Ardwulf’s Lair Hits 15 Years – #TuesdayNewsday 10/11/22

Each week, #TuesdayNewsday’s trip around the strategy gaming headlines keeps you current on what matters

Yes, Gary’s channel has now hit puberty.  Doesn’t mean it’s growing up or maturing or any of that, because, well…  🤷🏼‍♂️
But hey, it’s an awesome milestone and we’re thrilled to count Ardwulf as a Friend of the Dragoons™ and he deserves all those plaudits for building a great channel over all these years.

Congrats to Ardwulf!

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THIS WEEK’S OTHER HEADLINE

Registration is open for the Connections Online Showcase

October 19th will be a one-day, all-day Connections Online project showcase for professional/practitioner game design.  Each presentation will run 90-120 minutes and focus on a single use case of a game designed or adapted to professional military/natsec usage, including deep dives into the objectives/purposes, designs, mechanics, execution, and lessons learned from both the prep and conduct of the games.

Details This event is currently projected to run over 12 hours, as it’ll all be single-threaded (ie, no sessions overlapping with each other) Registration is open! Sessions will be broadcast through YouTube live for registered participants to interact with the presenters Sessions will be made public for viewing after the completion of the showcase and an editorial review by the staff

Confirmed Presentations Brian Train’s urban Kriegspiel for the 40th ID Urban Warfare Planners’ Course GUWS member Matt Kirchman on A Splendid Failure(Reconstruction in post-ACW US) GUWS member Andrew Olson on the Competition AI wargame design SAMS Student Dan Warner on Decisive Operations and incorporating that into the curriculum there SAMS instructor Eric Price on integrating ROOT into professional military curricula UKFC’s Take That Hill Roger Mason and wargaming active shooter responses

• Ares Games started shipping the 2nd edition of the War of the Ring game, and there are a couple of expansions and accessories they’re releasing this month, too
• These guys know that their target audience has this kind of money to spend, and many of them will happily drop $100 to have minis of the critters they grew up facing down in the adventures of their youth
• Steve Jackson Games is getting into the spirit of the season early with the just-released 12 Dice of Christmas
• Tiny Battle Publishing are shipping Hill of Death
• Warlord’s got some new minis this week, with an “army muster” box of Hanoverian line infantry, and a British 5.5 gun with crew dressed up as horse artillery, for the Peninsular campaign, and for Waterloo, all for their Black Powder rules
• The Anthems of War fantasy minis game released today, and you can get both a physical copy or a PDF
• Free League released a new edition of Into The Odd, an RPG with not a lot of rules, and a whole lot of weird (a ‘magnet’ for bones?)

 

• MMP did us a solid.  Seriously.  They announced their latest pre-order on Monday!  We love them for this.  Everyone go order GTS Briefings Vol 1, even if you don’t like GTS, just as a ‘thank you’ for MMP not announcing the pre-order on Tuesday afternoon
• Free League has the first T2K expansion, Urban Operations, on pre-order; if you plunk down your shekels, you get instant access to the PDFs, too
• Compass Games has their upcoming Sniper Kill Confirmed on Kickstarter for last-minute pre-orders
• Last week’s “announce it right after #TuesdayNewsday releases” award went to Rising Waters, which is now on Kickstarter
• Flames of War has added to their upcoming Bulge: British line we told you about last week, with both unit cards and command cards up for pre-order
• The re-launch of Kingmaker is still on Kickstarter for a few days
• You can pre-order the latest ASL scenario pack from Lone Canuck Publishing, Großdeutschland Pack #3 High TIde at Kursk from Gamer’s Armory
• Haithabu Tribes of the North isn’t the most evocative name, but it’s a realm-building 4X-ish card game in a medieval northern Europe with some cool-looking minis and some music files that all seem to have no bearing on gameplay

 

• Matrix Games has a big sale on pretty much everything going right now, for their Home of the Wargamers week
• Skeletons are on sale at Alternative Armies
• Humble Bundle has a big “Valor and Victory” sale this week that has nothing to do with the Matrix game of the same title.  This one’s all about their wargames, with titles like Day of Infamy, and Holdfast: Nations at War, and WWI: Verdun and Tannenberg plus a bunch of Tom Clancy, Age of Empires, and Men of War series and more, all between 30%-80% off
• Steam’s got the “Empire 2027” games: Latin America, Asia, and Europe all at 25% off

 

• Connections Online Showcase Registration Open
• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Chickamauga (part 2) for “Altar of Freedom”
• War Thunder: Armoured Warfare and Japanese Tanks
• This week’s classic article, wrapping up our History of Wargaming series with Charles Grant
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 9 Ep 5 ~ Connections Online Showcase 2022 (plus Tolstoi’s excellent companion wrap-up)
• This week in our forums
  • Let’s talk about Line of Sight
  • Comparing Horse & Musket battles to historical records
  • Cheating at chess?
• Upcoming Dragoons Events (and don’t forget to check the event calendar for everything else)
  • Next #UnboxingDay is 20 October, and we’re already stacking up some neat games to show you
  • Next Virtual Convention is The ACDC in January
    Registration is open for next week’s one-day (19th) showcase of professional wargaming projects under the Connections Online banner
  • Next Real-World Convention is definitely ForJeffCon (The Last MACE) in November as we’ve got our events submitted now

 

• “An Encounter at La Valtru” (part 2) for “Chain of Command”
• “The Battle of St. George” for “Field of Glory 2: Medieval”
• Hethwill is setting up his First Triarch Wars

 

• Siege of Vicksburg is this weekend, in (get this…) Vicksburg
• So is GMT’s Weekend at the Warehouse, out in the middle of f’n’ nowhere
• GameHoleCon is next weekend up in Madison, WI
• BGG’er Eddy has a nice photo report from Essen that focuses on the wargames he found there

 

Ooof…

• Rocky digs into T2K
• Moe is back off his wanderings and sharing a look at Point Blank: V is for Victory
• Gimpy Gamer takes a look at the Kickstarter for Incountry – a campaign we somehow managed to miss altogether
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about the best of the Bulge games

 

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

• Releasing today is Ozymandias, a “fast-paced 4x Bronze Age Sim”.  (You can watch the trailer here.)  Developed by The Secret Games Company, Ozymandias appears to be exactly to as described in the tagline: a light, easy-to-play 4x designed to allow players to conquer the Bronze Age world in a single session.
• After seven (eight?) years in development, developer Rhombus Studios and publisher Iceberg Interactive have finally launched Lord of Rigel onto Steam Early Access.  (You can watch the trailer here.)  While the game is a bit rough in its current form, we’re definitely intrigued by its premise, which is that of a younger race taking its first steps into a galaxy divided between — and dominated by — two Elder races.  (Goodness no, that doesn’t remind me of anything, Mr. Straczynski!  I can’t imagine why you’d ask…)
• Old World, the Antiquities-era historical 4x from Mohawk Games, received another patch this past week (link).  A few of the more notable changes in this update are AI and performance improvements, rebalance work to Ambitions, and units will now enjoy greater movement benefits when inside allied territory.
• Perhaps the most interesting news from this past week is the release of a major new patch (version 1.5) for Emperor of the Fading Suns — a game that came out back in 1997.  (For context, that’s a good 25 years ago at the time of this news release!)  Assembled and tested by the original developers themselves (Holistic Design), this new patch adds improvements to nearly all aspects of the game, including an enhanced map editor, improved modding capabilities, streamlined interface elements, and enhancing the role of religious sects — to name but a few.  (You can read the full changelog here, while a video tutorial of the new patch featuring the developers can be viewed here.)  Given the near-cult status EotFS enjoys among some folks, this new patch has definitely caused a certain amount of excitement.

 

• Some interesting thoughts on Kickstarters and crowdfunding and “fake” funding goals from an industry insider
• GMT’s got a charging & shipping update that basically says it’s all going to get shipped in the next 2 weeks
• There are shenanigans afoot, as Renegade has a cut a licensing deal with Hasbro for new editions of Axis & Allies and RoboRally and Diplomacy, and….  Squad Leader?  The social media replies from Renegade pretty much confirm they’re doing something with Squad Leader, too and that it wasn’t just a casual throw-in name

 

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

• Michael Peck dives into Compass Games’ re-release of Third World War to try and provide the public with some context around Russian performance today vs (expected) Soviet performance back in the 80s
• War on the Rocks recently published an article that takes issue with some of the ‘popularized’ wargames around Taiwan that made media waves a few months back; the article focuses on the mismatches available between US bombers, and the Chinese navy
• The next GUWS webinar is Back to the Future: The 1980s Global War Games as a Campaign of Learning on the 27th
• Logistics matter, and for the Russians, it’s getting tougher
• PaxSims has an announcement from Concordia University about a lecture series with game designers talking about wargame design on conflicts with both Ukraine and Taiwan.  While they’re missing Mitchell Land (of Next War fame) the rest of the line-up….  hoo-boy did they bring out the big guns: Chadwick, Prados, Herman, Miranda, Isby, and Kamps.  Wow.

 

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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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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