Your Professional Wargaming Reading List Just Exploded ~ #TuesdayNewsday 10/3/23

Our #TuesdayNewsday is your essential update for the week’s strategy gaming headlines, and a big list of articles in the professional realm for you to check out this week

It’s been 30 years since the Battle of Mogadishu that was memorialized in the book & movie Black Hawk Down.

 

 

It is fun to watch other content creators finally discovering other publishers (especially small press folks) that we’ve been talking about for a few years now.  Here’s hoping folks enjoy their new toys from Dark City Games, 2-1/2 years after we interviewed them at our June 2021 ACDC….

 

Fall Assembly countdown: 17 days to go!

You can still get signed up for the Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023.
You can find local hotels here.
We’ve got around 20 scheduled events, with plenty of empty table-space for pickup games in between.  We’ve got multi-session monster games, smaller 2-player shootouts, playtest/pre-release games, and learn-to-play classics.

You can read our event previews here

Current Confirmed Game Sessions NATO–Next War in Europe (w/ the designer!) Littoral Commander (USMC training game) It Never Snows (two-session rolling game) World at War ‘85 (w/ the designer!) Triumph & Tragedy & Bayonets & Tomahawks each day Brief Border Wars, This War Without An Enemy, Gunfight Royale, Oceans of Fire, Maneuver Warfare Card Game, Great Battles of American Civil War, Struggle for Zorn Open table gaming, In-store discounts, livestreams from the con Designers Hermann Luttmann, Bruce Maxwell, Keith Tracton …munchies, custom Armchair Dragoons swag, and other prizes & giveaways

Convention Details We’re almost two-thirds sold out Badges are $40 for the weekend We’re being hosted by The Gamer’s Armory, and they’re planning to open early on Sunday just for us, so we can get an additional game session or two in, before the general public gets in the doors Attendance is capped on this one because of the limited floorspace we’ve got inside the store and we want to make sure every player gets plenty of time on the tables. As noted on the convention site, we do not have a hotel attached to the facility. As a reminder, Regimental Patron-level Patreon supporters get a free badge for all Armchair Dragoons-hosted events.

 

Games released in the past week that you’ll want to check out

• Worthington started shipping their Waterloo Solitaire board game to pre-orders / backers, and it’s still available for $5 off if you hurry before they start shipping to everyone else
• NAC Wargames has The King In The North now for sale on their site¹
• Wargames Illustrated #430 is released
• Paper Wars #104, with Wolfe Tone Rebellion has started arriving for subscribers
• High Flying Dice released Galahad’s Ordeal, covering the 1944 Battle for Myitkyina in Burma
• Osprey are finally shipping A War Transformed, a skirmish wargame with an occult twist on WW1
• There’s a new, consolidated Across the Elle PDF of a bunch of scenarios for the Rapid Fire! WW2 rules
• Army-specific ‘gold’ blocks for Wizard Kings available now from Columbia Games
• Holy shit!  Cadet Games actually has “buy now” links on at least some of the game pages on their site!  Yes, we’re in shock, too

 

Crowdfunding, p500, pledge programs, whatevs yo! ~ if you can order it now & get it later, here it is

• Following the pre-order launch of their NATO Forces book, there’s a bunch of Team Yankee minis in that line now available for pre-order that will start releasing over the next 6-8 weeks or so
• Warlord Games has a WW2 French Infantry bundle that comes with a mix of headgear to allow you to outfit the troops for a variety of units
• The Gamefold table is now on Kickstarter – a folding table designed for gaming, with a raised edge to keep everything on the board
• Following up the original Tiny Library is the new Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy with a bunch of micro-RPGs from different creators all situated in variations of the present
• Pre-orders are up from Osprey for General Orders: World War II, yet another David Thompson² design; should be shipping by the end of the month
• Raiders of the Color Compass is a roll-&-write game with a sci-fi variant, a co-op variant, a multi-player variant, and more
• Last call for pre-orders for BCS Valley of Tears from MMP
• Avalanche Press’ recent newsletter makes it sound like the second edition of GWAS: Russo-Japanese War is ready to ship, but when you hit their site, it’s still listed as “coming soon” and “please allow an extra six weeks for delivery”

 

Here to help you save a few bucks, or, y’know… spend more than you were planning if it wasn’t for a good deal

• Kraken Dice launched their new storefront with 30% off pretty much everything with coupon code SHOPIFY at checkout (thru tomorrow), and that includes their finally-back-in-stock large messenger bags
• Fanatical has a “strategy sale” going on right now, and most Slitherine products are at least 50% off, and some up to 90% off
• North Africa ’41 is almost $20 off through Miniature Market right now
• Save $10 on Ardennes 2024 at Noble Knight right now
• Legion Wargames has a sale going on all of these, where you can take $15 off the current price (many already discounted!) with coupon code AGC15 at checkout
  • A Splendid Little War
  • Battle of Rosebud Creek
  • Blenheim, 1704
  • Decisive Victory: Soissons 1918
  • Fire on the Mountain
  • Heart of Darkness
  • Prairie Aflame
  • Redvers’ Reverse
  • Tanga 1914
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is Modern War #31 with Combat Veteran, a man-to-man game with scenarios in both Vietnam and Afghanistan

 

There’s always something going on with The Dragoons, so we’ve always got plenty to tell you about!

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Falklands (Sort of) for “Fletcher Pratt”
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 11 Ep 2 ~ Your Summer of Gaming
• Beta Preview of Beasts Of Steel, and a video interview, too
• Data Diving Into the Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey
• Going back through our Armchair Dragoons’ archives: Armchair Dragoons Reviews Pavlov’s House (Digital Version)
• Gameplay this week
  • Probe at La Cambe for “Chain of Command”
  • Peter played thru North German Plain ’85, scenario 1
• This week in our forums
  • Looking for some wargaming in the New Georgia Island campaign
  • Using DCS and some other tools for a narrative-driven multi-player wargame
  • Playtesting the new Hasty Attack! rules
  • Ranking the best music videos of all time
• 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 ~ 5 November and 3 December
  • Next #UnboxingDay³ will be 19 October – right before the Fall Assembly
  • Next virtual event is The 2024 ACDC, 12-14 January 2024
  • Next live event is The Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023, 20-22 October 2023, The Gamer’s Armory, Cary NC

 

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

• 1-8 October ASLOK (Cleveland, OH) <— RIGHT NOW!
• 5-8 October EssenSpiel (Essen, Germany)
• 12-15 October GMT Weekend at the Warehouse (Hanford CA)
• 19-22 October GameHoleCon (Madison WI)
• 20-22 October The Inaugural Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023 (Cary, NC)
• 27-29 October Carnage Royale (Dover VT)
• 3-5 November Rock-Con (Rockford IL)

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Our fellow content creators from the wargaming world

• If you’re interested in joining the DCS air-war campaign (mentioned above, from the ACD forums), there’s some more info on their site here
• Rocky talks about toy fairs
• Moe takes a look at Blade & Bow
• My Own Worst Enemy starts digging into Global War from White Dog Games
• Justegarde cracks into The Hunt
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about “your favorite wargames” as he skipped around different topics. Oh, and this happened:

 

Various news & notes from the business end of the gaming world

• Zenobia Award application window is open through 14 October
• A bunch of game manuals from WDS have been updated
• Man, as if we needed another Zack Snyder train-wreck in the world, here comes a game-related one, as Evil Genius Games heads to court against Netflix over the cancellation of their Rebel Moon game that’s tied into Snyder’s show on the streaming service; the cancellation seems to revolve around graphics shown at GAMA Expo, where the Evil Genius booth apparently included a couple of Netflix employees
• If you can afford to send out 4 email newsletters / week, with at least 60% overlap in content between each of them, then your company should be able to reliably release at least 1 new product / month without bombarding everyone with 18 months of repetitive “pre-order the exact same game” over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
• Renegade scooped up Risk 2210, Risk Godstorm, and Nexus Ops under license from Hasbro; where they sit in the production queue in relation to Squad Leader remains to be seen

 

 

Hey, we’d LOVE to have some more action in the dedicated area of our forums for the wargame practitioners.

• An excellent attempt at providing a stats-driven analysis of implementing tabletop wargaming at the company level and assessing the results; it’ll need a more thorough read-thru to see exactly what they measured and how, but someone is finally attempting to quantify training effects of wargames in units
• You Need to Play Wargames from the Summer 2023 issue of Amor Magazine
• Making the rounds on social media lately is this article from The Guardian about a journalist who attended a professional wargame about a near-future Russian attack on Finland
• A comparison of 6 wargames on the Battle of Hue
• Wargaming Waterloo from MCU Press is now available, for free
• Calling for tech support….  from the enemy
• Are we training for the right kind of future war?
• The next GUWS webinar is TONIGHT, with Luke Hughes discussing Cardboard Meets Bits, Designing a WWII Tactical Leadership cRPG (including the long-discussed-but-yet-to-materialize Burden of Command), and on 10/30 you can tune into Accelerating Organizational Change Through Games
• PaxSims shares an academic article from wargamer/professor Matt Kirschenbaum about Sand Tables thru history
• From our Connections Online livestream archive

 

Something neat from outside the wargaming world we thought was worth sharing

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE OF ART (@artistsuniversum)

 

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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Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
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Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

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In a world of wargaming so grand,
Tuesdays, news spreads ‘cross the land,
Updates each week,
For battles we seek,
On the tabletops, forces will stand!

1. and no, it’s not a Game of Thrones reference
2. or one of this clones
3. 3rd Thursday of the month