Season 13

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.

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.