OK, We’re Done With Origins (For Now) – #TuesdayNewsday 6/14/22

This week, #TuesdayNewsday is giving all the vital links to the Origins coverage, and the rest of the wargaming headlines that happened while we were there

Look, after this week you won’t have to hear about Origins again for a while, but we enjoyed the hell out of it, and we’d love to have as many of y’all as possible come join us next year for a great 5 days of wargaming, game shopping, camaraderie, and hilarity¹.

Our overall fill rates were great, and we had walk-up players for at least half of our games, include (amazingly) several of the big Europa sessions.  The players had a lot of fun, the GMs enjoyed themselves, and our crew was very happy with the Wargame HQ this year.

Oh, and here are our raffle winners this year – thanks to GMT Games, the Aegis Counter Trays folks, High Flying Dice, and Leder Games, along with the Dragoons who pitched in personal prizes for the raffle, too.

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That said, there’s also plenty of other news this week!

• Compass Games has Enemy Action: Kharkov out the door, and you can still grab it at the pre-order price
• VUCA Sims released Donnerschlag – Escape from Stalingrad this week
• Avalanche Press dropped 2 new things this week
  • Tank Battle at Raseiniai June 1941 is a set of linked scenarios to follow the action in Lithuania in ’41, as an expansion to Fire in the Steppe
  • Infantry Attacks: Black Mountain is another of the ever-growing “Gold Club exclusives” and since the entire point of this game is that it’s a smaller entry point into the new Infantry Attacks series, why wouldn’t you sell it to people that aren’t already your hardcore customers?
• Attack at Dawn: North Africa is finally out on Steam, and also 15% off right now
• Canvas Temple has a new line of 3D printed terrain for sale, scaled for sci-fi skirmish games, and it’s all being run by the kids, rather than by Jon
• High Flying Dice released Battle’s Shadow this week, about Ft Donelson (1862)
• There’s a new German Kampfgruppe starter kit for the Flames of War Bulge line
• On the RPG front, Free League has released the 5E book for their Ruin of Symbaroum setting
• Ares Games should now have English-language copies of This War Without An Enemy for distribution, but you might need to order thru your FLGS; ditto for FITNA: Global War in the Middle East
• We track about 40-45 different publishers for Tuesday Newsday, but when there’s no movement on your page for over 18 months, we might drop you from rotation.  Such was the fate of The Historical Game Company².  However, at Origins this week, Blue Panther had a full rack of their games that’ve all just recently (finally!) come out and are available through Steve’s store and they all include canvas maps
  • Attack on Cahokia
  • Battle of Baton Rouge
  • Battle of Leuthen
  • Battle of Pensacola
  • Battle of Poltava
  • Battle of Quebec 1759
  • Battle of Saint Louis
  • Battle of Saratoga
  • Battle of Yorktown
• Kaiserkrieg!, the newest from White Dog Games, was also at Origins, and was a chance to see it for the first time, too

• The Gamer’s Armory has a sale on a bunch of new arrivals, and you can get Churchill and Barbarians at the Gates, among others, at 20% off
• VentoNuovo has an “Everything Orange Swan bundle” on sale right now for €250 that includes all the Kickstarter bonuses
• Miniature Market has SHAEF on sale; it’s a 2-player game from the guys that did Quartermaster General
• Heroes of Normandie: Big Red Edition is on sale at Noble Knight Games
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is Modern War #27, with both Kaliningrad and Mosul in it

• A&A Arnhem ’44 is now on Kickstarter, although we’re a little curious how Cadet Games got permission to use the “A&A” branding
• Warlord Games has pre-orders for their Black Powder Epic Battles: The Hundred Days Campaign Supplement and the book appears to be a standard size, and not some weird in-between scale
• TS Wargames has Orsza 1514 on pre-order
• There’s a Kickstarter campaign trying to revive the old Grenadier minis “Fantasy Lords” product line, with many of the original sculpts
• Fellowship of Sims has their Wars of Religion game on Gamefound
• There’s a giant Horus Heresy Age of Darkness starter box on pre-order from GW, with a giant price tag attached
• Til Death Do Us Part is a solo adventure for The Fantasy Trip on Kickstarter right now
• You can still get a late pledge in on the ONUS! Traianus game from Draco
• You can pre-order From The Cellar #12, full of ASL scenarios, from The Gamer’s Armory
• Ever heard of the World War 2 Frontline Action? Us either. Somehow it comes up in a “wargame” search on Kickstarter… Reading the campaign, it sounds like “World War 2 Trivial Pursuit” with extra steps, and the only image in the campaign is a stock photo of Monopoly. But I guess back it if you want to

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Quatre Bras for “Lasalle 2”
• Origins coverage
  • Origins 2022 ~ A Report From The Show
  • Origins 2022 ~ The Vendor Hall
  • Origins 2022 ~ Gameplay!
  • Origins 2022 ~ The Rest of Origins
• My Own Worst Enemy was at Origins with us!  And he wrapped it up in his own video
• Upcoming Dragoons Events
  • Next #UnboxingDay is this week!
  • Next Virtual Convention that’s confirmed is still The ACDC in January
  • Next Real-World Convention is probably ForJeffCon, the Last MACE, in November

• The Big CoC Punch (from Wunsche) for “Chain of Command” (part 3)
• Hethwill is recruiting for some players for A Sprinkling of Nobility
• Here’s the wrapup of Europa at Origins
• Coming soon to a TTS near you!

• Matrix Games has a new Valor & Victory tournament coming up, focused on Normandy
• Shuffling executive at Paizo
• GMT gave us a shipping / charging update

• This week in our forums
  • Digging into Fields of Fire
  • We’re already talking about Origins 2023
  • Rome II is still getting a lot of chatter
  • Tolstoi is doing his usual “lots of detail deep dives” but this time on OCS
• A thread on BGG about discovering block games
• This is a fascinating story from Amabel at Hollandspiele, over on Twitter; click thru to read it all

• Rocky is still expanding your library, and trying to figure out if The Mission is a wargame
• Moe looks inside Compass Games’ Fulda Gap
• Wayne had a chat about wargame components
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream wrapped up Origins

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

• Publisher Sega and developer Amplitude Studios released the Cultures of Latin America Pack (watch the trailer here) for Humankind, their Civilization-style historical 4x.  Also dropping alongside the DLC is the massive “Bolivar” update, which brings a ton of changes, improvements, and bug-fixes to the base game (read the full patch notes here).
• Paradox Interactive announced By Blood Alone (trailer), a new DLC for Hearts of Iron IV, their grand-strategy title centered around World War II.  Paradox also just released the 1.11.12 “Bararossa” patch, which focuses on rebalancing tanks and adding bug-fixes.
• Arcen Games just released a huge new update (version 5.017) for AI War 2, their brilliant asymmetric space RTS/4x.  The number of changes & improvements in this update is honestly pretty enormous; you can read the full patch notes here.
• Publisher Gearbox and developer Blackbird Interactive have pushed back the release of Homeworld 3 to 2023 (news link).  While it means that players will have to wait a while longer to get their hands on the game, Blackbird also said they will be showing off Homeworld 3 at Gamescom, which is slated to run August 24-28.
• Publisher Hooded Horse and developer Pavonis Interactive have delayed slightly the release of Terra Invicta, their alien-invasion 4x/grand-strategy title, to later this year (trailer).  There will, however, be a public demo of the game available this week (June 13-20) during Steam Next Fest.
• Publisher THQ Nordic has announced Spellforce: Conquest of Eo, a spinoff game in their fantasy-strategy series (trailer).  Unlike previous Spellforce titles, Conquest of Eo will be turn-based, with a greater emphasis on grand-strategy over base-building.
• During this year’s Xbox & Bethesda Showcase, Microsoft announced Ara: History Untold, a historical 4x/grand-strategy game (trailer).  Ara is being made by Oxide Games, the developers behind the masssive-scale RTS Ashes of the Singularity, and a number of whom have previous experience working on the Civilization franchise.  The game is initially set to launch on the Xbox, although it appears it will eventually be available on the PC as well.
• Arcen Games, developer of the AI War series of games, has signed on with publisher Hooded Horse to develop a new sci-fi strategy title.  There’s no word at present as to whether this deal grants Hooded Horse any sort of publishing rights to Arcen’s existing stable of games — most notably, the aforementioned AI War franchise.

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

• A new tank from Rheinmetall, the KF51 Panther
• What are the casualties like in Ukraine? A dive into the separatists
• UK Fight Club is showing off Flank Guard, a tactical decision game
• The next GUWS webinar is David Thompson talking about From History to the Table: Modeling Skirmish-Level Engagements in Wargames on 6/21
• PhD student in War Studies over in the Swedish War College, if you’re interested

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.

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.

1. just not while taking a drink
2. and we’re getting very close with Clash of Arms & Pub Battles