Off again, off again, jiggety-jig…

On Monday I am going to Washing Tundy Sea, for the 2018 iteration of the Connections conference on professional wargaming.

https://connections-wargaming.com/connections-2018/

I’ll be at National Defense University at Fort McNair… among other things, facilitating a gamelab table discussion and giving a short seminar on “Perspectives on Counterinsurgency Gaming” (largely my usual talk on how games on modern irregular warfare are rare and subversive, and don’t get no respect because they upset people for a variety of reasons when they pay attention to them at all… so you’re not missing much if you’ve heard it from me before).

Also, demonstration/participation games of Guerrilla Checkers, Second Lebanon War and We Are Coming, Nineveh (Mosul urban combat game).

Looking forward to seeing many of the Usual Suspects again!

Going to be hot (32-35 degrees) and humid (with two days of thunderstorms). Quite a change from Arizona (though I hear the monsoon season has started there now).

Probably won’t be posting from there as I will be working off a teeny tiny tablet; more when I get back.

Advertisements

Ten Busy Days Away

 

Wow, that was a very busy trip, nearly the last one of a very busy year!

On Saturday 2 September I flew to London, a 9 hour flight. I arrived at about 1200 Sunday 3 September local time but 0400 body time… I got to the student residences at King’s College London (just across Waterloo Bridge from the Strand Campus where the conference was, very convenient but also what the British call “cheap and cheerful”), unpacked and went out to get a few things I needed (snacks, an adapter for the wall socket adapter I had bought in Canada but which proved to be the wrong one, and a new portable umbrella to replace the one I had bought last time I was in London in 2013 and carried back this time, but which somehow got lost or escaped in the last 20 miles before arriving). Then I tried to get some sleep… to avoid getting the jetlag that plagued me last time, I took a sleeping pill for the first couple of nights. Normally I do not use them, but it seemed to do the trick this time. (Of course, now I am back but my brain is still 8 hours in the future, so it’s harder re-adjusting now.)

On Monday I went for a bit of sightseeing… to Ian Allen Ltd. nearby to have a look at their very idiosyncratic and particular stock of military history reference and research books (really, this is the place to go if you must have a book on SS parade helmets RIGHT NOW), and they seem to have every Osprey book ever printed. I got a “BEWARE OF THE TRAINS” mug for Akito, from the Trainspotters’ section of the store. Then to Hackney, to get some tickets for a puppet show on a barge on the Thames River that Friday night…but the office they advertised there was just a house where they kept props. I did get things straightened out but saw more of Hackney than I intended to, though I did get to go by 10 Martello Street, once the home of Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records – it is still artists’ studios.

“The Death Factory”, they called it. Oh, those crazy kids….

I also went to the British Film Institute on Southbank, the Tate Modern, and very quickly to the Imperial War Museum – I would go back there later.

Tuesday was the “megagame” before the conference proper – an East Asia crisis simulation game called Dire Straits, that involved nearly 100 players and was set up and very ably run by Rex Brynen and Jim Wallman. Rex did a very good writeup of the form and intention of the exercise here: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2017/09/09/dissecting-dire-straits/

They gave me the coveted role of Kim Jong Un, in which position I oversaw a team of very clever people who came up with some brilliant ideas, as we conspired to make trouble and so ensure the autonomy and integrity of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Me looking Dear Leader-like. Photo by Tom Mouat.

As you can see by the photo, we were also playing at the same time an elaborate side-game of whose faction was gaining or losing power through representation in the organs of DPRK government. Part of this was the Obsequious Loyalty Forms which had to be completed by each player on my team each turn, to comply with a task I had set them – e.g. write a haiku about me, or draw a picture of the statue of me they would erect on their properties – for which they would be rewarded or punished. During my time in the catbird seat (which I did not dare leave during the entire four hours of the exercise) I had only two assassination attempts against my person, and one challenge on the floor of the Central Committee. Another thing I did was have them applaud everything I decided, which worked to freak out everyone in the rest of the large room as bursts of loud and sustained applause would erupt randomly from the North Korean corner.

At the beginning of the game they played a short video which detailed the events that had-will happen(ed) in each involved country (USA, Japan, the Koreas, Russia, China, Taiwan, etc.) the next few years between now and the time of the game.

The background music that played when they got to North Korea was “99 Luftballons” by Nena (remember that one?) and without realising it we had a balloon-themed time of it:

• The head of the Air Force drew an especially poor statue of me watering the World Garden of Peace and Cooperation, so we picked on a senior officer of that service to be tied to a weather balloon and set free to drift away – his frozen corpse dropped and shattered into a million bits on Russian territory, but they were dissuaded from regarding that as a hostile act.
• Later, Russia and China leaned on us not to do any more ground-based missile launches (our first move in the game was to do a test launch of a MIRV device on a ballistic missile, which succeeded and rather set the cat amongst the pigeons), so we hit on a low-tech way of skirting it: take the test missile aloft with large weather balloons, drop it and fire it in mid-air – we got a satellite-killer up into low-earth orbit that way.
• South Korea was bombarding our people and spreading dissension through propaganda broadcasts while moving forces up nearer the DMZ, so we decided to make a peaceful riposte. All DPRK schoolchildren were given a piece of fruit and the day off school to build small balloons to which were tied messages of peace, friendship and praise for the Dear Leader (again, written by members of my staff) and released to float south when the winds were right. Incidentally, the balloons were all made with strips of aluminum foil in them, so when they were released the South Korean military radars were completely spoofed by this strange blobby cloud of something drifting towards them over the border… they panicked, but not enough.

We did other things later in the game like hack Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, which made him pretty mad (even though he was not played by a person in the game; his decisions were the resultant of sets of policy vectors set and pushed by members in the large US Cabinet on a game board, which I thought was a brilliant touch), offer the USA shipments of food to help with its food bank problem, and condemn in the press a SEAL team’s failed attempt to sabotage our SSBN research program as “sneaky and moist.”

We had fun, though it was a serious exercise too – for me, it was a very intense time as crisis after crisis came in, needing to be dealt with.

The BBC did a story on it, even: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-41172485?SThisFB

After supper was an informal game session, where I brought Colonial Twilight to show and play – one of the few copies in the UK at the time.

The next day was the official beginning of the conference – the usual plenary sessions broken up by tea breaks, which were necessary in my view to allow the socializing that allows these kinds of things to progress and grow stronger. In the afternoon was a Games Fair, which was an organized time for people to bring their game designs to show and play. There were games on topics ranging from hospital triage and cyber strategy to a future war against Hezbollah and naval warfare. Bob Cordery took some nice pictures here: http://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.ca/2017/09/connections-uk-2017-games-fair.html

Photo: Bob Cordery

Bob also played in my five-player game of Caudillo, which went down very well despite my having forgotten a few minor rules. The two women on the right of the photo were business students from Venezuela and obviously weren’t fooled by the game’s setting in the city of “Maracas”, and its objective of determining a stable successor in power to “Jesus Shaves”.

That evening there was a second session of the Games Fair, and I taught a group of five guys through a session of Colonial Twilight. Two of them had never played a COIN system game before so it was a slow start, but we got all the way through a campaign before having to pack it in.

Photo: Ivan Seifert(?)

The next day I chaired a plenary session on “wargame design and analysis”. Rex and Jim, two of my favourite madmen, presented on the design and content of megagames in general, with commentary and analysis of how Tuesday’s game had gone. They were followed by a talk on the state of Swedish professional wargaming, and another on the risks and pitfalls encountered in playing through a game on nuclear missile defence. If nothing else, gaming these sorts of things points out how easily and quickly sides can be misunderstood, and actions and intentions distorted.

Mmmm… thinky thinky. (photo: Bob Cordery)

The last major activity was a breakout session in which we separated into several groups and brainstormed ideas for gaming out aspects of future conflict (of any type) in “The High North” which is one of the topics the British Ministry of Defence is concerned about as a near- to mid-future theatre. My group went with an idea for a game design that would explore the dimensions of conflict between indigenous peoples in the far north and the other forces and complications that would arrive, in the wake of a changing climate. I think I will be taking some time to ponder this seriously later.

That was Thursday, and the end of the conference… though a bunch of us settled at a nearby pub to have a drink or two and do some more of that necessary gettoknowyou that (also necessarily) tends to get pushed aside in the structure of a conference.

Friday I shifted out of student digs and to my stepsister’s place in Islington. I had a late breakfast with Rex Brynen, and we had an excellent talk at a very nice place in St. Pancras station, near a large statue called “The Meeting” and the point where the high-speed trains leave for Europe (another thing that did not exist when I was in the UK in the 80s). That night we went out to the west end of the city to Richmond, where we saw a puppet play on a barge moored in the Thames (in the winter they move it into the city near Regent’s Canal). It was very well done and was all about how one should never put their trust in poets, which I thought a good theme for any medium.

Saturday I went to Tesco Superstore, a large grocery store in Lambeth, to get a large number of chocolate bars for Lianne… they sell a cheap dark chocolate that is really good, so I ended up getting three and a half pounds of it. Then I carried all that over to the Imperial War Museum.

Front of the IWM, featuring a pair of guns from a battleship.

This was one of the best military museums I’ve ever been to, not just because of the quality of the artifacts on display but also by the thought that obviously went into the different exhibits. This museum is not the expected dusty closet of retired regimental colours and nostalgic battle scenes in oil paint by retired regimental officers; it’s far more about the aftereffects of conflicts and wider lessons learned (or not). As an example, the main exhibit that covered the Falklands featured the uniform and effects of a war artist who went with the troops, and the original Spitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher.

I had to leave from there and travel to the Isle of Dogs, to Fabian’s place where we would do further play of Caudillo, as we did back in 2013. (Playtesting Dios O Federacion)

We had a good time and the group made some great suggestions for turning this into an even more personally involving exercise for the players.

My arm flew out of joint…

when James won the game.

My arm went out of joint when James won the game (photos: Richard Barbrook).

Sunday I traveled all the way out to Dagenham, a town far out in the Greater London suburbs. I spent the day with David Turczi, with whom I’ve been working all year to design Nights of Fire, the thematic sequel to David’s game Days of Ire on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The game is pretty much there, we are just doing small tweaks and sealing and caulking against Stupid Gamer Tricks (which I continue to be quite bad at predicting or perceiving).

I’ve learned a lot from David about new methods and mechanics to put into games to make them more interesting to players, without sacrificing too much of the historicity.

Also, we played a mid-length game of Mark Herman’s Churchill, a very clever 3-player game. I did too well as Churchill and Stalin won the peace.

The woman on the left was posing for her boyfriend, not photobombing me.

Monday was the last day, and my stepsister took me to lunch at a nice place in Camden Lock. This is a somewhat touristy area with a lot of open-air and semi-outside markets with neat stuff in them. That night I packed up and we sat and watched The Devils, a demented Ken Russell film I had never had the chance to see. It was a good day to relax and start to decompress.

I didn’t get to sleep that night though, and was up at 0500 to catch the first tube to Heathrow Airport, because security there can take a very long time to get through. As it turned out, it wasn’t bad and there was no rush after all. The plane ride back was 9 1/2 hours (jet stream or head winds I guess) and quite boring; I watched three rather unmemorable movies. I also caught a cold because the whole row next to me was occupied by a Dutch family who all had the same virus, and whose darling little plague-vessel children hadn’t ever been taught to cover their mouths when coughing.

Come to think about it, maybe they were not Dutch but Phlegmish.

Well, that was the trip – busy and some intense times but I enjoyed myself quite a bit, came away with many new ideas and intend to go back next year!

 

 

Back to Blighty

Nope, not this time.

On Saturday I’m leaving for London, to attend this year’s Connections-UK conference at King’s College London. I’ll be chairing a plenary session on “wargame design and analysis”, and participating in some other shenanigans!

Other than that, I am taking a couple of extra days to see friends and collaborators, and play some more games – I am taking Colonial Twilight, Caudillo, the Brief Border Wars quad, the Freikorps re-do (still haven’t decided on a name) and Nights of Fire for show and tell and test-driving.

Really looking forward to seeing London again! Hope the jet-lag isn’t as bad as last time.

Posting may be spotty as I will be working off a tablet and it’s hard to type on it. I’ll be home on the 13th. Be good, now….

Connections 2014 AAR

Over on Grogheads.com, I wrote an account of Connections 2014.
Short, boring, copiously but fuzzily illustrated.
But it was a good conference, even if I ended up staying awake for 40 hours to get there!

http://grogheads.com/?p=5806

Link to presentation script and slides

Picture is less fuzzy than my mind was, thanks to jetlag and sleep deprivation!

In case you were having trouble finding this:

https://brtrain.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/abstracted-for-your-attention-script1.docx

https://brtrain.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/abstracted-for-your-attention-slides.pdf

Thanks!

Connections 2012 AAR

 

 DATE: 9 August, 2012

SUBJECT: After Action Report – Exercise CONNECTIONS 2012

FROM: Brian Train

TO: Dear Readers

CC: Dear Linkers

 1. PURPOSE:

 CONNECTIONS is an annual conference on civilian and military wargaming. 2012 marked the 19^th consecutive year this conference had been held. This year the conference was hosted by the Centre for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL), a department of the National Defense University located at Fort McNair, Washington DC. The general purpose of the action was for this writer to deploy from home station in Victoria, Canada, participate in the Connections 2012 annual wargaming conference with host nation (HN) personnel in Washington DC, and to redeploy to Victoria.

 Key tasks during the exercise were to:

• Attend and participate in presentations and discussions during the conference;
• Meet new people and strengthen connections with prior acquaintances;
• Conduct a major “show and tell” of the relevant design work I have been doing over the last year;
• Facilitate a working group in the Game Lab event, wherein conference participants collectively discussed the opening stages of how to design an educational game on a disaster response situation (for these purposes, the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti).

 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 This exercise was conducted in five phases:

 (i) Pre-deployment Phase: 1 June – 16 July 2012

 In the pre-deployment phase, the focus of training was on logistical preparations for deployment and redeployment, and preparing game designs for the “game demos” part of the conference. Some time was spent doing preliminary reading and planning for the Game Lab event.

  (ii) Deployment Phase:  17 July – 22 July 2012

17 July –  On arrival at the Victoria Airport  at 0dark30, it was discovered that the flight to Los Angeles was cancelled. After considerable time spent waiting in line and with an agent, emplaned for Vancouver BC, where I sat for several hours before emplaning for San Francisco, followed by a flight to Los Angeles. Arrived over six hours late; however, the rail portion of the deployment was the following day so there was no worry about making a connection.

 18-20 July – travel to Union Station in Los Angeles to catch the afternoon train to Chicago, called the Southwest Chief. Travelling with Joe Miranda (editor of Strategy and Tactics, World at War and Modern War magazines, the world’s most prolific wargame designer, bon vivant, raconteur and inveterate punster). I’d never taken a long train trip before. Accommodation on the train was a roomette, which consisted of two chairs facing each other that converted into a bed at night, while a second bunk could be swung down from the ceiling. It was awfully hot so it was not easy to get enough sleep. And finally, 28 miles short of Chicago after travelling over 2,600 miles from Los Angeles, the engine packed it in – I think we just ran out of gas but it’s Amtrak, they don’t have to explain what happened. We waited three hours in a stifling hot car that we could not leave with no power and windows that did not open, until they sent out an engine to push us into Chicago very slowly.

 After a pre-planned night and day in Chicago, we took the train the rest of the way to Washington DC. After crossing the Mississippi everything was much greener and bumpier than the West, which looked fairly badly affected by the drought. The hotel in Washington was a block from the Navy Yard Metro stop, which was convenient, and a bit more than a mile from the National Defense University. We usually caught rides though, as it was over 95 degrees and humid all the time we were there it would have been a pretty hot walk.

 (iii) Employment Phase: 23 July – 26 July 2012

 Conduct of the conference at National Defense University, Washington DC. I’ve outlined the entire agenda, with comments and rambling from my notes (in italics) on the parts I attended.

 Day 1, Monday, 23 July

 1200-1600       Optional

• Wargaming 101”, Mr. Matt Caffrey, Col USAFR (ret), AFMC
• “U.S. National Defense 101”, John Gresham, author
• “Wargame Design 101”, Joseph Miranda, wargame designer, editor (I attended the latter part of this seminar – Joe introduced the process he goes through in designing a game, from concepts to counter graphics, using two recent designs (Fail-Safe and the Commando game system) for illustration. It appeared to be well attended and there were lots of audience questions.)
• Self Guided Working Tour of Fort McNair  (that should read “walking” – I already made the joke last year about whether we would be expected to pick up cigarette butts and other trash while on the tour)

 1600-1800        Ice Breaker (things on sticks, cheese and crackers, wraps and stuff. It was good to see so many people I don’t see except at this conference: Mike Garrambone, Peter Perla, Mike Markowitz, Roger Mason, Matt Caffrey of course, Stephen Downes-Martin, to name just a few. I met a few new people as well, including John Prados, a designer whose work I’ve liked for a long time (some of his more interesting titles, for me, are Bodyguard Overlord, Campaigns of Napoleon, The Great War 1914-18, Kanev, Monty’s D-Day, Panzerkrieg, Pearl Harbor, Spies, Warsaw Rising, and Year of the Rat. He autographed my copy of his book Pentagon Games for me.)

 

1800-2000        Optional, Hands on Introduction to Wargaming (Prados was showing a prototype of his new game Set Europe Ablaze, on the French Resistance. I didn’t learn much about how it worked but it looked very interesting.)

 

Day 2, Tuesday, 24 July

 0800 – 0810      Welcome

            Prof. L. Erik Kjonnerod, Center for Applied Strategic Learning, NDU

 0810 – 0950      Keynote Addresses

• Dean Robert Rubel, Dean of Naval Warfare Studies, Naval War College (from notes: the intangible aspects of war and wargaming have mushroomed, making objective calculations less relevant; also, there is less time to play games and learn from the experiences. Only a human can do qualitative analysis of data generated by a wargame; experienced academics and players are required to analyse why players made the decision they did. Just accept in the end that there is no perfect rational objectivity – computers themselves may be rigid and consistent, but their software is in the end written by humans. Future challenges include cyberspace (the services don’t seem to be very interested though every game is completely dependent on computers and “disruptive” warfare (insurgency, commerce raiding, 4GW generally).
• Prof Phil Sabin, King’s College London, Wargame Designer, Author (transmitted over the Net from London. From notes:
  • Dunnigan was wrong (in saying in 1990s that manual wargaming was on the way out; it’s not because it’s just as good as ever for wargames, in its ways);
  • Rubel was wrong (in saying that wargaming should become a profession or discipline; it should be thrown open as widely as possible, to let different ideas contend);
  • Perla was wrong (in saying that the purpose of wargaming was to prepare us for Black Swan events; every wargame, played many times will generate a range of events, with outliers, like any other experimental trial. Actually, I think Perla was saying that wargaming is there to train us in flexibility and expect the unexpected, realising that Black Swans do happen but cannot be planned for specifically);
  • Sabin was wrong (in his first book Lost Battles that attempted to show through games that there was some kind of consistent dynamic among ancient battles – he may or may not have been right, but his work has been almost totally ignored by historians who have no idea wargaming even exists or is acceptable).
• Dr.. William Lademan, Director, WGing Div, USMC Warfighting Lab (from notes: Wargaming as a substrate for Innovation – he explained about the USMC Wargaming Division and its work on strategic and operational issues with the purpose of creating doctrine, not education or training games. The issue for the USMC in the new AirSea Battle is its Operational Access Concept: how to face different threats as forces approach an objective from the sea, then working with the Army to place and maintain forces ashore.)

 1010 – 1030     Intro to Connections Game Lab

             Co-Chairs: Rex Brynen & Deirdre Hollingshed

 1030 – 1200    Needs pull, Defense Decision Support Wargaming Today

• Approaches to Title X Gaming: Concepts or Capabilities, Shaun Burns, Naval War College
• Wargaming In Support of Science and Technology Decision Making, Paul Vebber, Naval Underseas Warfare Center
• Aids to Effective Contingency Planning, Westy Westenhoff, Col USAF (ret) (“In preparing for battle, I have found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable” – Dwight D. Eisenhower)

 1200 – 1300      Lunch & Introduction to Wargame Demos

  1300 – 1430      Wargame Demos               

• Brian Train; board games (This was my moment! I showed: District Commander; Guerrilla Checkers (manual and Android versions, which I had set up on an emulator running on my netbook); Kandahar; Palace Coup; Third Lebanon War; and Uprising. This is all work done since last year, not including the hobby games Scheldt Campaign and the work-in-progress A Distant Plain. I have been a busy boy. I had to show all this on one big table so it was all a bit too crowded and I think people were a bit put off by it – also, the manual wargames were in a back-alley classroom that was hard to find, while the computer games were given space in the (albeit noisier) foyer.)
• Mike Priest; miniatures (guy never showed up)
• BAE Systems; sandtable (???)
• Skip Cole; case study (Skip decided not to demo an OSP project he had done with the Coast Guard)
• Chris Fowler; JFSC; Advanced Joint Model (this was one of the computer games displayed; I was going to refill my water bottle when I stopped to look and he introduced himself as he was packing up, saying that the model ran on a Humdinger Celeron 3.4 with 5 gigs of Frammistan, but could also work in parallel using Hooper-Bloob algorithms, etc. – honestly, it just went by me. So I introduced myself, “Hi, I’m Brian Train and I work in shirt cardboard and Hi-Liter markers.” Then we just looked at each other.)
• Phil Haussmann; CNA, IW Tactical game (didn’t see this as I was busy demonstrating)

 1430 – 1600      Panel Discussions (two tracks)

 Opportunities push, developments/potential of popular wargaming

• Miniatures/Figure, Alan Zimm (missed this as I was busy packing up my demo games)
• Print/Board, John Prados, WG designer, historian (also, Joe Miranda and Al Nofi – I caught this part of the presentation after taking some time to pack up all my stuff. There was palpable nostalgia in the room as the discussion veered back from time to time on games past. Prados started by talking about Blue on Blue incidents and how they were never featured in games, both professional and hobby varieties – publishers are just as conservative and opinionated in their way as wargame sponsors. And of course, the irony that on this day in 1944, General Lesley McNair, for whom Fort McNair is named, was killed when the Army Air Force dropped its bombs short in the airstrikes preparing the way for Operation Cobra.)
• Computer, Paul Vebber (Paul participated via webcam since his employer did not want him to travel there. He talked about how computer games are tending towards the mutable, since mods changing the rules can be written and downloaded (maybe true, but not in substantial ways, and it’s prone to cause just as many problems with the intricate code). He also talked about things like the “gamification” of self-improvement and education, the Big Thing right now (see Jane McGonigal etc.), but I agree with him that this can only go so far.)

 Perspectives from Professional Military Education Institutions

• Anders Frank, Swedish National Defence College
• Ellie Bartels, CASL, “Innovation in Joint Military Education Gaming: GEMSTONE”
• Stephen Downes-Martin, NWC, “Boss, Players and Sponsor: the Three Witches of Wargaming                       

1620 – 1900     Connections Game Lab Practicum: Conference splits into groups and accomplishes initial wargame design, while attendees who are not in a design group may wander between groups. 

 (This was my other big job for the conference, facilitating Group “B” which was about 15 or 20 people (number reduced itself over time, especially after the dinner break). I hadn’t facilitated any group discussions for some time, and I think I was a bit too reticent and “Canadian” to interrupt the few people who did most of the talking.

 However, in about 2 ½ hours of hard talking we got as far as identifying the primary and secondary learning objectives of the game, the intended audience, the primary actors in the game, the sectors the actors could affect and their attributes, non-player actors, and a list of issues to pick up on later (e.g. the appropriate role of earthquake survivors themselves, game mechanics, victory conditions, variables and their relative importance, first and second order effects of game actions to incorporate the Law of Unintended Consequences, population migration, variable starting conditions, etc.). Basically, what we were thinking of was a card-based game with at least five players, aimed at players at mid-level positions in a military, diplomatic or NGO.

 I was very lucky in having a first-class SME in the group – David Becker, who was Political Counselor for the US Embassy in Haiti when the earthquake hit. I also want to thank Jeremy Antley and Sean Brady, who took excellent notes and made some great suggestions. It was also a privilege to meet Major Tyrell Mayfield, USAF, who was SME for another group but is on his way to Afghanistan for a deployment as a Combat Aviation Advisor – his blog at http://www.thekabulcable.com/ is excellent.)

 1800 – 1900      Break for dinner/Overview of Evening Wargames

 1900 – 2100    Evening Wargames (Volko Ruhnke came in after a full day of teaching to show people A Distant Plain in its current form. People were very interested in this and I think it will be a big hit. It’s about time for an Afghanistan game, just as things are starting to wind down for the Coalition there.)

 Day 3, Wednesday, 25 July

 0800 – 0930     Panel discussion: Methods and Application of Tomorrow’s Wargames (two tracks)

 Innovation from the Defense Wargame Community

• Rebecca Goolsby, Ph.D. Office of Naval Research (from notes: spoke on social media, data nd gaming and how the three can be used and analyzed. Interesting examples of how social media (Facebook and Twitter) were used in two exercises: a fake tsunami in Montenegro and an exercise with the California National Guard in locating things in the desert. Interesting point in sentiment analysis of tweets: throw away all the English-language ones, cut it down to 3,000-20,000 tweets, and do keyword searches to find out issues – military analysts need to be trained to do this sort of thing.)
• Yuna Wong, Marine Corps Combat Development Command (from notes: ethnographic observations of a seminar wargame, in this case one carried out by Centre for Naval Analysis after the separation of Sudan. Described how players settled into their roles, engaged with Control (as a super-player), made play more complex as the game went on, and acknowledged the pre-existing social network among players before the game (e.g. deference shown towards Sudanese players who were significant figures in their own right in their home country.))
• Zygmunt F. Dembek, Ph.D., M.S., M.P.H., COL, AUS (Ret) “War games for public health disasters: using war game principles for non-war games” (an interesting way to approach these kinds of simulations. The point is to, within the player’s area of expertise, ID major concerns where their organization would be stressed. He covered many points to address in the design of these exercises. One important final question was, what do you do with the problems identified, and what about problems identified that you cannot fix? Mike Markowitz in the audience went one further and asked about “cost avoidance”, in that policy people to their best to avoid costs and to deflect blame – has anyone ever tried to put this in a game? Hilarity ensued.)

 Learning From Other Game Design Communities

• Anchors in Time: Understanding Board Games in Historical Context, Mr. Jeremy Antley, Independent Scholar
• Alternate Reality Games: A new way of wARGaming? Ms. Elizabeth Bonsignore, PhD Candidate, U of Maryland
• Beyond Backstory: Rethinking Narrative in Games &  Sims Dr. Anastasia Salter, Assistant Professor, U of Baltimore    

 0950 – 1120      The Future of Wargaming

 Future Security Challenges Wargaming Will Need to Depict

• Simulating the Polarization of American Politics in Foreign Policy Gaming, Robert Leonhard, Ph.D., LTC(R) (from notes: RAND did a study of political polarization in 2007 that is informative: partisan realignment of the South, changing institutional procedures in Congress, growth in income inequality, balkanization mass media, and rise of new interest groups, along with disappearance of the “middle ground” and willingness to compromise, with a general decline of deliberation by either side. The effects of domestic polarization on foreign policy – undermines US leadership abroad, debates focus on ideology rather than facts or consequences, can produce charges (in the media, not for real) of treason or colluding with The Enemy (this is really nothing new in American politics, historically!), can push a president into bad policy or constrain his options, war fever can become deadlier (Chesapeake Affair, 1807) and peacemaking can become much harder (Lyndon Johnson, 1967). Dr. Leonhard ended by suggesting ways these could be modeled in games. (I admired his book on Maneuver Warfare, and also found he’s a fan of mine, and own several of my games!)
• Emerging Changes in Warfare, Col. T.X. Hammes (This was a good presentation, not least because I enjoyed his book The Sling and the Stone so much (got him to autograph it for me). Ideas just kept coming and coming! From notes:
  • Nation-state options for conflict include high tech (anti-satellite, EMP, cyber), surrogates (e.g. Hezbollah, criminals contractors) and ambiguous (cyber swarms (Russia-Georgia 2008), bankruptcy, espionage.
  • Non-state options for conflict: because they are driven by human networks (“coalitions of the angry”), narratives and changes in narratives, options rely on individual insurgents, contractors, or super-empowered small groups or individuals. Insurgencies can be transnational and self-supporting (through charities, crime and theft). And so on – basically FM 3-24, which was a great effort at the time, is incomplete and should be rewritten.
  • Three waves of insurgency over time: first anti-colonialism, then who rules in the liberated colonies, and now adjustments of borders inflicted on nations by the colonialists.
  • Implications of 3^rd wave insurgency: transborder conflicts, failure of artificial states, coalition of angry and opportunists, no central vision or end state beyond some kind of ethnic solidarity, insurgents often fight each other after kicking out the common enemy as they find they cannot rule as a coalition.
  • A word on contractors: they augment (trucking, drones, logistics, communications) or may even replace state forces (Iraq, Somalia); they avoid international and national restrictions (Boland Amendment, Nicaragua), reduce political capital to enter and sustain a war, and can be reliable troops for internal control (UAE recently hired *whatever name Blackwater is using now* to create an internal security brigade of Latin American and Ukrainian troops). But they undermine the legitimacy of whatever it is you are trying to do, because in the end they are seen as mercenaries.
  • Hybrid conflicts will be the patter of the future as they blend criminal, conventional, terrorist and insurgent tactics. The continuum of conflict is no longer a smooth curve; now it’s lumpy and spiky. How do we model this?
  • Best takeaway line of the conference: “It’s not a silo or a stovepipe: it’s a Cylinder of Excellence!”
• Overcoming the PolMil Prediction Addiction, Jon Compton (Hoo boy – this man is not afraid to tell you what he thinks.
  • He started with a poker illustration – if you play the odds rather than the player, you will lose, because that’s not what the game is about. The other guy may or may not be looking to the odds, and you also must be aware of your own reactions to stimuli.
  • If you give a probability n to any one thing, you are assigning the balance (1-n)  to EVERY other probability.  Infinity is contained within that interval. Therefore, “predictive social science models are all crap. They are all wrong…. It’s all crap, but it’s the crap we have.”
  •  It is productive to trace things backwards: our quantitative tools can predict trends, but not the discrete events that make up and drive these trends. Step back from an intractable problem until it falls apart into tractable sub-problems.
  • Reference to paper by Max Abrahms on terror groups that destroys many common thoughts about terrorists – I think it’s this one? http://maxabrahms.com/pdfs/DC_250-1846.pdf What Terrorists Really Want but he seems to have written about 20 such papers.
  • What is to be done: track and find your own vulnerabilities; anticipate, mitigate nd catalog them. This requires highly iterative wargaming that is focused on RED – use lots of Red cells and creative thinking to find the most damaging possibilities, not the most probable.
  • Stephen Downes-Martin remarked that wargaming is there to find weaknesses that the real-life opponent will find and exploit. Your sponsor can lie about it later, but he needs to understand what the game discovered.

  The Future of Wargaming’s Past: Data, Documentation, Preservation

• Archives and Documentation of Military Simulations Dr. Henry Lowood, Stanford University Library
• Data Curation and Conflict Simulation: The Example of Harpoon, Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum, U of Maryland
• The IMMERSe Project Dr. Neil Randall, University of Waterloo (I did want to see this as he has apparently received a massive SSHRC grant to study games, gamers and gaming, but had to pass it up.)

 1120 – 1230      Lunch & optional “Armed Conflict Year In Review”, John Gresham

 1240 – 1350    Overview of Game Lab/Methods for Tomorrow’s Wargames & Reports of standing Working Groups

 1410 – 1700      Working Groups:

 GROUP #1: Connections Game Lab/Tomorrow’s Wargames

(we discussed how the three groups in the Game Lab exercise worked it out. Some got further than others but everyone ran up against the same sort of issues. It’s possible something more substantial will be done with these in time for next year’s conference.)

 GROUP #2: Creating an Online Resource for Wargamers

 GROUP #3: Building a Wargame Profession

 Day 4, Thursday, 26 July, Marshall Hall 155

 This was largely Working Groups outbriefs and the best part, the Connections “Hot Wash” discussion. See 3. Lessons Learned.

 (iv) Redeployment Phase: 26 July – 29 July 2012

 Spent Thursday and Friday walking around Washington with Joe Miranda. Thursday afternoon  we went to the Dupont Circle area to scope out a nightclub that was going to have some kind of Goth night, and spent some time at a nicely stocked, very cheap bookstore that was right next door. Later walked around in Georgetown and had lunch there. That night we went back to the club (Phase 1), but the club remained shut even after 2200, so we walked back towards downtown, passing by the White House at midnight – there was one small light glowing there, as if the President had gotten up in the middle of the night and left the bathroom light on. All the Metros were shut down it was so late, so in the end we got a taxi back and went to bed about 0130.

 Friday we walked around looking at many monuments, and I went into the Smithsonian (well, the one that is dedicated to American history, there are about five other Smithsonians) for a short while. Quite unexpectedly at the Lincoln Memorial we ran into Callie Cummins and Chris Cummins Jr., of Decision Games, who had been at the conference to sell a few games.

 Saturday I saw Joe to Union Station as he was catching the train all the way back to Los Angeles, and then took the train out to Maryland, where I was met by Volko Ruhnke. We played a few turns of A Distant Plain and had a nice dinner with him and his wife. Got back later and finished packing and moving items around various bags, as I usually do before travelling.

Volko shows how it’s done.

 Sunday 29 July, returned by air to Victoria, Canada. Dulles Airport is a LONG way out of the city! Original plan was to go home via Chicago and Calgary, but flight was cancelled due to mechanical breakdown. After several hours delay, I got on a flight to San Francisco, then Victoria, which saw the return home several hours late, and with no luggage (this followed the next day).

 (v) Recovery Phase: 30 July 2012 onwards

Post-exercise repairs, cleaning, maintenance and critiques. Begin work on post-conference tasks. See 5.

 3. LESSONS LEARNED

 As always, there were lots of suggestions and lively discussion in the Hot Wash section of the conference.  Some of them included:

• Mini-tutorials on specific subjects (playing Red, pol-mil gaming, agent-based modeling, defense and interagency game design, White cell management, etc.)
• Spreading out the game demos over 2-3 time slots (I would have liked that)
• Ideas for panels on different subjects, for consideration next year:
  • Clients can come and explain what’s wrong with the products they are getting from their contractors.
  • Panels on gaming activities in other countries.
  • Shift away from strict “war”gaming: invite people to speak on intelligence gaming, HADR, pol-mil gaming, etc.
• Suggestion to do the Game Lab exercise again – moving towards an actual product of the conference in the form of a prototype game beats a lot of yakking, or Powerpoint slides piled high.
• National Defense University cannot host this event again (and, from remarks made during the conference, due to budget cuts the US military may find itself cutting way back on this kind of activity as a very narrowly defined kind of professional military education emerges). Possible locations for next year’s Connections include Quantico VA (USMC Warfighting Lab?) or Johns Hopkins University (Advanced Physics Laboaratory, which does a lot of modeling and simulation).

 4. COMMENTS

 The conference itself was an unqualified success – the only drawback was that there were so many excellent presentations, it was difficult to choose which to attend and which to pass up.

 Approximately 100 people, mostly from the Beltway region but also from Canada, the European Union, and Singapore, participated. Portions of the conference were livestreamed on the Internet through the NDU-CASL website, and some speakers took part through videoconferencing.

 Less successful were the deployment and redeployment phases – movement plans were drastically revised each way, due to circumstances beyond the unit’s control. However, the effects of the changes were mitigated by having extra “down time” incorporated into travel plans to begin with. And packing lighter would have been a help, as it would have allowed my bag to stay with me!

 5. ACTION ITEMS

 I have a number of things to do, read and revise as a result of this conference. Also, much of the rest of the year will be taken up with playtesting and refining A Distant Plain. More details later.

 Thanks for reading

 Brian Train

 

Game design-related posts, 2011

It has not proven possible to import exactly the entries I need from my Livejournal blog to WordPress, so I decided to import what I could year by year via cut-and-paste.

Edited to remove some personal details and irrelevancies.

Date: 2011-11-10 12:24

Subject: (no subject)

Oh dear, and another month slips by. It has been such a busy year, at least since May, and there are only a few weeks left in 2011.

But not time for end-of-year accounting and 2011 memes yet.

Chronological accounting-for-myself:

[snip]

October 19-22 – I went to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. Dear Readuhs will remember the conference I went to in early August, and how well one of my games went down at the demonstration period there. Well, out of that I got an invitation to go to the NPS and talk to them about using digitized versions of this and other games of mine, in a project related to another, much larger project they have going on. I got to make a lunchtime presentation to their Irregular Warfare students, mostly Special Forces captains and majors – I was kind of nervous about this but they were very friendly and interested. I spoke for less than half an hour and they filled up the rest of the time with questions, so I didn’t get a chance to talk with them which I really wanted to do. I did have a quick chat with a Marine Corps major who had trained in Armor, and instead of charging across the desert dealing death to enemy tanks from two miles away found himself and his tank company in a neighbourhood of Baghdad, working out which streets would have priority for garbage collection and which block leaders could or couldn’t be trusted.

If anyone wants to look at my script or Powerpoint slides, they are here: https://brtrain.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/presentation-at-naval-postgraduate-school/  . This is another blog I have started that will be confined to my game design and “serious games” development and other stuff. Not much there yet though, as it has not proven possible to port my game-design related entries on LJ over to WordPress en masse.

Anyway, the ensuing discussions with the project team went well, I came up with some new ideas for games for them that I will be working on and I put them in touch with Richard who has made up a version of Guerrilla Checkers for Android mobile phones, and will probably do the technical work for the team on what they need for the project. See a screenshot at Little Viking Games. (http://www.littlevikinggames.com)

A “guided gaming session” went less well, I tend to forget that a game I regard as being comparatively simple (especially if I’ve designed it) is still quite complex to people who have grown up playing ordinary board games or just computer games. As much as I tend to dislike computer games, a lot of the complexity and fiddliness of a game design can be subsumed into the structure and interface of a game. Players do not need to remember what pieces can move where or how, when the program will simply not let them do it, so they can concentrate on playing the game – and that’s enough for most players, but there needs to be some explanation of why this or that thing can’t happen, or the penalties for doing so. And it’s a lot easier to change a sentence to two in a rulebook than it is to rewrite hundreds of lines of code. Anyway, I left them with a big bag of playable copies of my games.

Monterey is a beautiful little town, and Friday night I went out to look around. The NPS is just a few blocks from downtown, so I walked down to the big pier that is full of shops and restaurants. I looked at I don’t know how many cheap t-shirts, and got a pound of salt water taffy for Aki (and a bunch of cheap assorted candy from the Walgreen’s downtown later). I had a plate of completely ordinary chow mein at a small Chinese restaurant where this huge Mexican family was having dinner – I think it was someone’s birthday or something. “Dad” was at the head of the table, obviously the patriarch and wearing the biggest hat – they were having a great time. Later I walked back by a different route but did not turn when I needed to, and ended up walking by this highway to a gigantic shopping mall with no way out except the way you came in, and the buses had all stopped running – in the end I did get out and back, but had walked five miles more than I had planned!

I went back on Saturday the 22nd – the NPS had actually paid for my flight and hotel, which was great. My flights were well spaced so I didn’t have to hurry at all; and I have resolved to hand-carry my luggage from now on if I can possibly help it. You can get a lot into a small bag if you roll it right. (I saved even more room on the flight down by forgetting my good pants at home! Luckily I remembered this in the air on the way to San Francisco, and got a pair of acceptable golfing slacks at the pro shop in the airport – otherwise it would have been pretty embarassing.)

October 24 – was my 47th birthday, which we didn’t really bother marking except for a good dinner at San Remo. I’m feeling rather more middle-aged now, and while I’m happy to have outlived George Orwell, I don’t have TB and haven’t come near to matching his output.

[snip]

November 4-6 – We went to deepest darkest Surrey, for BottosCon 2011 – the fifth annual board wargaming convention put on by Rob Bottos. It’s small, maybe 60 people came this time and that was the biggest yet. About half of the attendees were Advanced Squad Leader players, who usually don’t play much else (or at least, they came to the convention to play ASL only), and the other half were people playing practically everything else, from non-wargames like Urban Sprawl to Angola or Storming the Reich.

I don’t go to many conventions, and when I do I usually don’t play games – I spend my time talking to people, catching up with friends or trying to interest people in my new designs in the hope of snagging playtesters. Guerrilla Checkers (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71035/guerrilla-checkers ) proved to be a hit again, and someone expressed an interest in writing an iOS application for it so it can be played on iPad, iPhone, iKettle etc., which would be great. I also played out a few turns of the brigade-level version of my Finnish Civil War game (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68072/finnish-civil-war  ), which prompted someone to say that he thought he’d seen everything now, and did a complete run-through with a playtester of a newly written 2006 scenario for my Third Lebanon War game – it worked well and concluded on time, with a marginal Hezbollah victory. A minor revision to two to the rules and they’re even better – the basic designs are quite sound.

We also went out to one of Surrey’s many industrial zones – the whole area looks like it’s composed of strip malls, suburbs, and warehouse districts, there’s more than that but that’s what you see from the highway as you’re whizzing through – to get 25 pounds of Cerrotru, the metal I use for casting my miniatures. It’s gone up in price a lot, and this will probably be the last time I buy it for quite a while. I kind of like going to these industrial parks, reminds me that things are still made or at least assembled here.

[snip]

2 Comments | Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-08-08 16:45

Subject: Connections Conference 2011

Security: Public

Mood: confused

Music: kraftwerk, “Kometenmelodie II”

Tags: game design, games, travel, writing

Well, I’m back from the “Connections” conference at National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, and things went VERY well.

http://connections-wargaming.com/  (site)

http://web.me.com/mgkkmk/Connections/2011.html   (agenda)

I got to Washington late late on Sunday night. Monday afternoon I went to NDU, first to the Metro station (what is it about every subway system I’ve ridden on that they all smell the same? It’s a hot, dusty smell that must come from the engines on the trains or the stale air down there) and then a few blocks to Fort McNair (a small Army post named after a general who was killed by friendly fire in July, 1944 in France). Met up with Skip Cole, late of the US Institute for Peace, and reunited with Rex Brynen, the McGill professor I mentioned, after thirty years! That night Joe Miranda and I went out and looked over Washington at night – we saw the Washington Monument, and the White House, both from afar. We wanted to have a beer at the bar of the Watergate Hotel, but apparently it has been pulled down – there is still a building called The Watergate but it is full of condo apartments and dentists’ offices.

Tuesday: first day of the conference proper. Keynote speakers were James F. Dunnigan and Peter Perla, both great figures in the development and history of board and professional wargaming, and they spoke well. The panel on which I was presenting came right after. I was third, and was sitting at the end of the table waiting to go, and James FREAKING Dunnigan walked back into the room and sat down next to me, muttering that it was “standing room only back there”. I told him I thought he could sit anywhere he wanted. I went up and made my presentation, which went well but was a bit rushed because I was third. My presentation was called “Ploughing in the COIN Field” and was about the series of seven counterinsurgency/guerrilla warfare games I had designed since 1995, very different from each other in topic but using the same basic system.

I went back and sat down, fielded questions and that was it for the panel discussion and then JAMES freaking DUNNIGAN shook my hand and said, “I like what you’re doing”.

Anyway, that’s certainly my brush with greatness this year.

That afternoon were game demonstrations, my Guerrilla Checkers was a hit! (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71035/guerrilla-checkers ).

Ya know, sometimes Value Village will give you just what you need… I had found a bag of 1,358 little red buttons, 1 cm across with a “handle”, just in time for $2.99. This made up 20 sets of 66 guerrilla pieces, and I used some miniatures from an old parts copy of Risk for the 6 counter-insurgent pieces for each set. I copied a grid and shortened rules onto a card, and gave those away for free. I got some cotton napkins from VV as well, and had an 8×8 grid silkscreened on them, and got some large and small stones in contrasting colours from Michael’s to make up another set of nice copies.

I started showing someone how to play, and within five minutes the free copies were flying away and there were five or six games going at once.

Rules, in case you’re interested, at: http://www.islandnet.com/~ltmurnau/text/Guerrilla%20Checkers.rtf . Next thing to do is make some kind of Web or mobile app for the game; I had a couple of discussions with people on this.

Tuesday night were some more playtests, Wednesday was devoted to more presentations and working group work. Interesting discussions, including some talk on how to involve non-military people in military wargaming. I suggested we should call ourselves “ludic futurists”!

Wednesday night Joe and I went out to Georgetown. It started to pour rain the moment we stepped outside the Metro station, and we walked and walked. I was absolutely saturated but it was quite warm, so we dried out a little bit at a good Italian restaurant staffed by Filipinos.

Thursday were some final discussions and meetings, promises of further action, and the long flight home. I still think it’s pretty remarkable that I could travel over 5,000 km and visit three coasts of the continent in less than a day. I got home at midnight on Thursday. Security wasn’t too bad, only one pat-down in Seattle and I lost the little snow-globe of the White House Lianne asked for – apparently those are verboten, in any size, unless you drain them yourself first. So remember!

All in all, a good week – I made a lot of good contacts and plan on going back next year (it will be at NDU again).

Oh, and I also found that the article I wrote on the Dieppe Raid was nominated for “Best Historical Article” in the Charles S. Roberts Awards (http://charlesrobertsawards.com/results.php?theYear=2010 ). But it didn’t win.

Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-07-18 09:51

Subject: Another Interview (podcast this time)

Security: Public

Mood: sleepy

Music: Martha and the Muffins, “Suburban Dream”

Tags: game design, games, me

So, last week I was interviewed for a podcast by a guy who writes a blog on games. Oh God, there’s almost an hour of it.

http://ivebeendiced.blogspot.com/2011/07/ive-been-diced-episode-20-brian-train.html

http://armsandinfluence.typepad.com/IBD/IBDEp20.mp3

I really, really hate my voice on the air – do I really sound like that IRL? I sound like something’s pinching me inside. The cordless phone I was using died midway through the interview, as if it had killed itself rather than listen to me anymore.

Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-07-04 15:06

Subject: (no subject)

Security: Public

Mood: calm

Yes, been a while, hasn’t it… Among other things:

I didn’t write about the outcome of the convention in Tempe. I think I found homes for ALL of these designs, except Virtualia, which nevertheless was the predecessor for Kandahar and EOKA, both of which attracted interest. But hoo boy, I never talked so much in all my life – and I owe a great debt to Todd Davis, He of the Blue Hair, who made sure that I got a chance to talk to people who mattered.

I observed and kibitzed some folks playing Summer Lightning, and at least one copy was given away as a door prize. I helped to playtest Andean Abyss, (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/91080/andean-abyss )a new game on counterinsurgency in the 1990s in Colombia that was quite clever, and showed Guerrilla Checkers (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71035/guerrilla-checkers ) to quite a few people. Got a couple of small games and picked up two items in the game auction, normally the high point of the convention.

It was up to 105 degrees in the daytime, and would cool to about 80 around 4 in the morning. My good intentions of getting exercise by walking up the butte behind the hotel in the relative cool of the morning soon evaporated, and we never did get into downtown Phoenix (it would have been easy as there is a new light rail station a couple of blocks away) to look around. But we did walk around in the general area, and I got some cheap CDs at the record exchange down the street we always visit – Lianne got some nice antique glassware at the little store down the street from there, that we also always visit.

I hadn’t been to this convention in three years, and it appears my reputation has grown slightly in the meantime – getting published in Strategy & Tactics and World at War magazine certainly helped. Joe Miranda and I also made a presentation at a rather sparsely-attended panel discussion on simulating modern warfare.

[snip]

In the first week of August I am going to the Connections conference at the National Defense University in Washington DC to speak on a panel, and demonstrate some of my games. Again, I am not looking forward to getting there (Continental Airlines, which I understand is one notch above the way Aeroflot used to be, and a long period of cooling my heels in Houston TX of all places). I am taking just carry-on luggage so at least none of that can go wrong. And DC in August is a steambath, I hear, and there are no clubs for Joe and I to go to on the nights we are there (without travelling 90 miles to Richmond or Norfolk VA!).

2 Comments | Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-06-06 10:10

Subject: Psychopaths and game-players

Security: Public

Mood: rushed

Music: Oingo Boingo, “Grey Matter” (balaphone solo)

Tags: crazies, game, game design, social decay, stupidity, travel

I haven’t read Vonnegut in years, but this makes me want to go out and get his last book:

[snip]

In other news, tomorrow we’re off to Tempe AZ for the Consimworld convention! Lianne will lie by the pool and read while I bring her ice cream from time to time, and I will spend my time trying to get people interested in the batch of unpublished games I will be bringing with me, besides showing off Summer Lightning:

– EOKA (Cyprus 1955-59 – yep, whipped it into shape on the weekend, still think it’s a bit too fiddly though)

– The Scheldt Campaign (First Canadian Army Oct-Nov 1944, first game focused on the campaign)

– Third Lebanon War (Israeli Army invades souther Leb in near-future to stop Hezbollah, Or Not)

– Kandahar (non-historical game on Afghanistan)

– Virtualia (FID in a fictionalized post-Chavez Venezuela)

– Greek Civil War (been waiting a long time for this to come out, there is a new mag-with-a-game-in-it coming out that focuses on post-WW 2 conflicts)

– Balkan Gambit (when, o when?)

– Guerrilla Checkers (simple, interesting abstract game I invented last year)

Holy mac, I have been busy the last couple of years.

Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-05-24 08:42

Subject: I’m on The Youtube!

Security: Public

Music: The Residents, “Never Known Questions”

Tags: game, game design

Or rather, one of my games is… an Italian wargamer does a 14-minute video review of Summer Lightning, so you can take a look at what goes into one of these things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OsuG5ZCJmw

You know, I think I’ve finally arrived as a game designer with this one, due to the packaging. When I first started, we packaged the games in plastic comic book bags; later those tin boxes and small cardboard boxes, that were roomier but still pretty full of cardboard. The box for this one is 80% air; it must mean I’m nearly a professional!

Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-05-09 16:07

Subject: First Look inside the Box

Security: Public

Music: Cruxshadows, something

Tags: game, game design

I haven’t received my personal copies yet, but here is a look inside my new Poland 1939 game:

Not a bad job on the graphics, not bad at all….

2 Comments | Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-04-28 11:38

Subject: Kandahar

Security: Public

Mood: fulla cake

Music: Devo, “Fresh”

Tags: game design

A year or two ago, in response to the thoughts comments and feedback received by one of the Pentagon guys who was using my game on the 1954-62 Algerian War to model an online counterinsurgency game I worked up a new game called Virtualia, using a thinly-disguised post-Chavez Venezuela to look into urban guerrilla warfare. Later, I reworked that again into a game on the Afghanistan situation, in Kandahar Province and named Kandahar.

Anyway, an acquaintance from a long time ago who has since become a Poli Sci professor at McGill University used my Algeria game in one of his classes last year, and wanted to follow it up this year with another of my games. So he used Kandahar with some of his students, and they seemed to like it despite its relative complexity. Another student of his used the game for her Honours thesis and wrote a long playtest report/game review of it, and I got to write a response – both pieces are found here, on the professor’s blog on peace-building simulations: http://paxsims.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/deconstructing-kandahar/

Go and look, it’s really boring and irrelevant to you!

Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2011-04-07 12:10

Subject: Charlie Sheen Welcomes Our Alien Overlords

Security: Public

Music: DHI, “Machine Altar Transmission”

Tags: dream, game design

I had a dream last night that aliens had invaded and taken many of us (including me) back to another planet, and Charlie Sheen was a collaborator/ overseer.

And he was being a real jerk about it, like “Who’s standing here WITHOUT a shovel in his hands, NOT mining thorium? Duh, WINNING!”

In other news, my Poland game is due in the publisher’s warehouse inside of two weeks. Links to aspects of the game:

Buzz: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42591/summer-lightning-the-invasion-of-poland-1939

Where to buy: http://www.locknloadgame.com/Section_Cat_Content_Detail.asp?SID=33&SCAT=87&ID=95

Rulebook: http://www.locknloadgame.com/www.locknloadgame.com/sneakmanuals/SL-Manual-part.pdf

Very nice map, complete: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/952346/marc-von-martial

2 Comments | Post A Comment | Edit | Tag | Add to Memories | Share | Track This | Link