Ludic Futurism
October 14, 2025 Leave a comment
I mentioned earlier that while I was in Turin, Mauro Mola (standing) interviewed me for his doctoral thesis and the day after we played his game “From Strikes to Insurrection”. Here’s a picture taken of us playing this interesting card-driven game!
Also, Nicolas Pensyres posted a link to the CHPM Instagram page with some fleeting and interesting looks at the doings at Wargame Connections Suisse 2025!
October 10, 2025 4 Comments
Recently I was on Brant Guillory’s podcast Mentioned in Dispatches to talk about the new releases of Brief Border Wars 2, China’s War 1937-41, and even a short mention of O Canada.
Also talk about Quadrigames, the quad approach to publishing by SPI and other publishers, the d66 method of combat resolution, the recent trip to the Continent and so on.
October 5, 2025 2 Comments
I’m only now writing up the account of my trip across the big blue briny because I came back with a persistent cold, to a dead computer and a union on strike.
But I did have a good time while I was Over There!
First stop was the Connections-UK conference at Brunel University, September 9-11. I arrived a day early because I cross eight time zones and am reliably only semi-conscious when arriving at Heathrow Airport. (I can never sleep on airplanes, just doze a little, so I watched Barry Lyndon for the umpteenth time as well as Army of Shadows for the first time, and bits and pieces of some other films they had stashed in the back of the seat of the person in front of me.) Thankfully all I had to do is go to the new semi-outside bus terminal and wait for the U3 Uxbridge, and 20 minutes later I was at the place I was staying for the week, very basic room but directly across the road from Brunel University campus. I had dinner with David Burden at a nice pub by the canal and we talked game design.
The next day was the beginning of Connections-UK, and after an introductory talk we separated into “old hands” and “new chums”. I went with the former to play three moves of Jim Wallman’s Green and Pleasant Land, a wargame we had played in very altered form at Connections-UK in 2018. After seven years some of the events in the earlier game had come to pass, while others had faded from plausibility, and the focus of the game was less kinetic/military and more on getting departments of the UK government to cooperate with each other in controlling a stream of varied artificial and natural disasters. I think by and large we managed to do that, though my department wasn’t called on to do much, and Albion lived to see another day.
After lunch (sandwiches) an interesting talk by David Banks on the types of knowledge that wargaming can deliver. Basic message was that certain claims are made about wargaming but there is no clear universal way of determining their value, so we fall back on intuition, emotional narratives and community norms to reinforce what we think the game has demonstrated. In theory, wargames should be treated as experiments with stringent controls and multiple iterations, hoping to establish a general law through the standard scientific method. In practice that cannot be done because of the number of variables and interactions possible, even in a modest and simple game, but they do have some value and actionable knowledge and therefore success… if they are treated in ways like single case analysis and discovering causal mechanisms (using games, why did this event unfold as it did, and what things came together to make it so?) and exploring organizational modelling (gathering the multiple outcomes of games into a single framework or scheme to create a set of plausible possible outcomes). Even with these alternative methods, we need to remember that wargame payoffs are more theoretical than empirical because they are based on multiple interactions of objective and subjective models and things – this humbles us to remember the limits of wargaming.
We had social gaming in the evenings, and I brought a trusty set of Guerrilla Checkers with me to teach, along with a new game I’ve created called Gravel that uses much the same equipment as a set of the former (and which I will publish as soon as I am happy with it). Both aroused interest and perhaps a little cerebral disturbance.
The next day I attended a session on “insights from historical wargaming” and there were some great research presentations on historical wargaming practices, e.g. Royal Navy and Imperial Russian Navy wargaming before the Great War, lessons from Vietnam era counterinsurgency games, and using games to explore historical incidents as case studies.
I could not attend the second annual Game Jam event as I needed time to set up my stuff for the afternoon Games Fair on both days. They gave me a whole room to myself and called it “The Brian Train Experience” and I set out demo copies of QUICK Junior with the new map, the Scaleable Urban Simulation (brigade level Latvia module, not the divisional Taiwan module as I thought the former would be of more interest – there were quite a few new games being demonstrated that were set in the Baltic States) and 91 DSSB.
The latter two got some interest, but we did sit down and have a few good turns of QUICK Junior – in the photo are Pete Sizer, Pijus Kruminas, Natalia Zwarts and James Moulding. They all agreed that the hex + locations method for mapping was a good way to demonstrate the complexity, changeability and channeling behaviour of urban terrain. I was glad of the vote of confidence.
After presentations on the uses of commercial gaming and its professional uses (Fred Serval was supposed to attend but there were labour disruptions connected to the wobbly Macron government so he couldn’t leave Paris in time) and using serious games to explore and reinforce community resilience, the peak event on the third day was Mark Herman delivering the second Peter Perla Memorial Lecture. Mark is one of those rare folks who has had considerable success and delivered some great innovations in both the commercial and professional wargaming fields, and his remarkable speaking skills and communication style were on display. Some good quotes:
Some practical suggestions he had for wargames presented in a professional setting:
On the second Games Fair session I didn’t have any takers (many people were leaving early because of the Tube workers’ strike that week) so I had a little time to go around and see some other people’s games. David Burden had Tooru’s Fire, an interesting one set in Estonia that focused on the interface between urban and rural areas, and I got to talk to Des Fitzgerald who had an interesting urban conflict game called Fish City that focused on the different stages of the urban battle… I left him with a copy of my EXURB, on the same subject.
It was great to see old friends (who are all one year older, how does that happen) and make some new acquaintances, I really enjoyed this one and I do like Brunel University as a venue for it. It’s not sure whether next year’s event will be at Brunel but I hope it will be.
Friday I went to Richard Barbrook’s flat in Stratford – if the weather was good we were to shoot matchsticks at tin soldiers HG Wells style, but it rained so we stayed indoors and played The Chair Is Empty, the new name (thanks Roger Leroux) for Strongman. A good play and some good suggestions for improvement.
Saturday I went out to Hampstead to see my stepmother’s new flat – she is 85 and finally settled in her own place, a small but very nice place that has a support person in the building and is in a great part of town. She and my stepsister and I had lunch at the Spaniard’s Inn (forget what I ate but did have sticky toffee pudding for the first time in my life) and went for a walk on Hampstead Heath, something I have been meaning to do since the first Connections-UK in 2013 when I was staying in KCL college digs out near there but never had time to do.
Sunday I had lunch with Charles Vasey at Ziani’s, a Venetian Italian restaurant in Chelsea. A wonderful place to eat and talk for hours, though this was the third time in five days he had had lunch there as Mark Herman and David Isby had blown through town and wanted to see him. Had roast lamb that was very good but don’t let Charles pick the wine (though it was also very good)!
Monday it was time to shift to Turin. I had to cross London to get to Stansted Airport for a Ryanair flight there, thankfully the Tube strike was over so it was relatively easy to get there hours and hours early but still I don’t think I ever want to use that airport again – true cattle barn and thankfully I had Fast Track so went through security pretty quickly, but still next time it will be British Airways from Gatwick which would have been quite a bit easier. I got into Turin late and Giaime Alonge met me at the airport and took me back to his place, I would be staying in the same apartment block as his family.
Tuesday I went to visit the National Museum of the Risorgimento with Giaime, he and Giuseppe Tamba are working with the Museum to publish Houses of Cards/ Castelli di Carta, a simple card game I designed on the Grande Brigantaggio period in southern Italy after the Risorgimento. It will likely be sold through their gift shop and might be used in some schools, since a history professor (Dr. Carmine Pinto) is adding a playbook-like component to the game that explains a lot behind the people and organizations depicted in the game. The museum is really good, besides the usual uniforms, guns portraits and swords many of the exhibits are from popular media of the time – mass-produced and lithographed material commenting on and satirizing or boosting the issues of the day as Italy struggled towards becoming a single nation state.
Here’s another item for the “game as journalism” list: a game of Goose centred on events leading up to the Risorgimento.
Wednesday I had lunch with Riccardo Fassone and Stefano Ruzza, both colleagues of Giaime at the University of Turin. Stefano is in the Political Science department and often uses games, including A Distant Plain, in his classroom. We were at a genuine trattoria, one of the few left in the city, and I had fresh casarecce con chiangoli (pasta with meat sauce made with boar, something I had never had before – like pork of course but stronger and darker). After that I gave a lecture to a mixed class of interdisciplinary MA students about the elements of game design used for games on irregular war and how these differ (or should) from games on “conventional” wars. Some very intelligent questions from the students! Later Mauro Mola, a student in the department who is working towards a PhD interviewed me for his project on game designers and design. We had dinner at the Piazza Vittorio Veneto by the River Po, I had tajarin con funghi (local pasta specialty).
[featured: the “Communist Fear” box.]
I didn’t get much sleep as I had to get up early to catch the train to Lausanne – there was only one train going directly there from Milan and only a 15 minute window between the train arriving from Turin to catch it. But the high speed train was bang on time and I caught some fantastic scenery of the Alps as we went north and then turned east (I think I also caught my cold on the train too, as by Monday I was feeling unwell. And I am sure you can find better pictures of the Alps than this one I took).
In Lausanne I stayed at a nice small hotel right by Lake Geneva with a view of the lake, there was great summer weather all weekend. I met Nicolas Pensyres again after first meeting him at Connections-UK, and we went to dinner with his wife Sonia (good chicken cordon bleu).
The next day was the first day of Wargame Connections Suisse, held at the Centre General Guisan about a mile from my hotel. Walking there I saw this temple, placed in the middle of a park.
We had a panel of people, including me, talking about urban warfare and wargaming, and then adjourned to have lunch (small tartlike things) and play! Again, I had brought all three demos with me (and talked about them in my presentation, as well as EXURB and Dislocated) but we ended up playing QUICK Junior both days because it is easy and fast to teach.
Giuseppe Tamba on the right in this picture, he had to leave early because there was going to be massive strikes in Italy the next day. The Centre d’Histoire et de Prospective Militaires which organized the event gave me some nice books and a bottle of wine as a thank you gift! Later we went out to a Vietnamese buffet restaurant by the lake, it was great.
Soon it was time to say goodbye, and the summer weather turned rainy and cool. I took the train to Geneva and the airport, Swiss trains are indeed a marvel… clean, quiet and dead on time. Flight home was in two stages Geneva-Montreal-Victoria and I watched Antonioni’s Blow Up among bits of other films (2001 Space Odyssey, Les bonees femmes, Sam Bahadur and an episode of Barry which is still genius TV) with a sore throat to keep me company.
I got home to a dead computer (old iMac from 2008-9 whose hard drive finally failed, have since replaced it with a newer used iMac from 2017) and a union on strike, so the day after I went on the picket lines, congested and nine time zones out of whack!
All in all it was a good trip but very busy, I was quite tired and run down by the end of it… one more chapter in the “jobby” saga.
September 30, 2025 1 Comment
“Donald Trump followed Hegseth’s call to embrace the virtues of lethality as a doctrine with a suggestion buried in an hour-long campaign-style speech that the gathering of officers and senior enlisted advisers should consider targeting US cities and civilian populations as a training exercise.
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military – national guard, but military – because we’re going into Chicago very soon, that’s a big city with an incompetent governor,” Trump said, attacking JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor.”
[The Guardian, 30 September 2025]
I have written and spoken in the past about the necessity of Western militaries, especially the US, taking the issue of urban warfare seriously and preparing accordingly.
This is not what I meant, though I fear it may be the case before long.
[EDIT: I will let a recent statement by former SecDef and retired USMC General James Mattis speak for me: ]
IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH
I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.
Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.
Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.
September 30, 2025 Leave a comment
Presentation given at Wargame Connections Suisse, 20 September 2025 at the Centre General Guisan, Lausanne. Brief talk on recent games I’ve done on urban warfare.
September 17, 2025 Leave a comment
Presentation given to a class at the University of Turin, 17 September 2025, on the design and portrayal of games on irregular warfare.
Script: Turin Ruzza class sep 25 -29 aug
August 29, 2025 2 Comments
Howzabadis… a copy of China’s War being played!
Photo taken from Piotr Bambrough’s X account, at the Polish wargame convention Wargameron 25.
By his account they are having a lot of fun with it, calling it a “return to classic COINs” which is a phrase I suppose we can use, since the system has been in use for 15 years.
The colours of the pieces in the photo are not quite true… the Warlords are not as yellow as shown, nor are the Japanese as greenish; they are dark yellow and khaki, and quite distinct in natural light. I would have preferred a more reddish orange for the Warlords but this is what we got.
August 25, 2025 Leave a comment
In two weeks I am off to Europe for a short (two-week) professional wargaming round, after some work on my hand gestures.
Connections-UK 2025, 8-11 September
I will be demonstrating some urban games:
I’ve done something simple but different with the maps for the first two that could be interesting. At length I will make the SUSS available free once I am pleased with it.
Turin, 15-18 September
After a couple of days seeing stepfamily and friends in London I’m off to Turin to work on two games about post-Risorgimento brigandage. What’s interesting is that both of these are not wargames as such, but games about enforcing a difficult peace.
Also, giving a lecture to a class at the University of Turin about counterinsurgency games and how they model history, or something.
And checking over two games I did a while back on Resistance warfare in the area of Turin Free games: Mastering Resistance and Operation CANUCK (solo games on resistance warfare) that will be sold in a box with a third game by an Italian designer through the local museum devoted to the history of the Resistance (these are all over northern Italy, not so many south of Rome though).
Lausanne, 19-22 September
Then to Lausanne for Connections Suisse: a very short conference on urban warfare to demonstrate the above urban games again, and also talking about card games EXURB and Dislocated.
Going to be really busy, but very excited to see old and new friends!
August 21, 2025 Leave a comment
I have amended the Gaza City variant for We Are Coming Nineveh!: Variant: We Are Coming, Gaza!
13.0 POSTSCRIPT: AUGUST 2025
By the end of December 2023 it was apparent that the stand-up fight within Gaza City that seemed possible, even probable, in early and mid October was not going to happen… By January 2024 the IDF had shifted its main effort to the south and therefore, the variant I had created was now moot. But I left it available as another example of the kind of speculative interactive exercise that wargames can offer us, even if they do not have long-term application. They certainly don’t have much predictive ability!
Now in August 2025, after nearly two years of one-sided warfare and destruction, the IDF has launched a new operation to formally occupy and “clear” Gaza City, where about 740,000 people are still living. Hamas has been more or less completely shattered as a military organization. It will likely offer only token and sporadic resistance as a force of about 5 divisions carries out a plan that will see Israel completely occupying all of Gaza while its conditions for ending the war are satisfied (return of all hostages, complete disarmament of Hamas, Israeli security control of the entire region, and government by a new, alternative civilian administration).
Is there any point to making a variant to this variant to model the Gaza City operation that is finally taking shape? If you really wanted to do it, as a guess here are the changes that ought to be made:
3.0 Starting the game. Hamas does not receive any Veterans. They should have no additional units or assets beyond Ashbal, Stay-Behinds and Media Centre. They should have no capabilities cards at start and should have only 15-20 points to buy capabilities. Strongly suggest using the optional Opening IDF Bombardment rule. Maybe do it twice.
4.11 Supply. Hamas units are not in supply.
4.2 End of Game. The game ends only when all Hamas units have been removed from Close terrain hexes. Ignore all references to UN intervention or ceasefires or collateral damage.
8.0 Victory. Only one victory metric is used: IDF Casualties.
Optional rules: Use all except 9.6 Force Regeneration (or implement only for Ashbal units) and 9.8 (Additional Ceasefire Pressure)
August 12, 2025 5 Comments
The end is in sight!
Compass Games has just announced the launch of the Kickstarter for Brief Border Wars Volume 2.
If you haven’t pre-ordered at the lower price, this is your last chance to get it at a lower price of $59.
Estimated delivery date is November 2025.
Update: 10 days to go and they are already over 2 1/2 times the modest amount they wanted to raise. Also, Brief Border Wars Volume I was offered as an “add-on” but it’s now indicated as sold out!
Details, artwork, rash promises, system rules all available at:
[ 19 August – Edited to add: Compass posted a written interview with me about the game! Some parts might be familiar since the questions were too, but go ahead and check it out if you have a moment, under Updates. ]
[25 August – in the end 114 people boarded the BBW Express at the last moment and they raised triple what they wanted, so all good. It’s not coming any sooner but 114 more people will be happy when it does!]
brtrain 
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