QUICK: files for new version posted

December 30, 2025 2 Comments

[illustration of a section of the new map, from QUICK Junior.]

I have posted new print and play files for a new version of the game: The QUICK Page

This will not be news to some of you, but unfortunately August 2024 was the last serial of the Urban Operations Planner Course held by the US 40th Infantry Division, California Army National Guard. I decided to keep the QUICK game available to everyone on this blog as it has attracted interest by civilians and military members from a variety of countries.

But I’ve made a big change to the approach used for the map, based on some work I was doing on another urban combat system. The map is divided into large hexagons called Areas, scaled at 750 m or more per hex, depending on the general situation shown in the module. Inside each Area is a further subdivision of 1 to 6 Locations, denoted by dashed lines within the hexagon like sections of a pie.
All Locations within an Area are mutually adjacent, but are adjacent to a Location in another Area only if they share a section (not a vertex) of Area boundary. The number of Locations denotes the relative “complexity” of the terrain in the area: that is, how challenging and canalizing the terrain is to fight through and the terrain type remains a modifier for the robustness of construction there.  So an open field or park would have 1 Location and Open Terrain, but a section of an older city with small alleys and stone buildings would have 6 Locations and Closed Terrain and would be very difficult to dominate and fight through. Yet both represent the same amount of physical distance. I don’t think anyone has done exactly this kind of thing with a hex map before. I’d be interested to hear your reactions; so far everyone I have demonstrated this to has been quite positive.

Like the earlier version, the set of files here are for a game that takes place in downtown Manila but it has a new pattern map that covers a larger area. Opposing forces are the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the Olvanan 17th Group Army, plus North Torbian forces that could be on either side.

I have also made a module with I MEF advancing on Kuala Lumpur but will post it at a later date.

Optimistically, I have also kept the teaching materials and files giving instructions for a simple method of remote play on the page. The refer to the earlier (2024) version of the game but the mechanics are largely the same and can be adapted.

Thanks for your interest.

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A QUICK Defence of Marijampole

October 21, 2024 2 Comments

Marijampole1

Not an actual hasty defence of this small city in Lithuania, but one using the QUICK game to model one, as practiced at GameOn, a recent video-game-themed gaming event in Vilnius.

Friend of the blog Pijus Kruminas (who has an excellent Substack blog of his own concerning the use of games in academia) used QUICK Junior (which he played with me at Connections-UK this September) to construct a Lithuanian scenario.

In the scenario, the Russian 275th Guards Motor Rifle Regiment emerges from the Kaliningrad enclave and heads east towards Vilnius, with its advance blocked at Marijampole by the Grand Duke Vytenis Logistics Battalion and elements of the NATO enhanced forward presence battle group in Lithuania (mostly German, but with elements from the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, and Czechia).

Read his account of how the day went! I hope that he will be able to use the game in other settings in the future.

https://pijus.substack.com/p/how-we-defended-marijampole

[By the way, I have now posted the print-and-play files for QUICK Junior (Daugavpils) over on The QUICK Page. Scroll down to the bottom. ]

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QUICK in Lithuania

October 3, 2024 Leave a comment

quickjr marijampole

When I was running games of “QUICK Junior” (the scaled down version of the urban combat game, where the maneuver units are NATO platoons and Russian company size storm groups and detached platoons – yes, I know I am bad with titles) Pijus Kruminas was one of the participants.

He wanted to create a version of the game set in Lithuania, so I let him have the files (I will likely put them up on the QUICK Page soon for general distribution since they seem to be fairly sound) and here he has tried out a prototype, set in the small town of Marijampole.

The antagonists are a battalion of the 275 Motor Rifle Regiment from the Kaliningrad enclave, versus troops from a multinational NATO “Enhanced Forward Presence” Battle Group company led by Germans and the Lithuanian “Grand Duke Vytenis” logistic support battalion (based in Marijampolė).

From his LinkedIn post:

Thinking about defense at ISM University of Management and Economics. Together with Economics and Politics students Emilija Račkauskaitė, Gustė Kiškytė, Viltė Radzytė, and Povilas Masiliūnas, we tested an urban combat scenario set in Marijampolė, Lithuania, using the QUICK Junior (Quick Urban Integrated Combat Kriegsspiel) game designed by Brian Train. We’re preparing to facilitate several sessions of the game at an event, and the playtest revealed some changes needed to the scenario.

We selected Marijampolė as it is among the largest urban centers in the Kaliningrad direction and is important, among other reasons, as a railway hub (where most of the fighting took place around the railway station this time). One of the key lessons here is the use of combined arms, while the game also accounts for the civilian population, thus requiring participants to consider a range of options at their disposal as well as their effects.

The system works well, plus it can be introduced relatively easily. We’ll see where this goes, and once we play more, I’ll definitely be sharing more thoughts on the Substack.

So I’m looking forward to one of Pijus’ informative Substack posts!

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Mad Scientist Blog post 505, on urban/irregular warfare

September 18, 2024 2 Comments

“Mad Scientist” is a US Army initiative that was started a while ago to explore the future through collaborative partnerships and continuous dialogue with academia, industry and government. In that sense it is a bit like the Connections franchise of conferences, only in perpetual spasms and with its own Mad Scientist Laboratory blog.

A while ago they solicited some input from wargamers in response to the following questions:

  • What are you learning about Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO)?
  • What wargames do you find useful for learning about military operations?
  • If you could imagine the perfect wargame, what would it look like?
  • What Great Power peripheral flashpoints are you gaming?
  • What emergent technologies (or convergences) are you integrating into your wargaming?
  • What compelling insights from gaming would you most like to share with the U.S. Army?

Well, you know me, I can’t keep my mouth shut so I wrote some thoughts and sent them in, and now they are post #505 of the blog:

https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/505-brian-train-on-wargaming-irregular-and-urban-combat/

Thanks for the chance to say something!

The editor calls me “Canada’s doyen of wargaming”: I don’t know if they really meant that, or maybe they did – there was a real “mad scientist” named Doyen, a French surgeon who was remarkably nutty. (https://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histoire/medica/presentations/doyen-en.php)

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Postin’ down the road

September 9, 2024 2 Comments

canal

(In Hamburg they put me up in a hotel overlooking a canal.)

Been on the road for more than two weeks now and I thought I would drop some pictures and text to let you all know I have not been waylaid by cutpurses or bashi-bazouks.

Tomorrow begins the Connections-UK 2024 conference at Brunel University in Uxbridge, where they have just launched an MA degree in Wargaming! So today is a day for doing laundry in West Drayton (or Drearyton, more like) and sorting things out. 

7DBF9FC2-4781-4395-AA42-36B6C2CC38EE

The Urban Operations Planner Course went fantastically well, and the current version of the game was very well received!

I had some great facilitators from the California State Guard, an unpaid but very dedicated and professional group that I have a lot of respect for now that I have met some of them. They took  personal vacation time or time away from their jobs, plus time spent online with me beforehand, to learn the game and help the students. Thank you to (left to right): SGT (CA) Jesse Poller, SGT (CA) Bryan Tyson, 1LT (CA) Marcus Hough, CPT (CA) Joseph Villegas, SFC (CA) Joshua Leininger, and MAJ (CA) Christopher Allen.

CSG help

Also, several instructors on the course worked as facilitators; here are two: Hauptmann Akcay of the Bundeswehr and Stuart Lyle from the UK’s DSTL,

IMG_0046

and Roger Mason and Joe Miranda came from all the way across the LA basin to observe and help.

https://www.lecmgt.com/news/lecmgt-participates-in-the-us-army-urban-warfare-planner-course/

Students liked the setting-up-the-plan phase, and the area movement map of Manila was a great improvement over the previous year. 

Besides American students, we also had students from the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and half a dozen from the United Arab Emirates… they asked if they could prepare a translation of the QUICK into Arabic! Still no Canadian students (perhaps one or two remote ones) and the only other Canadian on the course, principal instructor and course co-architect MAJ Jayson Geroux was on personal leave to attend.

Very happy with how it turned out!

Brian QUICK

(photo: Stuart Lyle)

 

This is also the last time the course will be offered in this format, BG Wooldridge is retiring from the Army after 31 years of regular and Guard service and it is not likely that the Army will pick up on what this course has laid down, though its future fights lie in cities of all sizes… oh well, as I so often say at work, the urgent always overtakes the important.

The day after the course ended I flew to Hamburg for the Wargaming Initiative for NATO conference (WIN24), while there I met some familiar faces (Giuseppe Tamba, Yuna Huh Wong, Sebastian Bae, Matt Caffrey, Philip Sabin) and met many new ones, or people I had only known by email (Patrick Rueschtmann, Antoine Bourguilleau, Francesco Marradi, Pascal van Overloop).

My talk on modelling civilians in wargaming (mostly presenting bad examples) went OK (Modelling Civilians in Wargames 18 Aug   ) and was perhaps assisted by my attempts at Mediterranean hand gestures (thanks to Patrick Ruestchmann for catching video images of me being projected outside the lecture room!). Also, schnitzels were eaten.

The conference was over all too soon, I got a nice coin from the organizers that mimicked the look of a silver Thaler from 1824, to mark the 200th anniversary of the Prussian Kriegsspiel.

Then I got on the train to Berlin, to see how the city had changed in the last 35 years… short answer is: everything, and nothing: the place is still full of insane weirdos, but now they have the Internet too. And I found a good laundrette in Neukolln, not far from what I am told is the best doner kebab joint in Berlin (it was good, too).

berlin laundrette

I did see a couple of museums, one was a little-known one devoted to the Soviet war effort. It is in the building where the capitulation was signed and which served as the HQ for the Soviet military government later. Marshal G. Zhukov was the Governor for a while after the war, and they have preserved the room that was his office… also contains one of his uniforms and a big bust of Zhukov. Worth a visit if you go to Berlin, and even better Eintritt frei! The T-34/85 outside is supposed to be one of the first to get to the Reichstag but I’m not so sure.

za rodinu

I also went to the Filmhaus (the national museum of film and TV) and the Neue Nationalgalerie, which was also interesting but smaller than I expected. In the latter I snapped a picture of someone so cartoonishly “fitting” for a Berlin modern art spot I thought she might have been hired by the management to wander around to lend atmosphere! (Also note the guy with dress shoes but no socks.)

Yesterday I flew from Berlin to Heathrow, and now here I am in West Drayton getting ready for Connections-UK. I also did laundry today at a laundrette down the road.

drearyton laundrette

All of northern Germany was having a heat wave, 29-31 degrees and sunny each day which was even hotter than Los Angeles… now here it is 16 and gloomy, much closer to conditions in my home turf (or peat bog…)

More later! But lastly, the Brandenburger Tor at sunset.

8285E661-CDB1-4288-9F93-95331E367310

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Twenty-three busy days away

August 21, 2024 5 Comments

IMG_1551

(Will I find a quiet clean and friendly laundromat to match the one I used in Torino? I’ll let you know. Because I’m going to need one at some point.)

I’m going to be out on the road for a while, for what amounts to a three-week professional wargaming tour:

I may or may not be posting from the road, I am bringing my iPad which might make the task less onerous… anyway, that’s where I’ll be and that’s what I’ll be doing.

Be good while I’m gone!

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QUICK Junior @ 1 PPCLI!

March 21, 2024 10 Comments

Game2

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

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

Game1

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

RiverCrossing

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

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

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

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

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QUICK demo at USA CGSC

December 15, 2023 1 Comment

Quick at CGSC

Recently Mark Greenwald and some of his colleagues at the Directorate of Simulation Education at the US Army Command and General Staff College demonstrated the QUICK to staff from the Futures Branch there. Mark posted this image to TwXtter, and kindly included a link to the page where the curious can get their own copy! I can see that a few morbidly curious people did just that. So can you: The QUICK Page

Because they have deep pockets and deeper “bits” closets, you can see they printed out the new area movement map in colour and even mounted the pieces on wooden blocks! No dollar-store mini clothespins for these guys…

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Update: QUICK V2 changes and new map!

November 8, 2023 Leave a comment

Manila areas 16 oct 23 70pc

New map, of downtown Manila.

After some more testing of ideas and work I had done since the May 2023 serial of the Urban Operations Planner Course, I’ve posted some new files for the QUICK game. Major changes include:

  • Created a single intermediate version with many optional additions: hidden movement, criminal and insurgent elements, supply routes, varied initiative, fast and slow Enablers, popular support, random events, infrastructure, and wet gaps (crossing, bridges, demolition etc.).
  • Created 6 x 7 Execution Matrix: player selects 6 cubes and places them singly on 6 rows for 6 steps of a plan each round; each row has 7 choices and players step through round executing actions in row order. Simplified choices of actions, using only 2 colours of cubes.
  • Created irregular area movement map of downtown Manila with 88 spaces, depicting the same area used by students in their COA and IPB practical exercises. Rewrote scenarios for new map. Added random space table and table of probable locations for actual infrastructure. It was a lot of work but worth it I think.
  • Many adjustments to effects of Civilians, Enablers, Infrastructure and combat system.

Help yourself to the new stuff!  The QUICK Page

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Translations: Spanish-language material for District Commander Maracas and the QUICK (V2)

September 17, 2023 Leave a comment

dc_maracas medium          Day 4_Urban Wargame Play_2

The very productive and clever Aitor Saiz Lasheras of San Sebastian has made available Spanish-language translations of the District Commander series rules, the District Commander Maracas module, and the rules and playing aids for the QUICK (V2 version).

Snap them up here at:

https://minervae.top/2023/08/29/district-commander-de-brian-train-en-espanol/

https://minervae.top/2023/09/03/simulando-la-contrainsurgencia-urbana-district-commnader-1-maracas/

https://minervae.top/2023/09/11/quick-un-kriegsspiel-de-combate-urbano-integrado-disenado-por-brian-train/

Enjoy!

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