This Year’s CSR Awards Winners ~ #TuesdayNewsday 7/18/23

Our weekly #TuesdayNewsday is here to keep you current on what’s important in the strategy gaming world

Registration is not yet live, but the initial information for our Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023 is up and running.  We need to get a few coordination points ironed out, and then we’ll be able to open up the event registration for everyone.  If you’re interested in being a GM, drop a line in our forums, or shoot Brant a message

• Badges are $40 for the weekend, which include some munchies, custom Armchair Dragoons swag, and whatever other prizes or giveaways we’re able to gather before the event.
• 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.
• Gamer’s Armory is 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.
• As noted on the convention site, we do not have a hotel attached to the facility.  You can find local hotels here.  We’re looking into a potential block deal with some local hotels, but with the State Fair in town it’s tough.
• As a reminder, Regimental Patron-level Patreon supporters get a free badge for all Armchair Dragoons-hosted events.

 

The Charles S Roberts Awards winners for games released in 2022 have been announced…

• Best Ancients Wargame ~ Great Battles of Julius Caesar Deluxe Edition, GMT Games, designers Richard H. Berg and Mark Herman
• Best Medieval Wargame ~ Almoravid, GMT Games, designer Volko Ruhnke
• Best Gunpowder Wargame ~ No Peace Without Honor, Compass Games, designer David Meyler
• Best Early Modern Wargame ~ Plains Indian Wars, GMT Games, designer John Poniske
• Best Napoleonic Wargame ~ Bonaparte in the Quadrilateral, OSG, designer Kevin Zucker
• Best American Civil War Wargame ~ A Most Fearful Sacrifice, Flying Pig Games, designer Hermann Luttmann
• Best Early 20th Century Wargame ~ 1914: Nach Paris, VUCA Simulations, designer Bertrand Munier
• Best World War II Wargame ~ Pacific War Second Edition, GMT Games, designer Mark Herman
• Best Modern Wargame ~ Flashpoint: South China Sea, GMT Games, designer Harold Buchanan
• Best Hypothetical Wargame ~ The Third World War Designer Signature Edition, Compass Games, designer Frank Chadwick
• Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Wargame ~ The Long Road, Flying Pig Games, designer Mark H. Walker
• Best Solitaire or Cooperative Wargame ~ Skies Above Britain, GMT Games, designers Jerry White and Gina Willis
• Best Expansion for an Existing Wargame ~ Fall of Saigon, for Fire in the Lake, GMT Games, designers Mark Herman and Volko Ruhnke
• Best Wargaming Magazine ~ Strategy & Tactics
• The Redmond A. Simonsen Memorial Award for Outstanding Wargame Presentation ~ A Most Fearful Sacrifice: The Three Days of Gettysburg, Flying Pig Games
• The James F. Dunnigan Award for Playability and Design ~ Volko Ruhnke
• The Charles S. Roberts Memorial Award for Best New Designer ~ Richard Whitaker (Into the Woods)
• CSR Awards (Clausewitz) Hall of Fame Inductees ~ Dana Lombardy; John Prados; Volko Ruhnke
• Wargame of the Year ~ A Most Fearful Sacrifice: The Three Days of Gettysburg, Flying Pig Games, designer Hermann Luttmann

You can watch the awards show from No Enemies Here on YouTube

 

 

Sebastian Bae strikes again, with his column for War On The Rocks advocating that the military Put Educational Wargaming In The Hands Of The Warfighter

One of his key points –

integrate wargaming literacy and skills into the enlisted educational pipeline. This does not mean creating an enlisted force focused on designing wargames. Instead, enlisted leaders should be equipped with the experience, tools, and skills to leverage and teach wargames at the small unit level. The recent successes of wargaming at the College of Enlisted Military Education reflect the untapped potential of enlisted-led wargaming. Sustaining wargaming will require widening access to the broader joint force

echoes what we’ve been advocating for almost a decade now

 

New games released in the past week that you’ll find interesting

• The Bear and the Jackal Battlepack for LNLT-Digital is now out on Stream
• The War Diary #23 order page lets you add it to the cart, so it seems to be available now
• Acies just released a ziplock version of their Moravian Sun game
• A new demo of WDS’s Naval Campaigns series is available, focused on the Spanish-American War
• There’s a bunch of new releases in the The Witcher: Old World line that Miniature Market has on a launch sale
• The King’s Campaign is a new medieval-inspired RTS on Steam now
• For those of us of a certain age, the Gray Death Legion still holds some nostalgia & fascination and you can get a set of their later ‘mechs in a 4-pack thru B&N right now
• Holy shit! An actual game from Cadet Games for sale, in the wild! (You can’t find any of that info on Cadet’s own site) – Noble Knight has Nguyen Hue ’72 available
• So, not a game, but you can order it through their site – Warlord Games has tickets available for their “open day” on 2 September
• PLUSHY. TECH.

 

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

• War of the 3 Sanchos is on Gamefound so you can fight over medieval Spain
• These “Mayan Dice” ought to give Cyrano the squick
• The Battlefront minis guys have the upcoming WWIII/Team Yankee Nordic Forces expansion on pre-order right now and plenty more coming over the next month or so
• Modiphius has a pre-order of the Star Trek Adventures: Captain’s Log solo RPG, with 4 variant covers for your preferred ‘generation’ of Star Trek
• MMP’s Crimea has his it’s pre-order number, so this might be your last chance to grab it at about 25% off
• Look, we hate STL files clogging up our Kickstarter searches as much (or more!) as anyone else, but we did get the info about these Phil Foglio-inspired Wiz-War STL’s direct from Steve Jackson, so it’s not quite the same thing
• There’s a new starter box for the WOIN retro-universal system on Kickstarter
• The Fighting Fantasy Adventures card game campaign on Kickstarter got squashed for admin/currency-conversion reasons; they’re going to re-launch on Gamefound and if you sign up during the preview window you get a $5 discount once they go live

 

Stretch your budget a little further with these deals

• Big Summer clearance sale at Modiphius right now
• Big sale at Draco Ideas right now, starting at 10% and going as high as 70%
• S&T’s game-edition magazine sale this week is S&T #317 with Moscow, covering the 1941 campaign

 

What were the Dragoons up to this past week?

This are slowing down a bit as we ramble through July – “the Saturday of Summer” – and come down off of the binge of Origins articles

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Waterloo (IV) for “Valour and Fortitude”!
• Diving back into our own archives ~ Armchair Dragoons reviews Forgotten Legions (Compass Games)
• The Giant Civ 6 AAR: Nubia, Part 25
• The Grand “Champions of Krynn” AAR ~ Part 13
• Gameplay this week
  • The Battle of Quatre Bras (II) for “Valour and Fortitude”
  • “Cruiser Clash” (II) for “Battlefleet Gothic”
  • The IKS guys had a HUGE online Waterloo game this past weekend, and Jan streamed a bunch of it
• This week in our forums
  • A bunch of chattering about Jagged Alliance 3 before anyone bothers to share some screenshots
  • Star Fleet Battles, or Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks?
  • What’s the best 5-album musical stretch in pop/rock history?
  • Bison showing off all sorts of excellent painting
• 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 ~ 6 August and 10 September (skipping ahead bc of Labor Day)
  • Next #UnboxingDay¹ will be THIS WEEK!
  • 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

 

Our fellow content creators from the wargaming world

• Rocky gets a lead from us and writes his own column about Lancer instead of throwing it our way? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 
• Moe goes live tonight with his Whiskey Charlie show
• The Gimpy Gamer checks out Escape From Stalingrad Z
• Justegarde looks over his setup for Mr President
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about the best Joe Balkoski designs

 

News & notes from the business end of the gaming world

• “Set player count to zero”
• For you RPG fans out there, voting is open for the ENnies
• Avalanche Press has an article about an intra-Russian fistfight that happened…  or didn’t?
• Some interesting follow-up from the guys at MMP about their Winter Offensive charity partner (The World War II Foundation)

 

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

• 19-23 July Historicon (Lancaster, PA)
• 22-30 July WBC (Seven Springs, PA)
• 3-6 August GenCon (Indianapolis, IN)
• 17-20 August HistoriKC Fest (Kansas City, MO)
• 18-20 August SDHistEast (Portsmouth, RI)
• 25 August-2 September ConSimWorld Expo 2023 (Phoenix, AZ)
• 20-22 October The Inaugural Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023 (Cary, NC)

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As announced on our podcast on 3/31

The Armchair Dragoons Fall Assembly 2023
20-22 October 2023
The Gamer’s Armory, Cary NC

The convention page is up, but registration is not yet live as we lock down a few additional details.

In partnership with The Gamer’s Armory, we’ve got our first in-person convention coming up in October, where we’ll be taking over about half of the store.  We’ll be playing games in probably the biggest vendor booth you’ll see at a convention, and making plenty of new friends.

As a reminder, Regimental Patron-level Patreon supporters get a free badge for all Armchair Dragoons-hosted events.

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

• Littoral Command was reviews in Proceedings, the professional journal of the US Naval Institute
• Prediction and Validation in Wargaming: Are they possible? from Roger Mason
• Examining The Hoover Institute’s professional gaming series
• USMC MAJ Ian Brown talks about professional wargaming on a podcast
• The next GUWS webinar is Why You Should Be Megagaming on 15 August, followed by Intelligent Cardboard: Implementing AI in a Board Game on 29 August, which dovetails nicely with our podcast episode last season talking about tabletop AI
• As noted on PaxSims, an article at FP about How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat
• All of the Aussie’s wargaming articles from The Cove in one collection
• From our Connections Online livestream archive

 

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

 

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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In the weekly wargaming news,
We focus on info you can use,
From tabletop to digits,
And the occasional fidgets,
Missing it would give you the blues!

1. 3rd Thursday of the month