We Are Coming Nineveh wins a Charlie!

We Are Coming Nineveh has won a 2023 Charles S. Roberts Award for “Best Tactical Game”!

WACN wins a Charlie

GF campaign: Operation Barclay, by Maurice Suckling

Today was the beginning of the crowdfunding campaign via Gamefound for Operation Barclay, Maurice Suckling’s new game on Allied deception operations in the Mediterranean 1942-43.

Very definitely a 2-player game, it includes a lot of bluffing and actual deception by players to move through an interesting deck of intelligence and counterintelligence cards and mechanisms.

I signed up as #231, the game will be over 100% funded in a few hours… [update: it was funded in less than two hours!]

Price for a single copy is 21 Euros and it is published by Salt and Pepper Games, who also published the very clever David Thompson game Resist! about guerrilla warfare in Spain after the end of the Civil War. Both games use the same artist, whose work is quite nice, and the component quality from this publisher is also good.

More on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/404923/operation-barclay

Gamefound page (you can get a good look at the components and download the rulebook here): https://gamefound.com/en/projects/saltandpepper/operation-barclay

I’m looking forward to this, as it is a nice excursion into the background of my alt-hist game Balkan Gamble (see also the missing parts of my Strategy and Tactics article on deception operations in the Med here: Balkan Gambit… the rest of it)

Connections Online 2024 – including panel on urban wargaming!

Most of next week will be taken up with the Connections-Online virtual conference.

The theme is:

Distributed Wargaming — Recent Lessons Learned
With the onset of COVID, distributed wargaming — always of peripheral interest to the professional wargaming community, but rarely its focus — suddenly took center stage. Thrown into the proverbial deep end of the pool, wargaming institutions adapted. Let’s discuss how it happened, what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned from the experience.

And what we do next time.

There will be three days of “core events” Tuesday to Thursday, and ancillary events on Monday and Friday. Core events include, among others:

• a tribute to Peter Perla, to whom the conference is dedicated
• panel presentation on this year’s Zenobia Awards
• a presentation on the new Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory Wargaming Division by Mitch Reed
• a report on gaming used at the CNN Academy, by Rex Brynen
• seminar on analytical gaming using the SWIFT-G software
• panel on “Your Successful Professional Wargaming Career” (too late for me, I’m afraid)

There will also be a playthrough of First Contact!, a megagame, and a Kriegsspiel hosted by Jan Heinemann.

Details

Event site: https://tabletop.events/conventions/connections-online-2024

Get your badge to attend here – it’s $3.00 for 15 lucky early birds, $5.00 for everyone else. All the events are free once you have your badge. https://tabletop.events/conventions/connections-online-2024/badgetypes

Events schedule is here: https://tabletop.events/conventions/connections-online-2024/schedule#?query=

Oh, and…

I’m going to be on a panel on urban wargaming that starts at 1100 EST Wednesday 17 April.

Urban Warfare Wargaming: Past, Present, Future
This experienced panel will look at the timely topic of urban board wargaming from the perspective of a graphic designer, a game designer, an academic researcher specifically studying this topic, and a military practitioner. It will survey from the earliest urban board wargames in the 1970s up through today. This promises to be a don’t-miss panel!

graphic designer = Mike Markowitz

game designer = me

academic researcher = David Burden

military practitioner = it’s a surprise!

Hope to see you there.

We Are Coming Nineveh nominated for a Charlie!

We Are Coming Nineveh has been nominated for a Charles S. Roberts Award for Excellence in Conflict Simulation, in several categories.

I know, I normally do not post about awards – mostly selfishly because my stuff is not nominated as it’s too obscure, or because I have no interest in or experience of the games that are nominated. But this year We Are Coming Nineveh has been nominated, and its designers Juliette le Menaheze and Harrison Brewer have been nominated under the new “Chad Jensen Memorial Breakthrough Designer Award” for a first design by a new designer.

Juliette and Harrison’s initial work in putting this game together was so impressive as they had never done anything like this before! Their careful research, choice of mechanisms and presentation of the design’s intentions overall should be recognized.

You don’t have to vote for everything on the ballot, but you should vote for this one thing at least.

The game has also been nominated in the categories of Best Modern Game, Best Tactical Game, and Game of the Year.

Pick one per category, and those winners will be determined by the results of the public ballot, which is now open at https://forms.gle/SCPjWvDp7abnc9Ty5.

The ballot will be open until Midnight, Eastern Time, on May 13, 2024. Please vote, but only once!

QUICK Junior @ 1 PPCLI!

One thing that has been occupying my attention the past month or two has been the latest development of the Quick Urban Integrated Combat Kriegsspiel … QUICK Junior!

I was contacted by LCOL Cole Petersen, the commander of 1st Battalion PPCLI (Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, of the Canadian Army) in Edmonton. He has used simple games of his own design to do some professional military education with his officers in the past (see this Paxsims blog entry: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2022/09/01/1cmbg-homebrew-wargame-development/), and he asked me to design a scaled-down version of the QUICK to cover action by a single battle group (a task force built around a reinforced infantry battalion, as part of a brigade) instead of a division… two echelons down, so the maneuver units are platoons, not battalions.

I put something together for him quickly and it worked well I think, in the solo tests I gave it; the mechanisms are still much the same. I made a new map for it, a hex map (350 m per hex) of downtown Daugavpils, a city of about 85,000 in southern Latvia. A fair number of Canadian troops are stationed in the country, not far from Riga… right now they are the leadership for a multi-national brigade, but if things went sideways this is possibly the general area where the 1 PPCLI battle group would fight, against the 25th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade based in Luga. Daugavpils is the second biggest city in Latvia and there is an important rail junction and bridge over the Daugava river there. Otherwise it is not remarkable for anything except it was a Napoleonic fortress town, the birthplace of Mark Rothko (a famous American abstract painter) and its recently opened Museum of Smakovka (homebrewed alcohol, or maybe it’s disinfectant).

(yes, the counters are mounted on folded cardboard, with a thumbtack for a base… brilliant!)

Anyway, this week LCOL Petersen tried it out with his officers at a PD session and it worked very well! Five simultaneous games were going – one per company – with two Russian wins, two NATO wins, and a draw.

The officers were engaged in the game and talking tactics and planning processes shown in the game, from the initial CONOPS or CONcept of OPerations to understanding the cubes and matrix as representative of the limitations of time, attention and resources as well as the need to organize, prioritize and if necessary re-orient the plan. They also thought the game’s use of Enablers was an excellent mechanism for understanding the weighting of main effort and the balance between pushing resources down vs. centrally controlling them.

He will try it again at a later date with a larger scenario, but it worked this time. I’m proud and excited to have made something that’s of use to my own country’s Army!

Interview: Giochi sul Nostro Tavolo

Over at the blog Giochi sul Nostro Tavolo (Games on Our Table), Davide Clari has posted an interview he did with me a while back.

Go have a read of it! (Italian and English versions are posted)

Brian Train. L’attento lavoro del War Game Designer [Lavorare per Gioco – Around the World]

The post is illustrated with some covers of my games, and also the first “shelfie” I have ever done, and which is at the top of this post.

Bottom shelf is my folio, baggie and magazine games, plus a few copies of Guerrilla Checkers.

Middle shelf is boxed published stuff.

Top shelf is stuff I’m either working on or haven’t formally published yet, plus a box of miscellaneous game bits.

District Commander ZNO: Vassal module available!

Emma Carter has just uploaded a Vassal module for District Commander: ZNO.

https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:District_Commander:_ZNO

Thanks to her work, there are now Vassal modules for all four games in the District Commander series.

At this point, I do not see myself making new games in the series, at least not in the near future… I am occupied with too many other projects right now… though there are a lot of conflicts I would like to profile using this system!

I hope you will make use of these modules.

District Commander Binh Dinh: new Vassal module

Many thanks to Emma Carter, there is now a Vassal module for play of District Commander Binh Dinh!

https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:District_Commander_Binh_Dinh

Emma also created the Vassal module for District Commander Kandahar.

https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:District_Commander_Kandahar

New book: Paper Time Machines by Maurice Suckling

Coming soon from Routledge Publishing, an academic book publisher :

https://www.routledge.com/Paper-Time-Machines-Critical-Game-Design-and-Historical-Board-Games/Suckling/p/book/9781032416915#

Available for pre-order in July, and will ship in August.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Maurice for some time and assisted him with research and fact-checking for this book.

To some of you, there will not be much new as far as the history of the hobby goes, but the middle sections of the book are full of practical advice on useful directions and methods of historical board game design, like Engelstein’s book on board game mechanics but more focused on historical wargames. It’s further illustrated by case studies of three of his own board games – I’m particularly looking forward to Operation Barclay.

The final chapters address the larger issues in the hobby, and – again full disclosure – my work does get a few mentions in Chapter 23.

Here is the fluff ‘graph:

James Dunnigan’s memorable phrase serves as the first part of a title for this book, where it seeks to be applicable not just to analog wargames, but also to board games exploring non-expressly military history, that is, to political, diplomatic, social, economic, or other forms of history. Don’t board games about history, made predominantly out of (layered) paper, permit a kind of time travel powered by our imagination? Paper Time Machines: Critical Game Design and Historical Board Games is for those who consider this a largely rhetorical question; primarily for designers of historical board games, directed in its more practice-focused sections (Parts Two, Three, and Four), towards those just commencing their journeys through time and space, engaged in learning how to deconstruct and to construct paper time machines.

Here is the table of contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Part One: Context

Chapter 2: What Is Critical Game Design?
Chapter 3: What Are Historical Simulations?
Chapter 4: A Brief History of Board Wargames
Chapter 5: A Briefer History of Pol-Mil Wargames
Chapter 6: An Even Briefer History of Non-Wargame Historical Board Games

Part Two: Design Process & Tools

Chapter 7: Overall Process
Chapter 8: Devising A Thesis
Chapter 9: Common Components & Major Mechanics
Chapter 10: Major Card Functions & Metaphors
Chapter 11: Board Design
Chapter 12: Development & Publication

Part Three: Designing Historical Board Wargames

Chapter 13: Historical Board Wargame Design: Reference Books & Conventions Overview
Chapter 14: Design Conventions: Units
Chapter 15: Design Conventions: Combat Resolution
Chapter 16: Design Conventions: Movement, Morale, & More
Chapter 17: Design ‘Unconventions’

Part Four: Designing Non-Wargame Historical Board Games

Chapter 18: Case Study #1: Operation Barclay
Chapter 19: Case Study #2: Crisis: 1914
Chapter 20: Case Study #3: Peace 1905

Part Five: Selected Critical Topics

Chapter 21: Two Unsolvable Problems in Historical Board Game Design
Chapter 22: War Stories: Storytelling and Wargame Design
Chapter 23: The Postcolonial Turn
Chapter 24: Paper Beats Silicon

Film: War Game

Now here’s an interesting thing… screening at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Ad copy:

A bipartisan group of U.S. defense, intelligence, and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations participate in an unscripted role-play exercise in which they confront a political coup backed by rogue members of the U.S. military, in the wake of a contested presidential election.

Award-winning filmmakers Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber seize a unique opportunity to bring audiences tableside to a simulation that dramatically escalates the threat posed by January 6, 2021. With the grip of a thriller, War Game posits active-duty military breaking ranks to join an insurrection that soon spreads to other state capitals, yielding a chilling moment when it’s unclear whether the president fully commands the armed forces. The simulation’s outcome hinges on several inflection points, from the government’s capacity to counter the disinformation that’s effectively spread by the insurgent side to the potential invocation of the Insurrection Act (i.e., the last resort). While the exercise served to stress test our institutions, the film is a critical wake-up call, underscoring the urgent need for bipartisanship in safeguarding American democracy.

The event was organized by the Vet Voice Foundation, an organization that says it has 1.5 million members and works to involve veterans in politics and civil affairs.

I think the specific connection here is that one of the VVF’s senior advisors is MG (ret) Paul Eaton, who was involved in the 2020 Transition Integrity Project, a series of political scenario exercises in the United States involving over 100 current and former senior government and campaign leaders, academics, journalists, polling experts and former federal and state government officials.

The exercises included several matrix games. Rex Brynen wrote about them in his Paxsims blog here: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/tag/transition-integrity-project/

From the description I’m not sure if this is a film of an unfolding matrix game, but it could be.

Anyway, it is likely that this film will become available to view online after the Festival; if I hear anything about it I will post as the idea of a political coup by members of the military is one of those recurring fever-dream scenarios in American popular culture.

https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6569fa68fac9f4522ac0337c