And we’re back, finally!

By Troy Hill

Well, 2022 was an experience for No Dice No Glory. We were not visited not by the jolly old fat man in the red suit, but by Google Chrome’s red screen of death, citing malware.

In a nutshell, that was caused when we shuffled the site across the same set of interweb servers to a new account as one of our Toms on the steering committee stepped down, and another Tom took over the site hosting responsibilities. And that’s when the Russian Hackers infiltrated and stabbed us with the malware fork of doom.

Even if you see the red screen of death via Google’s Chrome browser, Google says we’re cured. But…

Since we don’t monetize NDNG, our steering committee foots the bill for website and podcast hosting out of our own pockets. We prefer to keep it this way. There are fewer tax forms to fill out. But, that means we sometimes are stabbing in the dark trying to fix problems on the back end.

Fortunately, we’ve added Tom Gall to our Steering Committee, and Tom brings expertise to the server side of the site. Our crack team of Toms discovered that the host that sold us the server space didn’t complete their end of the transfer as well as they should have, and the Russian Hacker cats got back in. Which made Google continue our Red Screen of Doom.

We’re actually fairly fortunate to have all of the Toms we have in our plucky little band of gamers. Tom the Newest (Gall) working with Tom the Chairborne have beaten the server into submission. Finally.

Then we had to convince Google the site was finally cleared of nasty Russian hacker code. THAT is where the current boondoggle is. Google says we’re clean on their security review dashboard… but their main network database won’t update us. We’re hearing that it could take several more weeks.

So, we’re resuming our publishing. For the time being, readers will need to access NDNG with a different browser than Google’s Chrome.

Looking Ahead

All of this downtime gave our steering committee time to reflect on where we want to go in the new year.

As always our focus is on tabletop gaming, with an eye toward computer gaming.

And yes, we are going to continue to ignore the giant 800-pound gorilla, riding the ten-ton elephant in the gaming space (rhymes with morspammer). Too many other sites, youtube channels, podcasts, etc cover GW games in-depth, far better than we could. That’s a noisy, noisy market to get involved in.

Instead, we’re focusing on the plucky upstarts to the middleweights in the gaming space. We will continue to cover games from BattleFront, Warlord Games, Firelock, Mantic, Studio Tomahawk, and even smaller companies/games like ESR, Bello Ludi, etc.

Many have noticed that over the last two years we have been covering traditional board wargames more and more. We plan to expand this more in 2023 and we are looking for more writers who love these games as much as we do.

Podcasts

The podcasts you’ve come to know and respect are returning. Tails of the Sails with Glenn and Tom M will continue, as will Mitch’s continued look at the tabletop gaming space. Troy is working on a sporadic line of pods that will take a look at historical and fantasy games outside of the WWII space that we’ve concentrated on for a while. This may also include discussions with other podcasters, looking behind the scenes at what they do.

In 2022 we invited the guys from the US Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies on a podcast to talk about how they use wargames to educate military officers. We feel this is something our fans love, and we will continue to work on this relationship and bring you more insight into how the military uses wargames for analysis and education.

Outreach 

Over the last few years, the NDNG team has supported a ton of events at conventions such as Historicon and conferences such as Connections. We plan to continue doing this, and you may see our team at a lot more events in 2023.

Join the discussion

The comments section under each of our stories usually has discussions with engaged readers. Your first few replies will need to be approved by a moderator. Civil discussion is always welcome there.

In addition, we’ve got our Discord Server for online discussion on a vast array of topics, as well as evening paint and chats hosted by any number of our contributors. Hop in a voice channel or a written thread and chat with your fellow gamers.

We’ll be phasing out our forums, since they are quickly being overshadowed by the Discord Server.

Overall

What that means is few changes that you’ll notice going forward, but with content continuing:

Tuesdays will be our main podcast drop.

Wednesdays and Fridays will be our main story drop days.

Bonus stories may drop on Mondays, Thursdays, or whenever we have exciting new content. That will normally happen when we can get our hands on pdfs of upcoming releases. BattleFront is excellent at getting us the new releases early. We encourage other game companies to contact Mitch Reed via his email (iprop27@gmail.com) and discuss how we can cover your game’s new releases.

Another area we want to focus our coverage on is the local gaming scene. From small game days to large conventions. If you’d like to submit coverage of your local game day, reach out to our editor, Troy via his email (troyphoto7@gmail.com).

Thanks again for reading, listening, and rolling dice to keep our hobby thriving.

May your tabletop games be plentiful, and your dice hot in the new year!