Your Local Gaming Group ~ #TuesdayNewsday 1/17/23

Here’s our new-look #TuesdayNewsday look at the strategy gaming headlines of the week

So we “sponsor” / host the Triangle Wargame Day at the always-awesome Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC (just outside Raleigh, NC) and have been slowly growing that crowd to where we’ve about over a dozen different wargamers all show up for multiple events.  It’s a Sunday afternoon of wargaming and community-building amongst the local wargaming crowd, and is slowly gaining some momentum.  It helps to have a fantastic partner like Gamer’s Armory as a host.

So, Dragoons – what’s your local gaming group?  And if you don’t have one, why haven’t you started one yet?

Drop us a line in our forums, or in the comments down below¹, and tell us about your local gaming group so we can help spread the word and find you some new gamers to join the fun.  We’ll collect the replies / suggestions and publish them all together in a few weeks.  Let’s start building your local wargaming community and get some dice on the tables!

Plus, we’re happy to offer some support to your local group with some signs, graphics, flyers, etc, to help you get the word out, as long as you don’t mind our Dragoon on it! 🤠

 

The ACDC is now behind us, and the AAR will be coming later this week.  In the meantime, we’re now looking forward to Buckeye Game Fest in April and Origins in June, so come see us at either of those and join us for some in-person wargaming fun.

 

What’s shipped this past week that you’ll find interesting

• MMP has published the Bonus Pack from this weekend’s Winter Offensive; proceeds from the sales are being donated to the WWII Foundation
• Compass Games started shipping Sniper Kill Confirmed and you can still grab it at pre-order pricing
• C3i Magazine #36, with Trevor Bender’s Desert Victory, has been spotted in the wild
• S&T Press are mailing out S&T #339, with Saddam Moves South in it (a 1990 scenario)
• Modiphius started shipping their Skyrim board game, and yeah… it’s expensive²
• Avalanche Press got Panzer Grenadier: Road to Dunkirk up on their store and if it was there before, we missed it
• Warlord Games has a few new WW2 North Africa minis
  • Kubelwagen
  • Kettenkrad³
  • 8th Army mortar team
  • Camel train.  Yes, camels.
• Based on GMT’s last shipping/charging update, both Banish the Snakes and Inferno : Guelphs and Ghibellines Vie for Tuscany, 1259-1261 should start shipping this week, and are still on their site at the p500 price
• As Paul gently nudged us on social media, we got one of HFD’s new releases last week, but missed A Sea of Fog and Fire
• The long-awaited final drop from the Team Yankee Red Dawn series is finally here!
  • Pickup Trucks
  • BTR-D Platoon
  • 2S9 Nona-S SP Gun-Mortar Battery
  • ASU-85 Assault Gun Company
  • and the “Wolverines” Armed Militia

 

Crowdfunding or pre-orders ~ if you can order it now, here it is

• Revolution Games just opened up pre-orders on Stalingrad: Advance to the Volga, 1942
• Panzer Dice 3: In Africa is a roll-&-write series of print-&-play minigames on WW2 in North Africa; it’s dirt-cheap and well past the funding goal and you’ve got 2 weeks to jump on board
• This one is actually about to close – the Munchkin polyhedrals from Steve Jackson Games are in their dice store on BackerKit and include different promo cards for each color dice set
• Gamer’s Armory has GTS Briefings Vol 1 on pre-order and due in about 2 weeks or so; it’s a magazine with an included small GTS series game
• It’s unlikely that SimRidge will hit its insanely-lofty $600k funding goal, especially for a title no one has ever heard of.  But the graphics for this WW2 RTS look really nice, and maybe they scale back the ambition a bit to get something out the door with their game engine and then shoot for the stars with a bigger release
• Realms Of Elghrune Box Set on Kickstarter is a graphics-heavy and very nice-looking RPG set that’s almost doubled its funding goal with 3 weeks to go
• The Last Doge looks like what Cyrano likes to refer to as “components porn” but the gameplay looks like a cross between the Forbidden Island series of games with a bit of The Adventurers treasure-hunting in there, too

 

Save a few bucks with these deals

• Miniature Market has Undaunted: Stalingrad at the stupid-low price of $84
• Humble Bundle has Isonzo: Collector’s Edition at $60, so you can get the game plus DLCs in one go
• Rising Front is a WW1 FPS that’s on sale through Steam at 10% off during early access
• Worthington Games are still trying to clear out some space in their warehouse, and games like Philadelphia 1777 and Stalingrad Beseiged are over 50% off
• Noble Knight has a couple of games from The Historical Game Company on a slight sale: Siege of Queretaro and 55 Days at Peking
• Shadow Empire on sale at GOG for $24; lots of chatter about it in our forums
• Knights’ War, a medieval skirmish set for minis, is free over on Wargame Vault

 

What’s happened with the Dragoons this past week

• Saturday Night Fights ~ “Barthheart’s Corner OVERDRIVE” for “What a Tanker!”
• ACDC 2023 Video Archive
• Gameplay this week
  • “Bathheart’s Corner OVERDRIVE” for “What a Tanker!”
  • Operation: MARKET-GARDEN for “Memoir ’44” OVERLORD
  • The THIRD Probe into Bas de Mouen.
  • The Battle of Talavera for “Valour and Fortitude”
• This week in our forums
  • The Battle of Pea Ridge
  • Still talking Napoleonic Games
  • Land & Freedom (upcoming Spanish Civil War game from Blue Panther)
  • Kaleidoscope on Netflix
  • What are you reading these days?
• Upcoming Dragoons Events (and don’t forget to check the event calendar for everything else)
  • Wargame Days at The Gamer’s Armory in Cary, NC ~ February 5th (and already talk of Atlantic Chase) and March 5th
  • Next #UnboxingDay⁴ will be this week!
  • Now that The ACDC is behind us, the next virtual event is Connections Online, 18-20 April
  • Next Real-World Convention is going to be Buckeye Game Fest, in Columbus OH, 28-30 April (with the War Room opening up on 24 April for extended wargaming)

 

Don’t forget to check our consolidated event & convention calendar for more!
You can also submit your own events for our calendar here.

• 27-29 January CascadeCon (Bellingham, WA)
• 8-12 February GameON! (Seattle, WA) which includes WW3Fest and a lot of support from Lock ‘n Load Publishing
• 17-26 February Winterfest (Sandusky, OH)
• 17-20 February DunDraCon 46 (Santa Clara, CA)
• 20-26 February Prezcon (Charlottesville, VA)

 

Other great content creators from the wargaming world

• Rocky weighs in on the OGL and D&D
• Moe is live tonight with a Whiskey Charlie show
• Gimpy Gamer digs into Southern Storm
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about The Best of Avalon Hill, part 3

 

News & notes from the business end of the gaming world

• There’s been a lot of public discussion about the OGL for the last few weeks, but here’s a well-supported and copiously-linked article from Cory Doctorow that was also making the rounds as a Twitter thread. Spoiler alert: the OGL probably made your behavior more restricted than simply ignoring it would’ve.
• Paizo’s response to Wizards is actually pretty damned hilarious:
  We believe that any interpretation that the OGL 1.0 or 1.0(a) were intended to be revocable or able to be deauthorized is incorrect, and with good reason.
  We were there.
  Paizo owner Lisa Stevens and Paizo president Jim Butler were leaders on the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards at the time. Brian Lewis, co-founder of Azora Law, the intellectual property law firm that Paizo uses, was the attorney at Wizards who came up with the legal framework for the OGL itself.
  It is unlikely that there’s anyone left at WotC/bro who has any comparable “decision-maker” experience to those folks
• A great article from Kevin from Fort Circle Games about the financials involved in producing & selling their Shores of Tripoli game
• This week, Avalanche Press has a fun article the history of the Austrian Motorgeschütz and how was deemed unsuitable to military service because it spooked the horses
• As a part of the OGL fallout, many publishers are looking at alternatives for the RPG/adventure gaming world, and Modiphius has guidelines for the 2d20 system on their site now. Why is Modiphius a big deal?  They’ve got a bunch of licensed IPs that you can noodle around with.
• Free League has their own licenses out there for an OGL, for both the Year Zero Engine, and the Dragonbane RPG rules
• Mantic Games has announced a player-engagement program called the “pathfinder” program, which has absolutely jack-all to do with the hugely popular RPG of the same name, which makes you wonder what the heck they were thinking
• Here’s Danni giving another step-by-step walkthru of one of her many jobs as a marketing manager in the boardgame world

• Excellent read here from Cole Wehrle

 

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

• Navy Sea Systems Command hosted some wargaming on innovation & improvisation
• If the Russians are fighting a land war in Ukraine, why are they worried about their non-functioning aircraft carrier
• The next GUWS webinar is January 24, with Players and Users: Wargaming as a User Experience (UX) Design Problem, followed on February 21 with The Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military
• The Brits are watching Ukraine with some concerns; they’re also sending a bunch of armo(u)red vehicles to allow the Ukrainians to shift to more offensive operations
• Call for Papers for Connections US 2023 is out there now

 

Something neat from outside the wargaming world we wanted to share with you

 

 

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.
You can also find the regiment on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and occasionally at a convention near you.

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