John Tiller Software sold to Wargame Design Studio – #TuesdayNewsday 11/23/21

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

This Week’s Headline:

John Tiller Software has been sold to Wargame Design Studio, a team that used to work on a variety of JTS products.  The old JTS website even redirects to WDS at this point.  The WDS site is visually attractive, but can give you a bit of a “someone else playing Tetris with your screen” effect as the games scroll about.

This Week’s Follow-Up Headline:

C’mon people, Ardwulf clearly threatened to record a “rap video” and we don’t even have 30 signatures on the petition?!
This must happen.

 

Newly Released This Week:

• The single most important new release this week:
  BLACK OAK WORKSHOP HAS THEIR DICE ADVENT CALENDARS BACK IN STOCK
• In addition to their purchase of JTS, Wargame Design Studio has released a new game in the Civil War Battles series, Forgotten Campaigns.  It’s the 15th(!) game in this long-running series.
• SCS North Africa: Afrika Korps vs Desert Rats, 1940-42 is now shipping and you can grab it at preorder price if you hurry.
• Decisive Campaigns: Ardennes Offensive is out now from Matrix Games.  It’s the 4th in the well-regarded DC series.
• Free League has now opened up their Twilight: 2000 sales to the public.
• TS Wargames in Poland have released Battles of the 2nd World War 1943-45 (even tho the box art on the page shows 1942-45). The description includes the line “Fourth edition of the Polish oldest and most complex wargames system” and while that’s technically accurate, that can’t be much different than being the oldest ultimate frisbee team in the Southeast, right?
• S&T #332, with a pair of 30 Years War battles as the included game(s), is in the mail to subscribers and S&T Press are taking orders for the general public now.
• Avalanche Press’s La Campagne de Tunisie has been reprinted and is available again.
• Compass Games are now shipping Paper Wars #99, with Rommel Triumphant as the included game.
• GMT’s now hauling 1848 Australia to your local depot.
• We missed Osprey’s release of their Heirs to Heresy: The Fall of the Knights Templar RPG a few weeks ago.  Looks pretty nifty.  Someone put it on our Christmas list, eh?
• Just when Cyrano thought that 12mm scale minis were a dead end, Warlord Games has released another ‘big box’ in their epic scale line during their “November Madness” sales.  Of course, it’s not the Prussians for Waterloo (they had to stop and ask for directions).  It’s a big American Civil War box for the epic scale Black Powder rules.

 

On Sale This Week:

• Easy Roller Dice Company has a Balck Friday sale that’s started early.  Use code FRIDAY30 to get 30% off everything, including their metal and gemstone dice.
• Paradox has Stellaris Aquatics on sale at 20% off and almost everything Stellaris is on some sort of sale right now.
• Battlefront (the computer game company, not the minis game company) has a Combat Mission modern series bundle that gets you Cold War, Shock Force 2, and Black Sea in one batch.
• Battlefront (the minis game company, not the computer game company) has a “Hit The Beach” box for their Flames of War game with a dozen or so vehicles, over 100 individual soldier minis, some terrain, regular and quick-start rules, and more.
• Surely you guys are tired of us making wisecracks about the prices on the games from The Knowledge Company, right?  No?  OK, fine.  Here’s a “Black Friday Special” that bundles 9 games together for a mere £999.  That same amount buys you 47 ASL Starter Kits.
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is Modern War #45, with The Dragon and the Hermit Kingdom on a hypothetical next Korean War, at 50% off.
• C3i Magazine has a sale for 25% off everything thin the WarGame Room with code BURMA plus all boxed games are 15% off with no codes needed
• LNLP sale with code GIFT2021

 

Newly Launched This Week:

• Against the Odds Magazine are now soliciting orders for #55, with Lee’s Greatest Victory as the game.
• Preorder for Yanks! second edition from MMP
• Ok, so the preorder for Fornaldar: Nordic Saga might’ve been up for a while at OSS and we just missed it, but it still looks pretty cool, and built on the well-loved old Albion game from that mid-80s Ares Magazine.

 

This Week With The Armchair Dragoons:

• The 2022 ACDC will be held 14-16 January, online as with all of our digital conventions.  Details coming soon, but we’ve got some exciting new companies & events getting involved.
• For some photo galleries on the conventions over Veterans’ Day weekend, we’ve got you covered!
• Saturday Night Fights got back around to their Project: Quatre Bras and the next article in the AAR series will be out soon.
• The Armchair Dragoons co-sponsored this past weekend’s MystaraCon, devoted to the old BECMI-era “Known World” and featuring a variety of luminaries that helped keep it all alive over these years.  Lots of panel videos at the link.
• Mentioned in Dispatches visited with the Dr’s Witcz about their Robotech Reconstruction game, which has some deep roots in counterinsurgency wargaming even though it’s built on a sci-fi franchise.
• This past Thursday was #UnboxingDay!
  • Twilight: 2000 by Free League
  • The Fall of the Third Reich by Compass Games
  • Assault 41: Red Horizon by Assault Games
  • The Day is Ours! The Battle of Princeton 1777 by Lock ‘n Load Publishing
  • Mystara 5e Player’s Guide
  • Autumn for Barbarossa by Multi-Man Publishing
  • Three times the action in Enemy Action: Ardennes – The Battle of the Bulge, 1944 (Compass Games, 2015)
  • 1995 by CSL
  • Normandy ’44 by GMT Games
  • Ayatollah you a story about 1979: Revolution in Iran by Dan Bullock from The Dietz Foundation
  • Car Wars by Steve Jackson Games
  • Brief Border Wars by Compass Games
• Other online games with the Armchair Dragoons
  • Wednesday Night Warfare cranked up The Battle of Altdorf for Shako 2
  • Jan from Let’s Play History ran and recorded his first shot at running a live Kriegsspiel!
  • The Chain of Command campaign on Thursday Night Throwdown is still rumbling along.

News From The Wargame Industry:

• In case you missed the big headline, John Tiller Software has been sold to Wargame Design Studio, who used to do a lot of scenarios & mods for JTS games.
• MMP’s Winter Offensive will be the same weekend as our next ACDC
• This week on Twitter, our favorite board game marketing manager – Danni Loe – is showing her “day in the life” again as she works thru her to-do list.
• Wayne took the time to offer his rebuttal to our looooooooooooooooong CSR wrap-up episode of Mentioned in Dispatches.

 

Something From Our Partners:

• RMN spends a long post on a detailed analysis of the newest Cepheus Deluxe RPG, and its Traveller DNA.
• Moe gave us the Designer Roundtable from Compass Games Expo
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about upcoming wargaming events, and he also released his Not-A-Rap-Video from Compass Expo

 

News From The 4X Gaming World:

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

• Just yesterday (Nov. 22), Paradox released the Aquatics species pack DLC for Stellaris, their space 4x/grand-strategy game (trailer); as usual, the DLC can be purchased on both Steam and GOG, as well as Paradox’s own storefront. In addition, the free 3.2 “Herbert” update dropped alongside the Aquatics pack (features trailer); it includes a raft of new features & improvements, along with a ton of bug-fixes (full patch notes here). Finally, Stellaris and most of its DLC is on sale this week, across the usual platforms.
• Also yesterday, Matrix/Slitherine released Adeptus Mechanicus, the latest DLC for Warhammer 40k: Gladius – Relics of War (trailer). It is available for purchase on the publisher’s storefront, in addition to Steam and GOG. The base game is also on sale this week, as is pretty much all of its previous DLC.
• Publisher Iceberg Interactive and developer Grey Wolf Entertainment has released Tech Supremacy, a new DLC for Pax Nova, Grey Wolf’s hybrid land-and-space 4x. Grey Wolf also released a free update alongside the new DLC, which focuses heavily on AI improvements in addition to the usual bug-fixing. On top of all that, the base game is on sale, as is the first DLC, Beyond the Rift.
• It’s something of a pleasant surprise, but developer Shining Pixel Studios has released an update for Oriental Empires, their excellent (and underrated) historical 4x game. The update is mostly focused on mod support, something that has long been requested. The list of changes are here, and the new modding guide can be found here.
• Amplitude Studios announced that there is now a demo available for Humankind, their Civ-style historical 4x (trailer). The demo can be downloaded via Windows, the Epic Games Store, and Steam.
• Publisher Hooded Horse announced that the release of Falling Frontier, the highly-anticipated space RTS being developed by Stutter Fox Studios, has been delayed until Q2 2022. As partial recompense, they released a new trailer detailing the game’s innovative search-and-rescue system.

 

The Professional & Practitioner Wargaming World:

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

• Cross-pollination!  US Army folks at the Command & General Staff College are using a Marine Corps game in the classroom.
• US Fight Club was chattering this week about the recent Defense One article about wargames that were run for US naval leadership. (Our buddy Aaron shared it, too)
• This week, GUWS has friend-of-the-Dragoons Dr Matt Kirschenbaum talking about Sand Tables: The Archaeology of a Platform and next week, they’ve got Designing and Playing the Information Warfighter Exercise (IWX) Wargame
• PaxSims is talking about the new KMAC-YOYO matrix game from Tim Price

 

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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