Wargame Design

Wargame Design

Author: Richard H. Berg

Publisher: Hippocrene Books

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9780917852015

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Describes the principles of conflict simulation design and offers the serious enthusiast guidance in designing original games


Tabletop Wargames: A Designers’ and Writers’ Handbook

Tabletop Wargames: A Designers’ and Writers’ Handbook

Author: Rick Priestley

Publisher: Pen and Sword Military

Published: 2016-11-30

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 147389008X

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Unlike chess or backgammon, tabletop wargames have no single, accepted set of rules. Most wargamers at some point have had a go at writing their own rules and virtually all have modified commercially available sets to better suit their idea of the ideal game or to adapt favourite rules to a different historical period or setting. But many who try soon find that writing a coherent set of rules is harder than they thought, while tweaking one part of an existing set can often have unforeseen consequences for the game as a whole. Now, at last, help is at hand. Veteran gamer and rules writer John Lambshead has teamed up with the legendary Rick Priestley, creator of Games Workshop’s phenomenally successful Warhammer system, to create this essential guide for any would-be wargame designer or tinkerer. Rick and John give excellent advice on deciding what you want from a wargame and balancing ‘realism’ (be it in a historical or a fantasy/sci-fi context) with playability. They discuss the relative merits of various mechanisms (cards, dice, tables) then discuss how to select and combine these to handle the various essential game elements of turn sequences, combat resolution, morale etc to create a rewarding and playable game that suits your tastes and requirements


The Craft of Wargaming

The Craft of Wargaming

Author: Jeffrey Appleget

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1682473775

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The Craft of Wargaming is designed to support supervisors, planners, and analysts who use wargames to support their organizations' missions. The authors focus on providing analysts and planners with a clear methodology that allows them to initiate, design, develop, conduct, and analyze wargames. Built around the analytic wargaming construct, organizations or individuals can easily adapt this methodology to construct educational and experiential wargames. The book breaks the wargame creation process into five distinct phases: Initiate, Design, Develop, Conduct, and Analyze. For each phase, the authors identify key tasks a wargaming team must address to have a reasonable chance at designing, developing, conducting, and analyzing a successful wargame. While these five stages are critical to the process of constructing any wargame, it should be understood that the craft of wargaming is learned through active participation, not by reading or watching. This craft must be practiced as part of the learning process, and the included practical exercises provide an opportunity to experience the construction of an analytical wargame. The authors also discuss critical supervisory tasks that are essential to manage the wargaming team's efforts. While the creators are focused on the design and development of the game itself, supervisors must set conditions for the wargame to be a success (best practices) and beware of the pitfalls that may set the wargame up to fail (worst practices). The book demonstrates using the analytical wargaming framework to create relevant and useful planning wargames. It also reinforces using the analytical wargaming framework for seminar wargames that, without rigor, are useless. The book demonstrates the benefits of using the analytical wargaming process to design educational and experiential games.


Zones of Control

Zones of Control

Author: Pat Harrigan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 845

ISBN-13: 026233495X

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A look at wargaming’s past, present, and future—from digital games to tabletop games—and its use in entertainment, education, and military planning. With examples from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Harpoon, Warhammer 40,000, and more! Games with military themes date back to antiquity, and yet they are curiously neglected in much of the academic and trade literature on games and game history. This volume fills that gap, providing a diverse set of perspectives on wargaming’s past, present, and future. In Zones of Control, contributors consider wargames played for entertainment, education, and military planning, in terms of design, critical analysis, and historical contexts. They consider both digital and especially tabletop games, most of which cover specific historical conflicts or are grounded in recognizable real-world geopolitics. Game designers and players will find the historical and critical contexts often missing from design and hobby literature; military analysts will find connections to game design and the humanities; and academics will find documentation and critique of a sophisticated body of cultural work in which the complexity of military conflict is represented in ludic systems and procedures. Each section begins with a long anchoring chapter by an established authority, which is followed by a variety of shorter pieces both analytic and anecdotal. Topics include the history of playing at war; operations research and systems design; wargaming and military history; wargaming’s ethics and politics; gaming irregular and non-kinetic warfare; and wargames as artistic practice.


Successful Professional Wargames: A Practitioner's Handbook

Successful Professional Wargames: A Practitioner's Handbook

Author: John Curry

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 9780244803643

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You will benefit from this book if you are a practitioner of the art of serious wargaming. Done well, the simple act of putting players in an immersive environment, asking them to make decisions and then face the consequences of those in a dynamically evolving narrative generates astounding insights and internalises learning objectives. Yet, as Clausewitz said of war, everything in wargaming is simple, but doing the simplest thing is difficult. This book explains the seemingly simple. It is a detailed guide to designing and delivering successful wargames, whether you apply the technique to Defence, other government departments, business, the emergency services, academia or humanitarian operations. This is important because good wargames save money but, first and foremost, they save lives.


Wargaming for Leaders: Strategic Decision Making from the Battlefield to the Boardroom

Wargaming for Leaders: Strategic Decision Making from the Battlefield to the Boardroom

Author: Mark L. Herman

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0071596895

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If you had the opportunity to probe the future, make strategic choices, and view their consequences before making expensive and irretrievable decisions, wouldn't you take advantage of it? Of course you would. And in a world of asymmetrical conflict, security threats, intense global competition, and economic uncertainty, there is an even higher premium on road-testing plans and strategies--whether they're spearheaded by government organizations, transnational corporations, or emerging megacommunities. Wargaming for Leaders provides a methodology to get at the issues that one leader, no matter how visionary, cannot grasp on his or her own. How? By bringing together the real experts on the topic at hand to wage “cognitive warfare.” Through tapping the collective wisdom surrounding an issue, experts can experience the future in a risk-free environment and find answers to questions that had not been on their radar--often with unexpected and startling results. With examples from the fields of military, corporate, and public policy, three wargaming developers from Booz Allen Hamilton deliver compelling insights on this problem-solving method, including fascinating details on how A large equipment manufacturer determined whether making a merger was strategically right for its business growth, as well as which technology investments it needed to drop A four-star U.S. general tested his war plan for Iraq and uncovered specific fixes that might have prevented a prolonged conflict An increasingly clogged air-traffic system faced a security-versus-convenience issue determined whether military airspace could be used during peak demand periods Wargaming allows organizations of every type and every size to organize information, plot out scenarios, and tap into the collective expertise of participants. The results allow everyone to identify and tackle obstacles, solve problems, and find new ways to innovate and further performance goals. Get ready for the battle of your organizational life--and prepare to reap the spoils of victory.


One-hour Skirmish Wargames

One-hour Skirmish Wargames

Author: John Lambshead

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2018-09-30

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 1526700069

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Many wargamers enjoy the challenge of skirmish games where, instead of the strategy of vast armies portrayed by traditional wargames, the focus is on the tactics of a small unit. However, skirmish rules are often so complex that it can take hours of rolling dice, consulting tables and recording data to recreate what would in reality be a fast and furious firefight lasting just minutes. Now these new rules make it possible to recapture the speed and intensity of these actions where every man, and every second, counts. The basic rules are supported by sections which give special rules and scenarios to capture the flavor of a range of different periods, from Napoleonic to Modern Warfare and beyond with Sci-Fi. From the 95th Rifles scouting for Wellington, Western gunfights and WWI trench raids, through WW2 parachute assaults or Special Forces strikes in Afghanistan, or even Space Marines storming a space station, Squad Firefights elegantly simple system allows you to focus on proper tactical decisions rather than rolling buckets of dice or calculating masses of modifiers.


Simulating War

Simulating War

Author: Philip Sabin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-01-19

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1441162267

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Over the past fifty years, many thousands of conflict simulations have been published that bring the dynamics of past and possible future wars to life. In this book, Philip Sabin explores the theory and practice of conflict simulation as a topic in its own right, based on his thirty years of experience in designing wargames and using them in teaching. Simulating War sets conflict simulation in its proper context alongside more familiar techniques such as game theory and operational analysis. It explains in detail the analytical and modelling techniques involved, and it teaches you how to design your own simulations of conflicts of your choice. The book provides eight simple illustrative simulations of specific historical conflicts, complete with rules, maps and counters. Simulating War is essential reading for all recreational or professional simulation gamers, and for anyone who is interested in modelling war, from teachers and students to military officers.


The Portable Wargame

The Portable Wargame

Author: Bob Cordery

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2016-12-30

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 132690454X

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The Portable Wargame has been developed over the past ten years to meet the needs of wargamers who want a fast, easy to learn, simple to use set of wargames rules that don't require the player to purchase and paint a large collection of figures and that can be staged on a small dinner table, a large coffee table, or something even smaller. The rules are designed to be used with a gridded tabletop made up of squares or hexes.


The Art of Wargaming

The Art of Wargaming

Author: Peter P. Perla

Publisher: US Naval Institute Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780870210501

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The author discusses fundamental principles and techniques governing the design and use of war games.