Presentation: Urban Warfare and Crisis Management

June 27, 2025 2 Comments

(Just before my Internet crashed… photo by Riccardo Massini.)

On Monday 30 June, I will be making an online presentation on “Urban Warfare and Crisis Management” to a wargaming workshop at the Centro Alti Studi Difesa in Rome.

Trends in urbanization, the city as a system of systems, urban warfare as a slow- or fast-motion disaster with progressive damage to those systems, a few illustrative games, and eight points for attention and design in making a really good game about this subject that relate to principles of disaster management.

As I often do, I am posting my slides and presentation script here so anyone interested can look at it and read it (and I can well imagine how hard my rapid pedantic-sounding English is on Italian ears).

Urban War and Crisis Mgt slides 24 June 25  (slides, PDF)

Urban Warfare and Crisis Mgt 24 June 25  (script, Open Document)

Edited to add:

Unfortunately, my Internet crashed just as I was getting warmed up!

They let me finish my presentation later, but gee, how embarrassing.

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China’s War: advance copy arrives!

June 17, 2025 12 Comments

Sent directly to me from the factory, an advance inspection copy of China’s War arrived yesterday.

And there was great rejoicing, as you can see (yes, I know there is a spider on me).

Seriously, this is a beautifully done game, at least to my eyes (I’m sure other people will pick it apart according to their prejudices, but so what – I am getting tired of caring about things like that). Components well made to usual GMT standards, very sturdy map, nicely done rules and playbook.

I’m very glad to hold a production copy of this in my hands, a full ten years after I first sat down to design it.

So, the item is now in production and GMT will be charging people in a few months (they don’t yet have a schedule date for importing copies to the US, so not until then).

Which means you have just a little longer to get your pre-order in, and get this five-pound box of goodness for the low low price of $55 (and $80 later). Pre-orders stand at 1,838 today!

https://www.gmtgames.com/p-830-chinas-war-1937-1941.aspx

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Guerrilla Checkers: From Board Game to Machine Learning Environment.

June 3, 2025 Leave a comment

(photo: Brant Guillory)

“Guerrilla Checkers: From Board Game to Machine Learning Environment” is the title of a 2025 degree thesis by Niklas Krogerus at the Arcada University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki.

Abstract:
This is a software development work, in which the board game Guerrilla Checkers has been
implemented in Python and adapted for machine learning. Guerrilla Checkers is an asymmetrical board game for two by game designer Brian Train. It could be described as a combination of Checkers and Go. The project provides a new software implementation of Guerrilla Checkers and makes it available as a machine learning environment for the first time. The software is designed to be compatible with the most common Python library for machine learning environments, Gymnasium, as well as Petting Zoo, an extension of Gymnasium designed for training multiple machine learning agents simultaneously. While having ultimately failed to produce an agent capable of challenging a human opponent, the implementation is shown to have produced agents that perform significantly better than chance. The potential of achieving better results by refining machine learning techniques is indicated. The text also explores the basics of combinatorial game theory, including Ernst Zermelo’s foundational essay on chess and John Conway’s groundbreaking work On Numbers and Games, before making a rough mathematical assessment of how complex Guerrilla Checkers is.

The rest of it is in Swedish, so it’s beyond me… well, so is software development in general.

If you consider a set of game rules as a collection of algorithms that temporarily modify the behaviour of a human being, one would think that I would be a good programmer – but I’m not.

Still, thank you Niklas, for using my game as the basis for your work!

https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/892979/Krogerus_Niklas.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

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