Ludic Futurism
December 13, 2024 Leave a comment
An excellent short interview with Major Tom Mouat, a name known to many of our Constant Readers here. As always, plenty of great pithy quotes.
Can’t believe he has 49 years of service! Can we please have his head put in a jar so we don’t lose all that knowledge?
December 6, 2024 Leave a comment
A nice account of the Game On! conference held by TRADOC at Georgetown University a month ago.
I had a great time (but a short one); seems like quite a while ago now though… it’s been an eventful thirty days.
In other news, Dr. Pijus Kruminas recently talked with the Defence Staff of the Lithuanian Armed Forces about the value of wargaming, and gave them a practical demonstration by using the Lithuanian scenario he had devised for the QUICK (A QUICK Defence of Marijampole).
And finally, registration has opened for CONNECTIONS NORTH 2025, a one-day affair (15 February 2025) to be held at the WO and SGT’s Mess at Canadian Forces Base Kingston. Themes include professional military education, wargaming force development, and a panel on urban warfare. I will not be attending in person (February in Ontario is pretty dire) but will be on the urban warfare panel somehow.
December 4, 2024 2 Comments
Maurice Suckling, Assistant Professor of Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic and author of Paper Time Machines gives a short TED-style talk on game design.
Designers of historical games built machines capable of transporting users into a sense of a different time and place. The five ingredients are a suitable traveler, and four different rhetorical approaches – aesthetic (how things look), procedural (how systems function), discursive (how systems are tied to thematic content), and experiential (how systems and other rhetorical approaches combine to make us feel).
I think I really don’t understand what I am doing, so I am glad he does.. after referencing a short Kafka story “The Top” he concludes:
The point here is this: that if we think of simulation games as a process we must bear in mind that these are processes in action. And if we think of history as a complex series of enmeshed processes we could say that a relatively poor way of attempting to model history would be to write about it, whereas a relatively more fidelitous way to attempt to model history would be to make games about it. Because when players are playing history they’re experiencing processes in action, they are experiencing the spinning of the top when the spinning of the top is the most essential thing about it.
November 18, 2024 Leave a comment
… and runs until 3 December.
Here is the link for the KS.
MSRP will be 32 Euros, but Kickstarter price is 20% off or 26 Euros.
I hope you’ll sign up! This one has been four years in the making.
Here is a look at the table of contents:
Also, on Friday, 9pm CET / 3pm EST, the inestimable Liz Davidson of “Beyond Solitaire” will be interviewing Fred, Riccardo and Jan Heinemann about the book.
Tune in!
https://lnkd.in/dy-__Pg9
November 15, 2024 7 Comments
Every so often someone suggests to me that I should make a serious effort to “monetise” what I’m doing.
I found this today:
Some people have called my designs “impressionistic” so I suppose that is sort of what I am doing, anyway.
November 13, 2024 3 Comments
Last trip of the year, I promised my wife.
I left last Monday (the 4th) and took the red-eye to Toronto, arriving in Washington in the mid morning after no sleep on the plane, sitting next to the guy on the plane with the meatiest persistent cough and of course he wore no mask… however, I seem to have evaded bodily invasion by the Phlegmish Army. A quick nap and then I walked down the street to a Peruvian restaurant for some excellent arroz con pollo, and then got some snacks and gargles at the Safeway. Poll workers still out asking people if they had voted. Despite the nap I was so tired I was falling asleep in the middle of rehearsing my talk. The next morning I got up, saw the headline… in the hotel breakfast room someone got up and muted the TV. That’s all I’m going to say about that for now.
Georgetown University runs a shuttle bus for its students and staff from the Rosslyn Metro Station to its main campus, which is nice because no form of public transportation runs close. Hotel shuttle to the metro station meant a quicker trip, and less sweat as it was 26 or 27 degrees the whole time I was in Washington.
(photo: Brant Guillory, who drove a long way to attend)
My presentation went all right, for some reason it was longer than when I had practiced so not as much time left for questions as I had thought. I’m still not very happy with my skills as a public speaker, not much improvement after over 40 years. But I was privileged to hear some very good ones at this conference, in between spasms of Imposter Syndrome. And, I was awarded the title of “Official United States Army Mad Scientist” for my efforts, and I’m very proud to hang the proclamation of same on my wall!
Game Night was fun, lots of things running simultaneously including some guys playing We Are Coming, Nineveh. I brought several things but in the end taught someone Guerrilla Checkers, who liked it.
(photo: Brant Guillory)
Anyway, it was a very good conference, pretty much exactly as promised and it was great to see not just people I hadn’t seen in years, but also to meet some new folks and possibly make some contributions to some other things that are going on. I had to leave a little bit early the next day in order to get out to Dulles Airport for my flight. I think Reagan Airport next time, if there is a next time… a lot faster to get to, though I am grateful the metro runs out to Dulles now (the first time I left from there, there was no metro, just an occasional bus).
I got to Vancouver via Denver, and got into the hotel where Bottoscon was being held a bit after midnight. The con was great too, the largest one yet at over 140 attendees… I taught Guerrilla Checkers to another new person, and got in plays of O Canada with Roger Leroux and Ian Weir. I discussed component production for this with Kerry Anderson and I think I will be putting it up for print-and-play as well as physical production early in 2025; the game is pretty well cooked and just needs to look a bit better.
November 4, 2024 Leave a comment
As previously advertised I’ll be at the “Game On! Wargaming and the Operational Environment” conference at Georgetown University in Washington DC, 6-7 November.
I’ll be speaking on “Gaming Neglected Aspects of the Operational Environment”. There will also be panels on: “gaming unconventional aspects of the Operational Environment”; using wargaming for professional military education, readiness and decision support; wargaming a total national response; and advances in wargaming technology and digital wargaming.
There’s a Game Night too! I’ll be bringing QUICK and Exurb (game for the phases of the urban battle that shape the battle) and Powers of Persuasion, an interesting game on influence operations that Project Wire of the UK MoD debuted at last year’s Connections.
The event is sold out. There will be no synchronous online content as far as I know.
Meanwhile, here are my slides and script:
Brian Train MadSci slides 30 oct 24
It will be a quick trip for me, I will be leaving right afterwards to get back to Vancouver, for BottosCon 2024 where I will be showing and playing QUICK Junior, O Canada and Strongman.
October 26, 2024 4 Comments
From the editors:
Against all odds and after four years I am super excited that I can eventually make this announcement: Our anthology is finally done!
“EuroWarGames. The history, state and future of professional and public (war)gaming in Europe”, edited by Riccardo Masini, Frédéric Serval and me [Jan Heinemann] will be published by Nuts Publishing.A big thank you to Florent Coupeau from Nuts! for believing in this project, picking it up and investing time and money to get it across the finish line.EuroWarGames has articles written by us, the editors, Andrea Alonge, Alfio Ferrara, Andrea Angiolino, Stephane Goria, Zoltan Harangi-Tóth, Paul Hodson, Brian Train, Lorenzo Nannetti, Xavier Rubio Campillo, Salvatore Santangelo, Volko Ruhnke, Ranald Shepherd, Maurice Suckling, Giuseppe Tamba and Daniela Kuschel about various different topics related to wargames, eurogames, game design and history.
The Kickstarter campaign will start soon and we will be sharing a few snippets and do some livestreams to talk about the contents. For now you can sign up for the campaign and be notified as soon as it kicks off. Your support would mean a lot to us.
I don’t have a current index of the contributors and their articles, but my contribution is “Analog Newsgames” – yes, you have heard me spout off about this topic before, but this one is at length, illustrated and there is a whole book full of other, more interesting stuff for you to look at instead.
Here is the link for the KS, when it starts (probably 19 November, but subject to change).
MSRP will be 32 Euros, but Kickstarter price is 20% off or 26 Euros.
I hope you’ll sign up! This one has been four years in the making.
October 24, 2024 3 Comments
Okay, this is going to show up all kinds of places in the next few days but I’ll put it here where I can find it again.
All praise to the cleverly disguised Directorate of Simulation Education!
Command and Staff students excited to wargame upcoming civil war
“No one gets to launch tactical nukes at Philadelphia until they’re 100% complete on annual training.”Kay Too Ess Ohhhhh
Oct 23, 2024FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Wargaming is a staple of professional military education courses across the Defense Department, and students at the Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) are pretty excited about their wargame scenario for Academic Year 2025.
“I thought maybe we’d play out a scenario for defending Taiwan or perhaps countering Russian aggression in Scandinavia,” said Maj. Molly Swift. “So I was surprised when we were told we’d be planning something called Operation EYELINER. Then, the instructor opened the road to war brief with a close-up of J.D. Vance. And as I gazed into those eyes, I thought, ‘Yeah, I can see how those baby blues could get the country in trouble.’ That’s when I knew this wargame was going to be special.”
Dr. Burgerlich Krieg, head of the Murderology, Murderonomy, and Statistics Department that oversees CGSC’s game exercises, noted that wargames are intended to prepare students for future conflicts.
“All of our officers take an oath to defend America against enemies foreign and domestic. So we figured that given the polarization of the upcoming election, we should game out a few homeland courses of action just in case the sweet meteor of death doesn’t put us out of our misery before November 5th.”
Using a modified version of the classic Axis and Allies wargame, each CGSC conference group was assigned a unique branch plan of national dissolution to explore.
“Operation EYELINER assumes that Vance takes over the presidency after Trump chokes to death on a Big Mac at his inauguration ball,” Swift said as she casually rolled a pair of dice in her hand. “Naturally, Vance’s immediate national security priority would be forcibly nationalizing the means of production at major cosmetics centers in California and Florida. So we’ve planned out combined armored thrusts and airborne assaults leveraging the closest Army bases to each maquillage center of gravity.”
Krieg elaborated on some of the other branch plans: “The American taxpayer can rest assured that the iron majors here at CGSC are gaming out every possible scenario. For example, Operation WORD SALAD follows an executive order by President-elect Harris to deploy special operators in direct action missions to eliminate any journalist who asks her a question harder than ‘What’s your favorite color?’ With a Trump victory, Operation CHAINSAW has the Corps of Engineers provide logistical support to irregular forces led by RFK Jr. that hunt down immigrants. Sure, using severed Haitian heads is kind of a dark way to track victory points, but it’s these types of realistic wargame scenarios that really make the military decision-making process come alive.”
October 24, 2024 2 Comments
(quick look at some of the Event Cards)
In today’s update from GMT, it’s announced that solo development for China’s War is about done, other playtesting was completed some time ago, and we’ve signed off on map art, counter art, and Event Card graphics (see above). Final touches on the tutorial scenario have been made and now there will be final formatting of rules book, playbook, and player aids.
Pre-orders are now up to 1,725.
With luck, this game should be printed in early 2025.
All praise to the invaluable work of Jason Carr and Joe Dewhurst to bring this into the world! This game has had one of the longest gestation periods of any of my games, from design to formal publication.
brtrain 
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