final Edition) as a last hurrah before they “run out of boxes, maps, and pieces.”  Odds are this is actually final, and not “final” like the “final” world tour by The Eagles or The Who.  This is the PTO equivalent of the venerable Third Reich game, and builds off the same engine that Avalanche used for their updated versions of that one.
• FFG released the Spreading War expansion to their Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth game.
• “Hey, let’s get the Aunts from that Geico commercial to play Munchkin with us!” said no one, ever.  But, hey, they probably play Farkle, right?  So what better way to get Aunt Bonnie to quit checking expiration dates on food in your fridge than teach her to stab everyone in the back with her favorite dice game re-skinned to a goofy fantasy theme⁴ full of in-jokes she won’t get?!

 

• It’s Winter, so Matrix Games gives you Battle of the Bulge and Drive on Moscow both at 51% off.  There’s been some chatter about the tabletop version of that Bulge game in our forums.
• Compass has various titles in their back catalog on sale, like Blood on the Ohio: The Northwest Indian War 1789 – 1794 and Fornovo 1495, both around 50% off
• Paradox has had the same stuff on sale for 2 months and 2 weeks now: Cities in Motion, Magicka 2, and Pillars of Eternity are the bulk of it.
• There hasn’t been a single-back-issue sale from S&T press for a few weeks.  They’ve always come back from that before, so here’s hoping we start getting more new sales from them soon

 

• Sebastian Bae’s Fleet Marine Force⁵ Littoral Commander is now available for (commercial) pre-order through the Deitz Foundation. It’s $65 for US shipping at $80 for international. As a reminder, we had this with us at Origins last year, and hope to again this year.
• Legion Wargames has put Operation Nordwind 1945 on their CPO system for $50.
• The latest focus for Flames of War is the mid-war period of WW2, in North Africa.  Last week we noted that they’d launched the book, and this week, they’ve got 2 boxed sets on pre-order.  Both sets are $60 and both are categorized as ‘starter sets’ so they’ll include a full rulebook.
  • Kasserine contains the US and Germans, with 21 tanks in the box.
  • Tobruk features the Brits and Italians,
• Friend-of-the-Dragoons David Thompson’s latest Valiant Defense game literally as we were preparing this article. You can jump on Lanzerath Ridge on Kickstarter right now.
• Also, as we were prepping this news update, Phalanx Games launched Purple Haze on Gamefound.
• Yes, both of the preceding items were showcased at The ACDC 10 days ago.
• Guaranteed to not make Cyrano happy⁶, Warlord Games are doubling down on their epic-scale Napoleonic line, and here comes 4 new sets on pre-order.  They’re all just north of $100 each, and all include 15-20 stands of infantry, a handful of mounted commanders, and at least a half-dozen cannon, and yes, there’s overlap between the sets.
  • Imperial Guard Corps Bundle
  • Highlander & Imperial Guard Bundle
  • French Middle & Old Guard
  • British Highlanders & Riflemen
• The Limitless Heroics campaign on Kickstarter bills itself as “the most comprehensive disability compendium ever created for a Tabletop Role-Playing Game” and sure looks like a resource that takes things from mental illness to dyslexia to physical limiters to emotional trauma and puts them all into serious book for exploring them through the lens of RPGs.  It features a dyslexia-‘friendly’ layout to make it easier for readers to grok, and is staffed by folks who are literally speaking from experience.
• Gamer’s Armory is reporting that Yanks! will be back in stock in mid-February, and they’re taking pre-orders on it at 25% off.
• Launched a while ago, but just came our attention this week, this board game console on Indiegogo looks pretty interesting, but as of now there’s no wargame support for it.
• MMP has had The Devil’s Cauldron reprint on pre-order for almost 2 years, and it reached its preorder number a while ago.  But it’s still out there on pre-order if you want to save over $80 on a copy.
• If there was ever a misleading title of a Kickstarter campaign, it belongs to Holy Wars ♰ The Pastime of Kings Collectable Card Game.  First of all, it’s not a CCG since you get everything in the box.  Second of all, with 34 cards/game, it’s barely enough to actually play.  That’s OK, though, because once you realize it’s just “Top Trumps” with better artwork, you won’t want to play for long.
• GMT Games (predictably) dropped their most recent update shortly after our last Tuesday Newsday⁷ and their p500 update isn’t the most robust this time around.  It’s an expansion, 2 reprints, and a mounted map plus the box to hold it all
  • Sovereign of Discord: A Fire in the Lake Expansion
  • Downfall Mounted Map + 3″ Box
  • Silent Victory, 3rd Printing
  • The Hunters, 4th Printing

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Islandlwana for “The Men Who Would Be Kings”
• The January 2022 After Action Review is now available
• #UnboxingDay was this past Thursday(see right)
  • Pax Baltica
  • CSA America’s Civil War 1861-1865 by Fiery Dragon Productions
  • Monty’s D-Day from Against The Odds Magazine
  • The Day Was Ours by Revolution Games
  • Tora Tora Tora
  • Imperial Tide by Compass Games
  • Fateforge Encyclopedia
  • Band of Brothers: Texas Arrows by Worthington Games
  • A real page turner in Waterloo Solitaire from Worthington Publishing
• Mentioned in Dispatches is lining up some great guests for next season and starts recording this week
• Upcoming Dragoons Events
  • Next #UnboxingDay is 17 February
  • Next Virtual Convention is Connections Online, 19-21 April 2022
  • Next Real-World Convention that’s actually confirmed is Origins, 8-12 June 2022

 

• Riding Shotgun for Ruthless
• Ruweisat Ridge part 2, for Rommel
• The Battle of Islandlwana for The Men Who Would Be Kings
• Hethwill’s looking for some players for The War of the Triple Alliance on 28 January, starting at 1800 EST / 2300 GMT.

 

• GMT has announced 2 events, and whacked another one
  • They’ve pulled out of The War Room at Dice Tower West, and coupled with the SDHISTCON crew also backing out of supporting it, there’s no plan for The War Room to happen there now, but there are still some wargaming events in the general program
  • GMT East will be held in White Plains, NY to be held 1-3 April
  • Weekend at the Warehouse is planned for 21-24 April in Hanford, CA
  • Yes, we’ve already put all of that on our event calendar; you hadn’t already checked it to notice?
• We probably need to just stop even checking the Clash of Arms website. It hasn’t changed in a year.  Then again, Ventonuovo’s front page and news page are both counting down the “last hours” of their Black Swan Kickstarter campaign that closed in June of 2021, and Minden Games hasn’t updated since about then, too.  And it’s been waaaaay too long since anything happened on the Battles! Magazine site, so there seems to be plenty of companies not worried about refreshing their front-facing content.

  

• CSL takes verbal sparring very seriously (see right)
• Wargame Design Studio followed up their survey results with some open-ended Q&A that they’ve shared on their site, too.
• Tracking the Ares Games ‘upcoming products’, it looks like the US release for the 303 Squadron games has pushed from January into February.
• Fred finally got his Cold-War-goes-hot game from Compass Games.  It wasn’t the one he spent the entire ACDC trying to order, but let’s revel in the small victories, shall we?
• Origins snuck the announcement out in a Facebook post reply, with a promise of more to come later, but proof of vaccination and masks are going to be required at Origins 2022

 

• This week in our forums
  • Ultracheng’s got some nice professionally-printed counters for his Wizkrieg game that he showed off
  • Looking to recruit another crew for the Dragoons to entire another naval wargaming tournament
  • There’s a group organizing a play-by-post T2K game
• Turning Point Simulations shared this article about strategy game players, with a reminder that it is supposed to be a satire site
• Cyrano has a nice chat on Twitter about why he likes the Lasalle 2 system so much, despite it’s lack of many Napoleonic minis wargaming tropes.
• What wargaming tribe are you?  Someone should do a meta-analysis of all the different wargamer typologies out there.  Y’know, figure out which typologies of the typologies you are.
• We asked y’all how many unopened/unpunched games you had that were over 5 years old

 

• Rocky rolls up a secret agent for the old James Bond RPG from Victory Games
• Moe has a new episode of Whiskey Charlie on tonight. He also did a learn-to-play for Imperial Tide
• Big Board is digging into Nordkapp from S&T #94
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about Old-School Wargames & RPGs

 

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

• Michael Peck gives the rest of world a look at what a Societ invasion of Europe would’ve looked like, through the lens of Combat Mission Cold War
• How do you wargame a “minor incursion” when it might not even be actual military assets?
• How do you wargame “the unthinkable” about the US?
• GUWS webinars have slowed down a bit in their frequency. The next ones are Designing & Facilitating Matrix Games (2/1) and Off the Hex Map with the Center for Army Analysis (2/22)
• Want to work in the practitioner wargaming space?  There’s a bunch of job listings that are either directly, or at least tangentially, related to wargaming work in the NatSec / Biz Wargaming worlds
  • Over in the UK, there’s Complex Systems – Business Wargaming Managing Consultant and a Complex Systems – Business Wargaming Consultant
  • CNAS is looking for a Research Assistant to join the Technology and National Security Program
  • Center for Maritime Strategy needs an analyst
  • Sandia National Labs needs a year-round undergrad intern for an R&D/wargaming role
  • Boston Consulting Group wants an “Expert Project Leader, Uncertainty Advantage“⁸

 

Why yes, we did get a cool new footnote plugin. Why do you ask?
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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1. and we know there are plenty of reasons not to be
2. yes, that’s 12mm
3. completely random
4. yes, we’re talking about Munchkin Farkle
5. thanks, USMC, for shitting all over a perfectly good name
6. or who knows, maybe more available product will make him happy
7. Seriously guys, would it kill you to send out your email on a Monday afternoon one time?
8. whatever that is