Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast "Mentioned In Dispatches" with the Armchair Dragoons

21 November 2025 ~

With yesterday’s launch of the latest Flashpoint Campaigns game, Cold War, we wanted a visit with our buddies from On Target Sims to talk about the changes in this game, the challenges of developing games on Cold War-era combat, how far you could stretch the system, and what lessons they learned along the way.

Brant’s joined this week by James Sterrett, as they interrogate Jim Snyder and Rob Crandall, and really, it’s mostly a reunion for the gang since they used to all work together running events at the Origins War College and still collaborate quite at bit on the Wargame HQ, too.  And speaking of War College events, here’s the AAR moment referenced around the 43:30 mark.  And if you think Rob should audition to be a play-by-play announcer for televised golf tournaments, let’s just say you wouldn’t be the first one to think that

Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War Preview ~ Mentioned in Dispatches Podcast ~ AAR set 1 ~ AAR set 2

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

14 November 2025 ~

Brant & Jim are joined by (only a few of) the Riches of Wargame Design Studio to talk about their latest series of games – The Sword & Siege series – that covers medieval warfare

As always when Jim is present, or pretty much any time we record a podcast, things do get off-topic a bit, but always focused on Wargame Design Studio.  We get a preview of what’s coming later this month, along with some behind-the-scenes looks at the research process.  3D graphics?  Solo vs AI gaming?  Updates to the WW1 games?  We make an attempt to pester Mr’s Hamilton and Walker with these and more.

Mandatory Linkiness

• Sword & Siege Game Demo at WDS site
• First Impressions of Age Of Longbow I – Sword & Siege Series by Wargame Design Studio
• Bonus Gallery of Age Of Longbow I – Sword & Siege Series by Wargame Design Studio
• First Impressions of Crusades : Book I by Wargame Design Studio

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

18 April 2025 ~

Brant, Jim, and Mike just talk about games – mostly wargames, some classic computer games, some good, some bad, and everything in between!

There’s no real agenda here, we’re just babbling about random wargame stuff, from ooooold computer wargames to upcoming battle anniversaries to the SALUTE show over in London.

Some of the links we promised in the episode

• Tanktics
• Air Combat Emulator  (and video!12 )
• Temple of Apshai
• Balance of Power
• Intellivision
• Battlezone at SALUTE

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

11 April 2025 ~

Brant & Jim are joined by first-time Dispatchers Achilles & Robert to talk about Adepticon 2025.  Minis, minis, and more minis, with all sorts of Star Wars, Battletech, and WH40K everywhere, and some occasional real battles too.

What did our guys enjoy?  What surprised them?  What loot did they bring home?  Coolest thing they so?  How many solo games were being played?  And why were there Muppets everywhere?!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

4 April 2025 ~

Rocky and Mike and Brant do their best to muddle through a discussion around why we do/n’t care about wargame awards, what’s wrong with popularity contests, and how you would design the “right” kinds of wargame awards.

We certainly don’t discuss all of the possible awards out there, and we don’t do a deep dive on each of them, but we try to cover a variety of ways in which these different awards approach their categories, participation, scope, and scale.

So what did we miss?  What awards didn’t we cover that we should have?  How would you organize a set of wargaming awards – categories, voters, scope & scale – if you were going to do so?  Sound off below!

Here’s a bunch of links to some of the wargame awards discussed on the show

• The Charles S Roberts Awards
• Wargames Illustrated Awards (reader survey)
• Golden Geek Awards
• SDHISTCON Summit Award
• The Homo Ludens Golden Luddite announcement
• Origins Awards archive
• Tabletop Games Blog (for the interesting category names)
• History on the Table Awards (from a few years ago on BGG, their own site seems to be messed up)

And this was from the question we asked at the end of 2024 about your wargame-acquisition decision-making

And we also asked whether or not awards had any bearing on purchase decisions.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

28 March 2025 ~

Brant is joined by Dr James Sterrett and one of his students, US Army MAJ Alex Adkins, to discuss the wargaming curriculum at the US Army Command & General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth, KS, and MAJ Adkins Master’s thesis wargame Overmatch.

The discussion includes some info about the program (more info below) and pivots to MAJ Adkins experiences in the program.  There’s a bunch of discussion about Overmatch and its development and purpose.  There’s also a brief discussion of the uses of wargaming in the military decision-making process.

A couple of links to things that were discussed in the show

• Unfortunately, LTC(R) Neil Garra’s book about MDMP wargaming is out of print
• US Army publication How to Master Wargaming (PDF download)
• Some discussion of MDMP wargaming in this podcast episode
• Overview of the MMAS wargaming program at CGSC
  • Season 4 interview with an MMAS student
  • Season 6 interview with a pair of MMAS students
• Logistics in wargaming, including classes of supply

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

21 March 2025 ~

Friend-of-the-Dragoons Rex Brynen (of Paxsims, among other places) and fellow Canadian Ben Taylor join Brant for a discussion about serious games that don’t involve all the shooty-bangy things.

What are some of the tools that overlap from wargaming into the non-kinetic world?  What are some success stories in using wargaming techniques in these contexts?  What are some of the third rails to avoid when using wargaming techniques with other audiences?  When do you push back on requests for a wargame?  All these, and more, in the best hour of podcasting you’ll get this week.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

14 March 2025 ~

Mike & Bill join Brant to talk about GMT’s long-running Battles of the American Revolution series, as we continue this season’s focus on digging into some different game series in a bunch of our episodes.

At over 25 years old, it’s one of the longest-running, still-active series that started after TAHGC’s crash & burn back in the 1990s.  We talk about the scope of the series across all the games, some nuances of a few specific games, whether (or how) the game could expand beyond the AWI, and games from other publishers that might operate in a similar space.

Some links for this show:

• Series page at GMT
• Series page at BGG
• Bill as the GM at the Fall Assembly (about halfway down the page)
• Flintlock series
• Hold the Line series

You can chat about this series in the Age of Gunpowder section of our discussion forums

Battles of the American Revolution Series Mentioned in Dispatches Episode ~ Series Intro ~ Saratoga ~ Brandywine ~ Guilford Courthouse ~ Eutaw Springs ~ Savannah ~ Camden Event Podcast Episode Saratoga Digital ~ First Impressions ~ Gaming vs The AI

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

7 March 2025 ~

Similar to what we did last year at the Expo, rather than try to organize a full-hour episode on a particular topic, we grabbed a couple of different guests to join us for a consolidated Expo episode.  Also, rather than focus exclusively on publishers this year, we cast a slightly wider net.

We start out with a wonderful discussion with Steve Jackson13 to discuss their latest Kickstarter, trends in the gaming industry, blazing new trails, and evergreen hits.  For this conversation, we were joined by Jason Matthews.  We start off that discussion talking about the Kickstarter campaign for the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that are being reprinted.   Steve also shows off some very neat minis tiles from Lorescape that he’s backing and can be used for a variety of hex-based games.

click images to enlarge

Our second guest was Mike Dunn of Gaming Trend, who is one of the key drivers behind the recent push in the GAMA Media & Events division to improve the quality of content, and capabilities of the members.  We talk about media coverage of overall industry and some of his specific initiatives within the organization.  This might seem a little bit like media navel-gazing, but we thought it good perspective on what forces are shaping potential coverage of the industry.

Finally, with both of the folks that lead Buckeye Game Fest at the Expo, we snagged Kate and Kristin to talk about the background of BGF, as well as some upcoming plans for the next few years as BGF is looking to broaden their appeal to a wider audience. Plus, don’t forget Quad Fest at BGF this year!

Overall, we think this offers a fair cross-section of the kinds of industry folks you encounter at the GAMA Expo, as we try to situate our niche of the wargaming hobby within the broader context of the overall game industry.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

28 February 2025 ~

Brant, Jim, Gus, and (eventually) Sam get together to discuss CA’s Total War series of wargames.  Starting with Shogun and continuing through multiple iterations of Rome and Warhammer as well as such off-the-wall games as Attila and Pharoah, plus Jim favorites Napoleon and Empire, among others.

What did we love and/or hate?  What was awesome, ugly, fun, or stupid?  Who is shadowboxing, and why?  What would we fix?  What do we think is superfluous, and what do we think is essential?  And how exasperated will Jim get with it all?

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

21 February 2025 ~

The OCS games are one of the current standards of the industry for large-scale ‘monster’ games with a reputation for both complexity and consistency.  Series rules are usable across almost all of the 20-odd games, and veteran players have literally hundreds of hours under their belts.

We talk about the scope of the series, how far before/after WW2 you could reasonably extend the series and why, the logistics model, the surprise mechanic, splitting roles across multiple players, and even a digression about bad dice.

A couple of relevant links

• The logistics column mentioned around the 10-minute mark
• The OCS home page
• Ardwulf’s “How to Play OCS” video from the ACDC several years ago
• BGG series page
• The OCS Depot

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

14 February 2025 ~

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day; no, it’s not that kind of XXXX fantasy!  Brant, Mike, and Sam chat about their favorite 4X games in the fantasy genre (as opposed to historical or space).

What distinguishes a fantasy 4X game from the other kinds?  What are some hallmarks of the genre?  Which games were our favorites and why?  Which ones had particularly good graphics?  Most of these are digital, but what about on the tabletop?  What parts would we pull from different games to create our ultimate fantasy 4X game?

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

7 November 2025 ~

OK, so we’re getting wacky4 this week as we bring in a pair of game designers/professional musicians on board to talk about the parallels between the wargaming business (and hobby gaming as a whole) and the music business – creating your own music, finding a publisher, going on tour, market segmentation, storytelling, and more

Let’s welcome aboard Wes Crawford of Wharf Rat Games and Dan Bullock, both designers who have self-published a variety of games as well as selling designs to other publishers.  You get back-stories from both designers of pitching games to publishers, developing their games with player feedback, and the inspirations behind some of their upcoming designs.  And of course, we find as many connections to their experiences in the music business as we can along the way.

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

7 February 2025 ~

Brant & Mike are joined by Ardwulf, and Bill is back again, to talk about the classic quadrigames from SPI, and their later evolutions through TSR and Decision Games, as well as other emulations of the form by Compass Games, GMT, and others.

We talk about the history of the games and the designers who were ‘trained’ on quads, and the underlying ‘schtick’ of fast-playing, quick-learning, low-overhead, small(er)-footprint combo packs.  We also cover some of our favorites, some recent multi-pack games that fit the “quad” ethos, and the fifth-wheel games later published in S&T.  Are series wargames more of a thing now than back then?  And which quads showed up in single packs, as well?

All of this is leading up to this year’s Buckeye Game Fest 14, where we’ll be sponsoring/participating in Quad Fest!  In partnership with Ardwulf’s Lair and My Own Worst Enemy, we’re putting 6 classic SPI quads on the table in The War Room at BGF, from Wednesday through Saturday (with Friday as the main day).  There’s even room for more GMs to add a couple of Quad Fest events – just get in touch with us about scheduling so we don’t overlap each other!

What are your thoughts on the old quad games?  Any particular favorites, or ones you hated?

What about Quad Fest?  Is that enough to get you to come join us / game with us at Buckeye Game Fest?  Is there a game you want to see added, or one you’re willing to come join as a GM?  Sound off below, or tell us in our forums!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

31 January 2025 ~

Kicking off our 14th season with episode 164!  Brant is joined by Keith Tracton and Tim Densham, a pair of designers who were also GMs for our most recent ArmChair Dragoons Digital Convention (The ACDC).

We talk about how this year’s ACDC shook out and what they enjoyed during the show and what could’ve been improved.  We compare digital conventions to in-person ones, too – what are the dis/advantages of digital setup & prep vs in-person teaching of games.  What’s different with an in-person presentation vs a digital broadcast on-line?  And whatever happened to that guy the city watch hauled off for going through the dead guy’s pockets back in 2018?

More shenanigans to come as this season unfolds!  For now, rejoice and be happy, as Mentioned in Dispatches with The Armchair Dragoons returns

The 2025 ACDC ––  ORIGINAL OPORD ~ REGISTRATION ~  LIVESTREAM ARCHIVE ~ AAR ~ PODCAST

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

6 December 2024 ~

Brant & Mike are joined by Jim & Bill to talk about all the things for which we are thankful in the world of wargaming and our wider hobby ecosphere.

Let’s talk about conventions, content creators, how technology has changed wargaming, and more.  Chime in below, or in our forums, and let us know what you are thankful for in the wargaming world!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

29 November 2024 ~

Over Veteran’s Day weekend, a bunch of wargamers gathered in San Diego, where they started each morning by scraping 3 inches of sunshine off their windshields before cruising over to the Portuguese Hall for several full days of games, panels, interviews, special events, and other general frivolity at SDHISTCON.

So join Brant has he chats with Grant from Pushing Cardboard, Liz from Beyond Solitaire, and our buddy Ardwulf, about what they played, who they met & chatted with, and most importantly, about the outstanding food they ate while there.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

22 November 2024 ~

It’s time to blast off to the outer reaches of strategy gaming as we spend some time discussing 4X games that are set in space.  Brant & Mike are joined by Sam and a different Mike to talk about gameplay in 4X games, classic tropes, processor power, and more

Sam’s also been playing the latest DLC for Distant Worlds 2 from Slitherine Games – Return of the Shakturi, and he gives us his initial impressions of the content as well as his overall thoughts after 2 years of continued improvements for DW2.  Of course we make fun of how late the Stellaris board game is running, but we also spend a few minutes on other 4X board games, too, like Stellar Horizons and Space Empires 4X.  Enjoy!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

15 November 2024 ~

We’re back to computer wargaming, as we pick up where we left off and start shifting up in echelon away from tactical to operational and strategic level games.  This isn’t some “all-time top 10” or anything; it’s just games we’ve enjoyed over the years and some commentary on them, from ancients to modern, and everywhere in between.

So join Brant, Bryan, and Cyrano for a rambling romp through our digital wargaming as we call out some of the better games we’ve played over the years.  And no, Bryan is not from Ohio, but still likes adding a “s” on all the titles anyway.

Here are some of the other episodes referenced in this discussion, too

• Mentioned in Dispatches, Season 5 Episode 10 – The Charles S Roberts “Awards”
• Mentioned in Dispatches, S3E6 – On Target Simulations & Flashpoint Campaigns
• Shadow Empire AAR and forum thread

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

8 November 2024 ~

Ian and Mike15 join Brant to talk about the ‘aha!’ moments of wargaming in military classrooms, what games they’ve used for different purposes, and wargame interfaces, among plenty of other things.

Some links & Info

• Ian’s #ManeuverWarfare and the essay he references in the episode
• Lessons learned from playtesting at Origins
• Orange Crush has been overcome by events, but was used back in 2014
• Wall Street Journal article about Command: Modern Operations
• USMC Wargaming Cloud
• Connections Online will be held 7-12 April 2025

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

1 November 2024 ~

Let’s talk digits!  Bryan and Gus join the show to talk about some of their favorite computer games over the past 20-25 years, with a focus on this show starting at the tactical level and drifting slightly into the operational level of combat.

We cover a lot of different ground as we tackle Battletech and the Russo-Japanese War and vampires and WW2 and the Aliens universe, all in one show.  There’s bemoaning of bad DRM decisions and nostalgia for turn-based games back when that was all the computers could handle.  We talk about some favorite media licenses and game worlds, and some not-so-favorite sales practices.  And plenty of other babbling.

• Press Announcement of Slitherine acquiring Battlefront
• Fight Club International
• Classic Reviews ~ Aliens versus Predator 2 – Primal Hunt
• Peter & Jan playing Field of Glory Kingdoms
• Rule The Waves 3 coverage from our site
• Velker vs Boyerwulf in Blood Bowl

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

25 October 2024 ~

Is there a positive word for “browbeating”?  How mad should your opponents be when you blow up the city block that they’re occupying?  How much table space is too much, too little, or just right?

Brant & Mike are joined by Fall Assembly attendees Rocky and Bill to talk about what they enjoyed, what needs improvement, and what they learned.  You can also read our AAR here and keep up with the playlist of videos from the convention16.  As you’re doing all of this, you can start planning now for next 10-12 October, and whether you’re going to attend for 2 days, 3 days, or the full weekend plus the Thursday night social!

On this episode, we talk about the overall convention, but also about a couple of particular games we played as well:

• GMT’s Rebel Fury
• Keith Tracton’s Raider Drop Zone
• Fight Club International’s Take That Street
• GMT’s Battles of the American Revolution
• . . .   and more

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

18 October 2024 ~

Brant, Mike, Bryan, and not Gary talk about things that contribute FOMO in wargaming, and how FOMO has applied to their own gaming acquisitions.  Which companies create that “fear of missing out” among their customers?  How does crowdfunding contribute?  Where are there games that are perpetually available and never really create any sort of FOMO?

What about you, dear audience?  What contributes to any FOMO for you, and how do you17 combat it?

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

31 October 2025 ~

For the first time on Mentioned in Dispatches, we’re joined by designer James M. Day, who partnered with Fernando Sola Ramos in designing this year’s multiple-CSR-award-winning Panzer: North Africa.

So Brant & Mike barrage Mr Day with a variety of questions about his history of designing tank-heavy games, the local newspaper covering his win, some history in the computer gaming world, and solo adaptations of his games.  We also spend a little time talking about the background behind Mr Day’s upcoming man-to-man sci-fi game ARC.

Huge thanks to Mr Day for taking the time out of his schedule to join us, and we’ll definitely clear the schedule for him to join us again in the future.

A couple of our links to CSR-related content

• Announcement of the winners, from Origins
• Our podcast episode discussing the awards

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

11 October 2024 ~

Shelf of “Shame” or a Shelf of “Opportunity”?  Brant & Mike are joined by Rocky and “The Other Mike” (OJsDad for those of your who watch Saturday Night Fights) to talk about all those games you’ve stacked up on your shelf that are still waiting to hit the table.

What have you had the longest without getting it to the table?  Do you have more than one of the same game and neither of them have been played yet?  Are you collecting all of a particular line of games (or expansions) but never get them played?

And then there are the edge cases:  if you’ve played someone else‘s copy of the game, does that count for checking it off of your shelf of shame?  If you’ve played it thru VASSAL / TTS / etc is that enough to knock it off the list?  What about games that you were gifted or otherwise didn’t really intend to acquire but are now on your shelves?

There are no hard-&-fast rules here, but what’s still lingering in your game collection that you keep meaning to play but never seem to find the time to get to?  Go ahead and confess your shames!  Comments below or in the forums

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

4 October 2024 ~

Time to shoot up some truth serum and sharpen the knives!  Bryan wanted to talk about the “worst” of wargaming, so Brant dragged Jim & Mike into the fray and here we go ––

Worst game name?  Computer game?  Rulebook?  Category of games?  Which game was so bad the 1st edition was unplayable as written18? There’s plenty of rough & tumble thoughts here to go around, so jump into the discussion and let us know what some of your “worsts” are. What did we have to say about Hearts of Iron or Maneouvre or I, Napoleon or Fields of Fire or Balance of Power.  What do 60s classic rock songs have to do with this episode?  Why is(n’t?) Mike angry at the CSRs and is this the only time Jim will ever agree with him about solo wargaming?  Is there actually a Napoleonic game that Jim hates worse than the Ridley Scott movie?  Have we asked enough questions?  Why aren’t you listening yet?!

And yes, we do get off-topic – we have tradition to uphold!  At this point, Jim has dropped from the 3rd hit to 4th on Google, when searching “Teugn-Hausen”.  But . . . one of their videos of the battle is up to 5th, so he’s got 40% of the top hits on the world’s biggest search engine when you go looking for a major Napoleonic battle!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

27 September 2024 ~

Last Summer, we teamed up with Beyond Solitaire for a big survey about people’s solo/solitaire war & historical gaming.  We were interested in both purpose-designed solo games as well as games people played solitaire regardless of how they were designed.  The plan was always to repeat this each Summer and see how it changed over time, so we did it again!

You can see the links to the rest of the 2024 survey content below, but on this episode of Mentioned in Dispatches, we talk about some of the big rise & fall games from last year, how the top games compared based on how long you’ve been wargaming, and finding new-to-you gems in the data.

The results of our 2024 survey can be found here:

2024 Solo & Solitaire Wargaming & Historical Gaming Survey Results ANNOUNCEMENT | RESULTS | DATA DIVING | BEYOND SOLITAIRE YOUTUBE DISCUSSION | BGG Geeklist | Historical Rankings MORE DATA DIVING | MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES EPISODE

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

20 September 2024 ~

David Thompson joins Brant for a wide-ranging discussion around the uses of AI for creative purposes in tabletop gaming, whether for art or text.  Note that the “AI” we’re talking about this week is for the creation of the game content, and not as a ‘bot’ or automata in place of an opponent.

Under what conditions might AI usage be OK?   Assuming it’s legal, is it automatically ethical?  As a consumer, what sort of usage are you comfortable with?  What disclosures do you want regarding the usages of “creative” AI in tabletop gaming?  What’s black and white and how big are the gray areas in between?

Some of the headlines we mention in this episode

• This Kurosawa Movie Inspired George Lucas’ Original ‘Star Wars’ Script
• Terraforming Mars and AI artwork
• Scythe art and “tracing”

The Chasing Amy reference19 with language that is sooooo NSFW

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

13 September 2024 ~

Season 13 is here!  Brant, Mike, and Rocky spend this episode talking about what motivates people to play a wargame, how to keep your motivation up when it’s flagging, and how to get engaged with a topic that’s outside your wheelhouse.

Let’s kick off this new season with discussions of Divine Right and other reprints, boosting your opponents’ motivation to play, how to engage with your game topic, similarities to RPG reprints, why to keep playing your way through a game that’s no longer fun, and more.

• Barthheart’s post that inspired this episode
• Rocky’s Banzai Magazine explorations (with more to come here, too!)
• Mike’s unboxing of Divine Right

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You also can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads.  (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

10 May 2024 ~

Wrapping up season 12, we’ve got a full house here to talk about the current state of hobby wargaming, what we’d like to improve, and some predictions for the near future.

So let’s join Brant & Mike and welcome back Moe (of Moe’s Game Table) and Grant (of Pushing Cardboard) and settle in for our season finale to discuss the current state of hobby wargaming in 2024.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

3 May 2024 ~

How are “historical RPGs” different from other RPGs and how can you use them to explore various points in history?  And far back (or forward?) do they look?

So let’s join Rocky and Byron and Brant talking about different eras & periods, some underlying mechanics, what they can (and can’t) do, and some of our favorites.  We obviously reference Nations & Cannons, and here are Pat Mooney’s previous apperances in our 5Q interviews, podcast episode, and ACDC panel.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

26 April 2024 ~

Ardwulf comes back to the show and brings fellow Origins GM Lee along with him, to talk about our Origins events and Buckeye Game Fest, interspersed with some guidance and advice about how to register for and attend most game conventions out there.

So we talk about our experiences with both conventions, as well as some of the differences in focus between the gameplay-focused conventions (like BGF) and the larger, and more broad-based cons like Origins or GenCon.  And anywhere Brant references a 10×20 space, it’s actually 20×4020, and this year’s space at Origins is actually 40×40.

Some links that’ll help you out:

• Go find a convention through tabletop.events!
• Buckeye Game Fest 2024
• Origins Game Fair 2024
• Brant & Peter and the We Are Coming Nineveh livestream
• BGF ’22 coverage with the Artemis videos
• BGF ’23 coverage with a lot of input from other gamers

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

12 April 2024 ~

In preparation for Connections Online next week, we’re joined by a pair of wargame practitioners: Kevin Williamson, and Mitch Reed, both up in the DC area. Mitch is well-known to the hobby world as the lead sled-dog of the No Dice No Glory team, but he’s also on his third different professional wargaming gig, after an extended military career.  Kevin’s hobby background is more digital than tabletop, but it’s serving him well in his current wargames-in-military-education role.

With a focus on the overlap between hobby and pro wargames, both of our guests talk about places where they’ve seen hobby wargames used in the pro realm, the ideas they steal from the hobbyists for their day jobs, and the perils & pitfalls of using hobby wargames in a practitioner context.  And because this is Mentioned in Dispatches, we definitely wander off topic in a few places.

Here’s a list of stray links mentioned in the show

• No Dice No Glory (Mitch’s site)
• Fight Club US
• Near Peer Simulations
• GAO report on wargaming (2023)
• Flashpoint Campaigns

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

5 April 2024 ~

We’re joined this week by designer Darin Leviloff, who designed the first States of Siege game (Israeli Independence) and has since designed several more that have found new homes with other publishers.

Ironically, the original game is the only of Darin’s current designs that isn’t back in print, although he does take a moment to explain why not.  We also discuss Darin’s background in wargaming, how he stumbled into designing, and what’s on the drawing board.

You can read Brant’s Hapsburg Eclipse AAR here.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

24 October 2025 ~

Brant, Mike, and Keith have a discussion about the 2025 Fall Assembly, just in case you weren’t already sick of hearing about the best convention that you haven’t yet attended.

What got played?  What stuck out for us?  What about the new location?  What did we like or not?  What about next year5?  Plenty of wargaming crammed into a pretty tightly-packed weekend with a great crew of gamers.

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

29 March 2024 ~

Brant is joined by Chris Weuve (chair of the Connections Online committee) and Pete Pellegrino, longtime professional wargamer and instructor.  This slightly-rambling episode looks at some of the history of wargaming at the Naval War College, how and why it’s withered today, and what we can do about it.

We also talk about how Pete came to wargaming and how its indicative of other people wandering into the wargaming practitioner field, and Chris (of course) tells us about a test-to-destruction as a valid type of wargame.  And we unironically use the term “ambiguity horizon”.  Of course, we wander off-topic here and there, because this is Mentioned in Dispatches and that’s our schtick.

A handful of references (look, there were a lot)

• The Bob Work Memo (or at least Bob Work talking about it) and some of our commentary on it
• Wargaming Pathologies
• That Nimitz quote
• CAPT William McCarty Little
  • collected essays (midway down on the page)
  • The Strategic Naval War Game Or Chart Maneuver
• Millennium Challenge
  • the official report (PDF)
  • “the real story”
  • “lost lessons”

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

22 March 2024 ~

Fresh off of GAMA Expo, Fort Circle Honcho Kevin Bertram joins us to talk about what’s up with the company, as well as their upcoming CircleDC convention.

Kevin fills us in on the current production plans for Fort Circle Games, which run out over a half dozen games and through the end of 2025 (at least).  We discuss some of the production & development process, including the visual art & design piece.  We talk about Kevin’s Substack wherein he divulges waaaaay more info than a lot of other companies probably would.  And we also spend a bit of time talking about what’s coming up at CircleDC – the designers he’s expecting, the venue, and the non-gaming activities they’ve got planned to go along, too.

• CircleDC convention info
• Behind the Fort Circle scenes
• The Fort Circle homepage

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

15 March 2024 ~

We spent last week at GAMA Expo, and rather than try to set up a 90-minute chat with someone there, we tackled a handful of people to come talk to us.

So kick back & relax and enjoy this patchwork episode of many different guests, as we run well past the hour mark, but give you a smorgasbord of people here (in no particular order):

• Jim Dietz, The Dietz Foundation
• Cole Wehrle, Leder Games and Wehrlegig Games
• James Buckley, Phalanx Games
• Drew Wehrle, Wehrlegig Games
• Jason Matthews, Fort Circle Games and the GAMA board

Plus, here’s the link to the GUWS talk from Ian T Brown that we reference while talking with Jim

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

8 March 2024 ~

Moe’s back!  And the Molotov Cockatiel joins us, too, as we take a spin through some classic wargames – how far back they go, why we love them, which ones we can’t stand, and how classic wargames might be like your favorite musical artists.

We also take some time to discuss how the business has changed a bit from in-house design & development teams to freelance designers and occasional development teams.  We learn a bit by cracking open some old rulebooks.  We talk about what’s still on our shelves decades later.  And since Moe’s here, we can’t help but talk a little hockey.

Some references

• Rocky looks into Tactics II
• Alexander The Great
• Russian Campaign vs Russian Campaign
• Luftwaffe
• HOCKEY!

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

1 March 2024 ~

Inspired by this thread on BGG, our panel tackles the idea of “how would you improve the wargaming hobby if you had $1 million to do it?”  So join Brant, Mike, Rocky, and new voice21 Byron (Jack Nastyface in the forums) as they go as bluesky as they can with some ideas.

Endowed faculty chairs.  The giant Blue Panther-tron Dr Seuss Grog-Print-O-Matic game printer to bring back old-school out-of-print wargames.  Hire some goddamn editors!  Supported play programs.  Bling out the games!  Can you tie into a much-loved media license to bring in a ready-made audience?

So are we trying to broaden the hobby?  Are we trying to better serve the people already in the hobby?  Are we trying to preserve the existing body of knowledge for future wargamers?  There’s a bunch of courses of action and none of them are necessarily wrong, but all come down to personal preferences.

The Weekly References (Non-Tolstoi-Edition)

• The #ManeuverWarfare card game
• Evil Genius Games
• Mentioned In Dispatches Season 6 Ep 7 – Teaching Game Design
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 10 Ep 1 ~ The OGL For Wargaming

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

23 February 2024 ~

Amabel is back!  One of our favorite designers comes back to Mentioned in Dispatches to talk about what’s going with Hollandspiele and tell a few tales of designing off-the-wall games.

So chill & enjoy as she gives us the low-down on Hollandspiele’s best-sellers, what’s coming soon (Comet, Ides of March, Striking Flint, and more), and what she’s enjoyed working on. Custom dragon meeples?  Game reviews as literature?  A game with no rulebook?  Small-box games that are even more experimental?!  Yep, we covered that too!  And stay tuned ’til the end when Amabel starts pestering Brant with some questions of her own.

Oh, and of course we talk a bunch about the New Yorker article where Amabel was the star of a long read about modern boardgaming and game design.

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

16 February 2024 ~

Liz drops by to talk to Brant & Mike about her upcoming Night Witches game (designed with David Thompson).  Hexes, counters, aircraft and AAA shooting at each other, and managing aircraft damage all combine for a fun little solo/co-op wargaming experience.

We also talk about some of her other work in the wargaming world, whether it’s additional designs kicking around in her head, or the editing work she’s done for other people.  We also talk a bit about some conventions – BGF, Circle DC, and Origins are all among them.  And yes, Brant does actually play wargames, too.

References & Links

• Night Witches on BGG
• White Tribe AAR
• Hapsburg Eclipse AAR
• Buckeye Game Fest 2023 w/ the La Bat games
• Buckeye Game Fest 2022 w/ the Artemis videos
• Liz’s channel

And you’ll understand the point of this one around the 55 minute mark or so

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

9 February 2024 ~

What the heck is an “adventure wargame”?  OK, so we’re not going to get into the parsing of specific definitional details, but we’re going to try to give you a sense of what makes them different than you average wargame and why you might enjoy playing them

So help us launch season 12 with a discussion of where RPGs and wargames overlap and how you can adapt some of those experience & campaign ideas to your more traditional hex-&-counter wargames down the line.

Some references?

• The Drive on Gießen for World at War ’85
• Striker (RPG rules)
• Five Parsecs From Home / Five Leagues From the Borderlands
• The Birthright setting
• Polyhedron 156 / V for Victory RPG

We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

15 December 2023

So we’re cutting it pretty close to Christmas22 but here are some wide-&-varied suggestions for gifts to put under your favorite wargamer’s tree, with Rocky, Brant, Mike, and Bryan

It’s not just games, but a bunch of game accessories and add-ons, protective tools, tracking tools, and more.  And, yeah, we recommend a few games, too.

A, uh… ‘curated’ version of the different stuff we talked about on the show

• Ultrapro top-loader map protectors
• Cube4Me wargame sets
• Black Oak Workshop Advent-ure calendars
• Easy Roller dice bags
• Etsy game counters
• Board Butler on Kickstarter
• Gunner-Heat-PC
• Decisive Campaigns Ardennes Offensive
• Gift certificates?  We specifically call out both Enterprise Games and Gamer’s Armory
• Napoleon’s Eagles 2
• For the People on p500
• Dragoons logo merch

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

8 December 2023

The fine folks at Wargame Design Studio just recently released their latest game – Thirty Years’ War – in their Musket & Pike series.  Rich stops in with Brant & Jim to talk about their recent releases, the company’s current design plans, and what they’re currently excited about.

What’s the company’s design and release philosophy – tablets?  Macs?  Steam?  Long-term patching & support?  What’s the breakdown of their different series and how widely are their historical nets cast?  How did they get sychronous online multiplayer functionality “right” 20 years ahead of a bunch of other companies that still haven’t figured it out?  What’s up with the graphics?    Why don’t they announce games until they’re actually launching?  And yes, we cram it all into a 1-hour show.

Links & References

• Tim Stone’s interview at Tally-Ho Corner
• WDS’s news page

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Here’s the game that Jim referenced in the show, as they streamed one of the Thirty Years War scenarios

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

17 October 2025 ~

The Game Manufacturers Association, which has now been renamed GAMA: The Tabletop Games Association, has been a bit of a flashpoint for wargamers over the past dozen years or more. With some real questions about why wargamers should care about GAMA, it’s often been tough to make the case that they should.  But with all the changes at GAMA since the pandemic6 there’s the potential for real value for publishers beyond just discounts on Origins booths.

So Brant & Ardwulf are joined by Jason Matthews to talk about GAMA as a whole, but specifically what wargamers & wargame companies should be getting out of the organization.  What does GAMA offer everyone and how does that apply to wargamers?  What about Origins and the wargaming program there?  What can a publisher get out of GAMA Expo?  And how many times will someone’s browser crash and knock them out of Streamyard?7

Drop in on your podcast platform of choice  (iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Castro | whatever we forgot to link) and throw our way to help other listeners find us

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons. Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web. You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

1 December 2023

The Autumn convention season has come, and (largely) gone23 and we’ve got some attendees of those conventions here to regale us with their adventures.

So let’s welcome in Ardwulf, Grant from Pushing Cardboard, and Tim from Catastrophe Games and talk about Compass Expo, SDHistCon, and the (then-upcoming) U-Con.  We discuss the games played, the ‘other’ events – panels/seminars, social gatherings, etc – pre-press or playtest games on tables, and what was for sale at the shows.  What did we like about the conventions?  How’d they compare to other conventions?  What are we looking forward to next?

Tell us about your recent convention experiences!  Which ones did you attend and what did you like (or not) about them?  What’s next on your convention calendar?  Discuss below, or in our forums!

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

24 November 2023

History doesn’t always repeat, but it does often rhyme.  Brant, Liz, and Jim dig into some wargaming history to talk about the things that were going around and are now coming back around.

And of course we’re going to get off topic and not just talk about production form factors and themes that come back into vogue.  Liz is always24 going to pimp her Night Witches game (co-designed with one of David Thompson’s 11 clones).  Jim’s going to continue to slag on solo wargames.  Brant’s going to ramble on topics only he cares about.  But hey, we’re having fun, right?  Right?!

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

17 November 2023

We’re a little behind on getting this one recorded & released, but our annual deep dive into the Compass Catalog is here!  Brant, Mike, Mike, and (eventually) Jim take their time going through the catalog and pick out the games they want, the ones they have, and the ones they’re trying to figure out the raison d’etre.

So join the crew as we go, literally, page by page through the catalog, question the existence of some games, sing the praises of others, try to do math in our heads on discounts, rankle at shipping costs and plan a game smuggling ring using airline couriers, and wonder why Jim hates solo games25.  Have fun as a bunch of old dudes26 celebrate a form of media whose heyday is clearly behind us, but that these guys can’t get enough of.

Go check out this year’s catalog in PDF here Past episodes talking about the Compass catalog? 2020, 2021, 2022

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!

10 November 2023

It’s not like you have to go too far to find problems with crowdfunding campaigns.  Heck, our man Gimpy has made it a personal quest to root out Kickstarter scammers and put them on blast on YouTube.  And while we’re not going to spend any time trying to excuse someone’s bad behavior over a crowdfunding campaign, we did think it’d be interesting to grab a couple of folks who have been heavily involved in them over the past few years to give us an extended peek behind the curtain.

So we welcome back Tim Densham of Catastrophe Games and Jeff Tidball of Prolific Games & Left Justified Studios to give us the inside scoop on prepping that campaign, pricing it out, the comms plan, the execution of a crowdfunding campaign, and what happens after it all ends. How do you find your customers?  How do stretch goals affect your pricing model?  How quickly does the money get to you?  How long should you keep a campaign open?  There’s a lot to dig through as both of these gentlemen are happy to explain.

Please gallop on over to the iTunes page for our podcast and give us a rating – whatever you think is fair! Even after all these years, we still need a few reviews short of iTunes recommending us in their podcast engine, and every rating helps.  Thanks!

Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming. You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it. (We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.) You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events. Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

The Armchair Dragoons, they’re a hoot, In wargaming, they’re absolute. On their podcast so grand, They conquer the land, With dice rolls and strategy, they’re astute!