17 April 2026 ~

For the season 16 finale, Brant’s joined by David Thompson, Tim Densham, and Byron Collins to talk about game conventions coming up, some of our favorites, some we can’t stand, and what makes for good & bad conventions.

Oh, and Tim needs some advice, too, toward the end.

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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.

10 April 2026 ~

Brant is joined by Dr Aggie Hirst of Kings College London to discuss her research that resulted in the book “Politics of Play” and her other explorations of professional wargaming

Links & References

• Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military
• Mentioned In Dispatches S16 E8 – The Wargamer’s Bookshelf
• Battle Lab ~ Another “Resurgence” of Military Wargaming and Battle Lab ~ Uses for (Professional) Wargaming
• Stackup.org – Combating Veteran Suicide Through Gaming
• “Videogames Saved My Life”: Everyday Resistance and Ludic Recovery among US Military Veterans
• What to Do When Mother Nature Plays for the Red Team
• Civilians on Hexagonal Battlefields

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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.

3 April 2026 ~

Brant is joined by industry veterans Chris Pramas and Ross Thompson to talk about pathways into working in the tabletop game industry. Chris is one of the bigwigs at Green Ronin, and Ross just recently jumped on at Critical Role.

The Tabletop Game Jobs group is here (it’s public) and the Tabletop Game Job Talents group is here (it’s not). They’re both on Facebook, so if you’re not on there, you might not be able to see much.

Also, as noted around the 53:00 minute mark, here’s the survey question about “how did you learn to play D&D”

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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.

27 March 2026 ~

Brant, Rocky, Aaron, Austin, and Keith all team up to talk about sci-fi wargaming and barely scratch the surface. Hear what the designers are thinking as they’re developing their games, and we leave plenty of space for future episodes, too.

Of course there are links!

• Marine: 2002 – A Game of the First Lunar War (1979)
• Robotech: Reconstruction (2023)
• Raider Drop Zone (2024)
• Hammer’s Slammers (1984)
• Littoral Commander: Space Force (2026?)

Previous episodes on sci-fi wargaming (but not 4X games)

• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 10 Ep 3 ~ Sci-Fi Wargaming
• Mentioned in Dispatches Season 9 Ep 6 ~ Scifi Gaming & Space Navies
• Mentioned in Dispatches, Season 5 Episode 8 – Science Fiction Warfare & Gaming

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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.

20 March 2026 ~

Brant is joined by Dr James Sterrett and Jan Heinemann to revisit & update our earlier discussion way back in season 2 on The Essential Wargaming Library. In the past 5-6 years1 there’s been a veritable explosion of full-length, serious books about wargaming and those interested in these titles are now filling up a second shelf with them, instead of having room for fancy bookends and tchotchkes around the limited selection of wargaming tomes.

Linkdump

• Forging Wargamers by Sebastian Bae
• Wargames According to Mark by Mark Herman
• Eurowargames anthology from Nuts Publishing
• Wargaming Experiences: Soldiers, Scientists and Civilians and Wargaming Experiences II: Discussions by Natalia Wojtowicz
• UK MoD Wargaming Handbook (PDF)
• Paper Time Machines: Critical Game Design and Historical Board Games by Maurice Suckling
• Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems by Amabel Holland (and the Mechanisms as Metaphors video)
• Historical Simulation and Wargames: The Hexagon and the Sword by Ricardo Masini
• Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military by Aggie Hirst
• The Matrix Games Handbook: Professional Applications from Education to Analysis and Wargaming by John Curry
• Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design
• Peruvian Naval War College Journal issue on wargaming
• Journal of Advanced Military Studies wargaming issue
• Wargaming Handbooks panel from Connections Online

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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.

13 March 2026 ~

Byron and Rocky join Brant to talk about all sorts of fights-in-the-skies, as we look up for this week’s podcast.

The mandatory list of references

• Like an (Air) Boss – A veritable Typhoon of Angels, Bears, Phantoms, Intruders and Mustangs all Fly(ing) to Fight and Win in a minis wargaming Danger Zone – Rocky’s article on Cold War jet-age aircraft combat
• Lee Brimmicombe-Wood on BGG
• JD Webster on BGG

(and probably a few we forgot)

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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 March 2026 ~

Brant is joined by a pair of professional wargaming educators (Ed McGrady and David Banks) to talk about the professional development options for those in the applied / practitioner / professional world as well as a bit about how hobbyists can cross over

Mandatory linkdump!

• Kings College War Studies Department
• MORS Certificates, including their wargaming courses
• Dragoons playlists, where you’ll find the Connections Online playlists
• Wargaming and Resilience Planning MA at Brunel University in Uxbridge/London
• Georgetown University Wargaming Society
• Fundamentals of Wargaming Analysis at JHU
• John Curry at Bath Spa University
• Degree programs as the US Army Command & General Staff College

Got other links to wargaming curricula we should be linking here? Drop them in the comments below!

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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.

27 February 2026 ~

Ardwulf joins the podcast for a discussion about when the bifurcation of wargames and TTRPGs happened, and how & why. Anecdotes aplenty and also assorted assholery abounds.

Links to some of what we discussed

• Old parlour games / proto-RPGs
• Flintlock’s shifty thread on Bluesky
• The Dicing With Dragons book
• The Defense Language Institute in Monterey / The Customs House Plaza
• Talking about megagames back in 2020

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 saddling up 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, including our all-new merchandise shop. 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.