Way More New Releases & Pre-Orders Than We Were Expecting ~ #TuesdayNewsday 3/28/23

Here’s our gotta-have-it #TuesdayNewsday look at the strategy gaming headlines of the week

There’s a great thread on Twitter with folks showing photos of their trips to battlefields.  It’s not directly related to wargaming, but c’mon, these are all pretty neat

 

 

We had a dust-up in our forums, and are dealing with some personal fallout as a result.  It’s all just a reminder of why we enforce our particular set of rules the way we do, as it works for us.  It’s not the only way to run a forum, but it’s the way we prefer, and it’s worked pretty well for several years now.

 

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

Man, we started this week thinking there wouldn’t be a ton of new releases, and boy were we wrong….

• VUCA Sims are now shipping Traces of War, which explores that hugely under-served niche of the WW2 Eastern front, albeit with a Japanese designer and their usual excellent components
• Against The Odds Magazine looks like they’re now shipping issue 58, with Clash of Carriers (Battle of the Philippine Sea) in it
• Bonaparte Overruns Piedmont appears to be shipping now from OSG
• Wargames Illustrated #424 (April ’23) is now available
• Strategemata released Albuera 1811: Beresford vs. Soult and you can probably get what it’s about
• Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy is now available from S&M, both direct from Matrix Games, and thru Steam
• Osprey seems to have subsumed by Bloomsbury, at least online, but they’ve managed to get Stargrave: Side Hustle out the door for when you need some short diversions for your sci-fi games
• It might not be officially released, but Campaign: Fall Blau from Catastrophe Games is starting to show up on game tables, like Rocky’s (see below)
• Rapid Fire! have their Crete scenario book available now
• Second edition of 878 – Vikings, Invasions of England can found at Noble Knight, in case you hadn’t seen it before
• Guadalcanal: The Battle for Henderson Field, 1942-1943 is a new game-only release from the guys at War Diary Magazine

 

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

We also weren’t expecting a ton in the crowdfunding realm, and we were wrong again!¹

• Heroes of the Pacific : Battle of Guadalcanal is the latest in the “Heroes” series from Devil Pig Games that is totally separate from the Lock ‘n Load Tactical series that also has “Heroes” in all the titles
• Compass Games’ latest last-minute pre-orders-on-Kickstarter project is 2040: An American Insurgency
• Choose Cthulhu – a choose-your-own-madness set of books form Steve Jackson, are on Kickstarter now
• On the heels of the recent Berlin Soviet line from Flames of War comes the new Berlin German line, covering late-war forces there; the hardback is up for pre-order, with more coming soon
• The 800lb gorilla in the Kickstarter zoo is BattleTech: Mercenaries, that’s at $4.5m and counting, largely b/c Catalyst does excellent products, and BattleTech as a franchise just prints money
• Now that ATO +58 is out, pre-orders have started for #59, with Blind Faith – The Hussite Wars 1419-1434, and it feels like the “t” is “Hussite” is really, really important
• Gamelyn Games got the license for The Last Kingdom TV show and now has the official board game on Kickstarter
• By Fire and Sword 2nd Edition is up on Kickstarter, with a starter box that includes some Eastern European armies you might not know much about
• Arnhem Heroes are a bunch of custom sculpts – NOT STL FILES! – that you can pick up on Kickstarter, and some of these figures look like they’re straight out of A Bridge Too Far
• Flashpoint: Hostile Frontier is a sci-fi dogfighting game that’s on Kickstarter, but seems to be trying to sneak its way to success
• 1630 – The Thirty Year’s War, is an RTS, whose audience that actually knows something about the topic is probably all old enough that they have no desire to play an RTS, but what the heck, maybe they’ll get there anyway
• GMT’s monthly update includes the following new p500s
  • 1848: The Springtime of Nations
  • Men of Iron Tri-Pack, 2nd Printing
  • The Guerrilla Generation

 

Save a few bucks with these deals

• Shadow Empire is currently on sale at Green Man Gaming for $17.59 USD
• Warlord Games’ March sale has a few days left, with 25% off the Beyond the Gates of Antares and Cruel Seas lines, and 15% off Konflikt ’47 among others
• Modiphius Games has got to be close to done moving their warehouse, so you better hurry up to take advantage of their shipping sale of 20% off their physical copies
• Alternative Armies’ “Spring Mega Event 2023” is going on now, and the savings start at 20% off everything and go up from there
• There’s a Tactical Assault VR game on sale on Steam, so you can play a shooter with the funky face-goggles on
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is S&T #315 with Red Tide South, about a Soviet invasion of Italy in the 80s

 

What’s happened with the Dragoons this past week

• Saturday Night Fights ~ “A Patrol to Ap Bac” for “Charlie Company”
• First Impressions of Nuclear War Simulator by Matrix Games
• The Giant Civ 6 AAR: Nubia, Part Nine
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 10 Ep 7 ~ Wargaming China
• Gameplay this week
  • “Fireball Forward” First Live Stumblethrough
  • The Battle of Teugn-Hausen for “Valour and Fortitude”
• This week in our forums
  • Workers & Resources Soviet Republic?  As a game?  Uh, OK
  • Trying to get excited about Distant Worlds 2
  • More chatter about Age of Wonders 4
• 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 ~April 2nd (this week!) and May 7th
  • Next #UnboxingDay² will be 20 April, right in the middle of Connections Online
  • Next Virtual Convention is The ACDC on 13-15 January
  • 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.

• 31 March – 3 April, Circle DC (Washington, DC)
• 31 March – 2 April GMT East (Mount Kisko, NY)
• 17-24 April Connections Online
• 24-30 April Buckeye Game Fest (incl The War Room) (Columbus, OH)
• 18-22 May Compass Expo Spring ’23 (Meriden, CT)
• 27-29 May KublaCon (San Francisco, CA)
• 21-25 June ORIGINS (Columbus, OH)
• 23-25 June WarGamesCon (Austin, TX)
• 19-23 July Historicon (Lancaster, PA)

And within a week or so, we’ll have that special event announcement for the weekend of 20-22 October, so start looking for hotels in the Raleigh/Cary NC area…

The Connections Online executive committee is pleased to announce the theme of this year’s Connections Online conference: “The Enemy Gets a Vote — Playing Red.” We’ll look at playing Red in wargaming, as well as what various professional communities mean by the term “red teaming.” (Hint: The definitions overlap, more or less, but terms frequently has discipline-specific connotations that may not be entirely obvious.)

The Core of the conference will run from 18-20 April 2023, with events scheduled from 1000-1600 EDT. Extended events (including both games and workshops) will run from the weekend before to the weekend after. Core events will be accessed through YouTube; registration information will be forthcoming. Previous conferences are accessible through YouTube (2022 and 2021).

Among the 12 planned core events we will have: What Is Red-Teaming, Red-Teaming Acts of God, Advice for New Practitioners, Gaming & Red-Teaming the Pandemic, and the guys from The NSDM
Extended events will include the Wargame Bootcamp to learn to use Discord, VASSAL, and TTS; a Littoral Commander demo; a discussion of the state-of-the-art of the hobby wargaming space; and a multi-player Discord-driven Kriegsspiel with the International Kriegsspiel Society

 

Other great content creators from the wargaming world

• Rocky takes the new Campaign: Fall Blau from Catastrophe Games for a spin, and has a bad day….
• Gimpy Gamer’s got a look at Fighters of the Pacific and yes, BBMike is now jealous
• My Own Worst Enemy shows you how to sticker the blocks
• Hotlead was held last week up in Canada, and Mad Padre got a bunch of video
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about the best of Richard Berg

 

 

News & notes from the business end of the gaming world

• This week, Avalanche Press has a neat article about the Bavarians as a standalone force at Verdun
• Assault Games continue to share preview images of their upcoming Sicily game
• Hey look, Ares Games, if you could stop pushing back the release date on We Are Coming, Nineveh! that’d be great! kthxbai!
• GMT’s March monthly update is out, and we’re not renaming as the “Arm Chair Dragoons” but we do appreciate the shoutout for Origins

 

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

• Ukrainian paratroopers getting ready for a Spring offensive? And what about using the 1st GTA’s own T80s against them?
• IWP Students Wargame High-Intensity Combat in the Indo-Pacific Theater
• The next GUWS webinar is Flux Capacity: Interactive Sims for Decision-making in Complex Environments on April 4th
• Job listings
• PaxSims takes a spin thru the latest issue of the Simulation & Gaming academic journal

 

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

What does a Rubik’s Cube have to do with codebreaking?

 

 

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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