WARNO Issue #3

Week Ending 1 August 2026

Aug 01, 2026

THE SITUATION

62 New vids this week. Lots to cover. Thirty seven of them clock in as “real wargame videos!” The rest are a diverse blend. From Calendale’s pontification on Elric – all 7+ videos to Mr Bickford doing yoemans work on old Wargame Magazines! aka Moves & F&M! Then a swag of RPG style game vids and a few interviews.

Thirty-seven had a real wargame on the table. The other twenty-five: fantasy and licensed-IP titles (13), hobby talk with no game in front of the camera (8), and magazine flip-throughs (4).

Inside the historical half:

· WWII — 17 videos, 46%

· ACW — 4, 11%

· Early modern (1600s–1700s) — 4, 11%

· WWI — 3, 8%

· Napoleonic — 2, 5%

· 20th-c. naval — 2, 5%

· Modern / political — 2, 5%

· AWI — 1, 3%

· Industrial age (1850–1920) — 1, 3%

· Jacobite Rising (1745–46) — 1, 3%

Seven of those seventeen WWII videos are Bill Needels on his own — Sicily II, Holland ’44, Panzer Battles, posted most days of the week. Without his week, WWII is 10 of 30, a third rather than a half.

Everything below WWII is one or two channels deep. ACW is Rebels Against Rebellion covered twice plus Monocacy and the Line of Battle podcast. WWI is both halves of VUCA’s The Far Seas plus a Tankschlacht unboxing — Cambrai, 1917. The early-modern column is Bickford’s Nine Years War run and a Baltic Empires unboxing. Napoleonic is Hexed And Countered alone at Marengo. The Jacobite row is John Maag prepping a Charlie’s Year campaign (Red Sash).

The audience numbers run the other way from the production numbers. The 17 WWII videos pulled about 5,980 views between them — roughly 350 apiece. The 13 non-historical ones pulled 12,160, about 935 apiece.

Reading the numbers: this is 30-odd curated channels, not the entire hobby. View counts are lifetime-to-Saturday, so a Sunday video has had six more days to accumulate than a Friday one. Just a tid bit as I look at the numbers i.e. I posted a video this afternoon it has 18 views.

Smaller channels with less subs will be hard pressed to clock 4 figure+ view patterns, whereas larger channels that are not Wargame specific can do so with some ease, and draw in non wargamer and wargamer alike views.

Elsewhere it was WBC week — The Players’ Aid filed daily debriefs from Seven Springs for six straight days, which is most of this issue’s blog volume and worth reading as a run rather than as separate posts. They actually wrap that all up tomorrow.

SIGNAL — Under the Radar

Meandering Mike — Avoid Overseas Surprises When Buying Games (A Walk and Talk) Not the biggest small channel, but the most useful video in the gather — and the best comment-to-view ratio of anything this week (~97 views, 17 comments). Mike walks and talks through what importing a wargame now costs an American buyer:

· The de minimis exemption is gone. Orders under $800 used to clear without duty. That’s expired, not renewed.

· Country of origin is what’s assessed, not country of shipment — he’d previously been charged at the Chinese rate on a Chinese-made game imported via Canada.

· A “North American store” is not a promise of a domestic warehouse. He ordered two games from a European publisher’s North-American-flagged storefront, it shipped from Europe, and FedEx presented an import bill of $30.90 — roughly double what he’d paid for shipping — with no warning from carrier or seller.

· The carrier’s admin and processing fees can dwarf the duty itself. Owe twenty cents of duty, get charged five or ten dollars to process it.

His advice: read the fine print on who carries the duty, check where the goods ship from and where they were made, and if you can’t get a straight answer from the seller, don’t order. He credits eBay’s global shipping programme for stating up front when charges are covered. He says three times that it isn’t a political video, and he’s right that it doesn’t need to be — it’s consumer mechanics.

97 views · 26 min —

MISSION — Video: the threads worth pulling

· VUCA Simulations had a busy week. The Far Seas drew an unboxing and first look from Category Solo and a solo playthrough from Hexed And Countered; The Players’ Aid discussed Imperial Elegy: Solo Bots.

· Flying Pig’s Rebels Against Rebellion got an overview from Zilla Blitz and a preview from Hexed And Countered. Flying Pig is running a kickstarter for this strategy card driven game. I have not seen anything on it, but it appears to be a historical Euro set in the ACW around anti succession movements.

· Zilla Blitz also made complexity his August monthly-update topic, off a poll of about 900 responses: medium won at 42%, but 33% said they want their games more complex, not less — the opposite of what he’d predicted, and he says it’s changing what he covers.

· Napoleonic: Hexed And Countered ran Napoleon at War Deluxe Edition (Decision Games) at Marengo across two parts.

· ACW: Wayne Hansen played Early Threatens Washington: Monocacy Junction solo, and MMP’s We’re Not Dead Yet Ep 46 featured Nick Roser on Line of Battle. Nick has a fantastic new design out that is on the PXXX list at MMP.

· WWII: Bill Needels posted a full week on Sicily II plus Panzer Battles and Holland ’44; WARdROBE finished an Old School Tactical East Front scenario; Battlefield Banter closed out Combat Commander: Mediterranean Scenario 21; ASL Academy ran an episode on the morale system.

· Naval / strategic: RvT (Dickie) continued Rule the Waves 3 as Italy.

· Podcasts and interviews: Cardboard Commander put out a Zone of Control episode; Pushing Cardboard interviewed Shayne Logan.

· For newcomers: Seek Out and Play’s Three Types of Print Wargames is a genuinely clean four-minute explainer — hex-and-counter, card-driven, card-only, with a note on each one’s downside. Worth having a link to when someone asks where to start.

MISSION — BLOG: Featured Posts

· The Players’ Aid — WBC 2026 daily debriefs, Days 1–6 plus the series opener. Read as a run.

· The Boardgames Chronicle — Men of Iron: Blood & Roses overview, and Part 4 of the Crusades campaign via C&C Medieval (Ramla).

· Wargaming Weekly — a first win in an AI-adjudicated wargame, reviewing The Price of Hasakah on the Providence platform. — https://wargamingweekly.substack.com/p/the-price-of-hasakah-on-providence-by-experttheory

· Sgt Steiner’s — Khalkhin Gol with Chain of Command 2 at the Ulster Wargames Society.

· Grymauch’s Solo Wargaming Blog — Pony Wars: The Homestead, turns 9–16.

From the field — professional / serious-play corner Standing note: PAXsims covers professional and serious-play wargaming rather than the hobby. It’s here because the two fields borrow from each other constantly, and the professional side is where a lot of design thinking gets tested first. - Wargaming and the perils of LinkedIn — LinkedIn has become the de facto professional network for conflict simulation, and the post examines what that platform’s incentives do to the discourse. - Wargaming in a resilience context — the UK Resilience Academy’s insight paper by Rob Grayston, arguing civil resilience exercising should deliberately borrow matrix games, serious games and megagames from military wargaming. - How to Play a Matrix Game – An Introduction — short instructional video from the wargaming team at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.

NEW FROM BIGBOARD

I posted 2 vids 1 on Fallschirmjaeger and 1 on Ukraine 44. The Third is a quick comment on whats up next…after being all sweaty. You know where to find my stuff.

On the blog this week: - One Hundred Unorthodox Strategies — #5: The Infantry — 1 August - Winter War: The Game That Wins the War Finland Lost — 29 July

SUSTAINMENT — The Full Roundup

Everything that dropped this week, by channel. 62 videos across 24 channels — alphabetical, no ranking.

ASL Academy - Advanced Squad Leader RSS - Episode 52 - Morale System Discussion — 309 views · 51 min · WWII

Battlefield Banter - Combat Commander Mediterranean , by GMT Games, Scenario 21, Episode 3 : the grand finale! — 61 views · 48 min · WWII

Big Board Gaming - rock paper…no scissors:) — 18 views · 2 min - ukraine ’44- turn 4 /1 — 209 views · 2 min - Fallschirmjaeger /10 — 290 views · 2 min · WWII

Bill Needels (Punched) - Sicily II - Airsick? — 20 views · 16 min · WWII - Sicily II - Western Sicily Turn 2 — 49 views · 17 min · WWII - Panzer Battles - Germans Defend without 11th Panzer This Activation (T4A7) — 44 views · 7 min · WWII - Holland ’44 - Link-up at Eindhoven and Cutoff at Valkenswaard (Southern #2 Turn 3) — 49 views · 8 min · WWII - Sicily II - G4 Ever (Western Sicily Turn 1) — 39 views · 14 min · WWII - Panzer Battles - Soviet Full Court Press (T4A6) — 92 views · 9 min · WWII - Western Sicily - Sunday Drive (pregame) — 156 views · 7 min · WWII

Calandale > Note (curation): All wargames, but he editorializes politically - SCREEN his picks, skip the political ones. - Elric Kingdoms — 146 views · 49 min - Elric Empires — 211 views · 78 min - Elric Successor — 232 views · 31 min - Elric Dragon Masters v Usurper — 166 views · 94 min - Elric Bright Empire — 185 views · 14 min - Elric intro — 561 views · 105 min - Mr President review — 1,128 views · 50 min - Mr President 2020b & wrap — 147 views · 116 min

Cardboard Commander - Zone Of Control Podcast | Episode — 365 views · 32 min

Category Solo - The Far Seas - Unboxing & First Look - VUCA Simulations — 140 views · 18 min

Gaming with ER Bickford - Nine Years War Part 3 — 7 views · 15 min - Nine Years War Part 2 — 15 views · 9 min - Nine Years War Part 1 — 27 views · 13 min - Fire & Movement 60 — 21 views · 6 min - SD69 May3 — 13 views · 27 min - Alexandros Command 10 Magazine — 50 views · 17 min - Moves Magazine 95 — 25 views · 7 min

Hexed And Countered - The Far Seas (Vuca Simulations) | Solo Gameplay Part 1 — 108 views · 36 min - August 2026 Content Preview — 546 views · 6 min - Napoleon at War - Deluxe Edition (Decision Games) | Marengo Gameplay Part 2 — 270 views · 82 min · Napoleonic - Rebels Against Rebellion (Flying Pig Games) - Preview — 321 views · 27 min - Napoleon at War - Deluxe Edition (Decision Games) | Marengo Gameplay — 722 views · 52 min · Napoleonic

John Maag - Learning Charlie’s Year - Campaign Prep — 129 views · 95 min

Justegarde - New Arrival - Tankschlacht (Revolution Games) — 652 views · 10 min

Meandering Mike - Avoid Overseas Surprises When Buying Games - A Walk and Talk — 97 views · 26 min

MMP Not Dead Yet - We’re Not Dead Yet Ep 46 feat Nick Roser and Line of Battle! — 1,212 views · 54 min

Pushing Cardboard - Live Cardboard 37 - Shayne Logan Interview — 211 views · 36 min

RvT (Dickie) - 08 Let’s Play Rule the Waves 3 | Coastal Cruiser Battle — 248 views · 38 min - 06 + 07 Let’s Play Rule the Waves 3 Italy | Big Victory + Not So Much — 1,016 views · 54 min

Seek Out and Play - Three Types of Print Wargames — 112 views · 4 min - S4E7: “The Rulebook Revolution” Speak Out & Play - July 2026 — 80 views · 23 min

The Discriminating Gamer (Cody Carlson) - TDG: Sniper Elite: Operation Kraken unboxing with Ray — 210 views · 9 min - TDG: Midway Solitaire — 1,822 views · 12 min - TDG: The Mandalorian: Adventures - Sworn to the Creed unboxing with Ray — 595 views · 12 min - TDG: Enemies of Gotham City — 2,200 views · 19 min - TDG: Star Trek: Captain’s Chair - Second Contact unboxing with Ray — 567 views · 11 min - TDG: Cody’s Top Ten IP Fantasy Games (July 2026) — 5,599 views · 16 min - TDG: Tarawa 1943 Solitaire unboxing with Ray — 918 views · 8 min · WWII

TheGimpyGamer - Kingdom Dungeon Hero Review — 245 views · 13 min

Tony’s Board Life - Fields of Fire 2 Peleliu Mission 1 Part 2 — 138 views · 31 min

WARdROBE - Holland 44 Short Campaign Thoughts — 50 views · 18 min · WWII - Old School Tactical East Front scenario 1 done! — 148 views · 6 min

Wayne Hansen - Let’s Play! Early Threatens Washington: The Battle of Monocacy Junction, July 9 1864 | SOLO GAMEPLAY — 115 views · 82 min · AWI

Wiseguy History - Space Imperia 4x [PC version of GMT’s Space Empires 4x] — 1,244 views · 58 min

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