Comments Off on AWL Wargaming Conference 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 31/01/2026
The 2nd Edition of the WARGAMING CONFERENCE AWL will take place at the Military University of Land Forces (AWL) in Wrocław, Poland on 15-17 September 2026. The theme this year will be “Comprehensive Security: Advancing Wargaming in Military and non-Military Domains.”
If you are interested in joining a panel discussion or delivering a presentation, contact the organizers at: conferencewargame@awl.edu.pl. They are also accepting inquiries from industry representatives wishing to showcase games, systems, solutions, or hardware.
General attendee registration is not open yet. The official registration form will be published closer to the event date.
Comments Off on Assises Françaises d’Étude du Wargaming 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 31/01/2026
The 2026 Assises Françaises d’Étude du Wargaming will take place on 23 April in Lyon.
Nous vivons une situation d’imbrication de crises multiples : financières (par exemple celle des subprimes de 2008 dont la crise de la dette publique française est en partie une conséquence), sanitaires (Covid-19), géopolitiques (guerre en Ukraine, guerre de ses proxys et de l’Iran contre Israël), environnementales (climat, biodiversité), sociales (migrations, inégalités), et informationnelles (désinformation, guerres narratives). Ces crises ne sont pas juxtaposées, mais s’entrelacent et se renforcent. Cette interconnexion des crises rend l’incertitude de plus en plus forte et les capacités de contrôle ou de prédiction plus aléatoires. De plus l’interconnexion structurelle des systèmes (finance, transport, etc.) et l’accélération des flux — de capitaux, de données, de personnes, de virus — rendent les sociétés extrêmement sensibles aux perturbations.
Décider en situation d’incertitude est une activité relativement courante : c’est le propre du stratège qu’il soit militaire, chef d’entreprise, manager, etc. Ce type de décisions reste néanmoins, d’ordinaire, confinée à certaines instances de direction générale ou d’état-major et certaines situations assez limités dans le temps et dans l’espace. De nos jour l’incertitude touche à la fois les acteurs publics et privés. Dans de telles situations de crises systémiques, qu’est-ce qu’une bonne décision ? Une décision est-elle nécessairement mauvaise si elle n’est pas jugée bonne ? Nos outils d’aide à la décision sont-ils toujours appropriés ?
C’est dans un tel contexte que nous avons choisi d’orienter les 3es éditions des Assises Françaises d’Étude du Wargaming : en quoi les pratiques de wargaming peuvent s’inscrire dans des activités incertaines ? Comment le wargaming peut permettre aux décideurs de réduire l’incertitude ou de se préparer à y faire face ?
The deadline for submitting a presentation proposal is 15 February. For further information, see the AFEW 2026 website.
Comments Off on Simulation and gaming miscellany, 26 January 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 26/01/2026
PAXsims is pleased to present some recent items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers. Many thanks to Catherine Philippe and Andrew Spearin for suggesting material for this latest edition.
In October 2024, the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania ran a tabletop exercise on how political violence in the United States might escalate. According to an article in The Guardian, the simulation eerily resembled the current situation in Minnesota.
In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.
While our hypothetical scenario picked a different city and a slightly different sequence of events, the conclusions we reached about the possibility of green-on-green violence are directly applicable to the current situation. First, none of the participants – many of them senior former military and government officials – considered the scenario unrealistic, especially after the supreme court’s decision in Trump v United States, which granted the president criminal immunity for official acts.
Second, we concluded that in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief. State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a “political question”, leaving the conflict unresolved. This is why Judge Menendez’s ruling is so critical: it may be the last opportunity a federal judge has to intervene before matters spiral completely out of control.
Third, we warned that senior military leaders could face orders to use force not only against state national guard units, but against unarmed civilians – and that they must be prepared to assess the legality of such orders. Any domestic deployment of federal troops must comply with the Department of Defense’s Rules for the Use of Force and with the constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Even under the Insurrection Act, federal troops may not lawfully shoot protesters unless they are literally defending their lives against an imminent threat – yet such conduct is already happening in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents.
Finally, it is not legal for federal troops to back up ICE agents who are behaving illegally.
Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution. That oath carries legal force. Service members are not only permitted but obligated to refuse patently illegal orders.
That obligation is now under pressure. Senator Mark Kelly is under investigation by the Pentagon for publicly reminding service members in a video he made with five other members of Congress that they may – and in some cases must – refuse illegal orders. But they were essentially correct: troops must refuse to carry out patently illegal orders.
For members of the 11th Airborne Division, this may soon cease to be a theoretical question. Minnesota may be the first test of whether constitutional limits on domestic military force still hold – or whether the United States is about to cross a line from which it cannot easily return.
Wargaming has grown as a tool of practice for the modern military professional. New and more frequent wargames explore myriad areas of warfare at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The purposes vary, but wargaming generally focuses on improving the players’ ability to fight a future conflict.
But practitioners also may use wargaming for purposes beyond the battlefield—for example, to help modernize a military occupational field. In creating a game tailored to the Marine Corps’ communications occupational field (06XX), figuring out an approach was the first challenge. Designers had to ensure the wargame’s results, evaluations, and recommendations were rigorous, sound, and useful to the service.
The approaches the authors discovered can inform the development of wargames that go beyond the standard analytical focus on battles, operations, and campaigns.
TIDALWAVE identifies gaps and deficiencies and corresponding solutions to resolve anticipated shortfalls in our ability to project and sustain the joint force and to exploit adversary vulnerabilities in order to deplete their ability to conduct military operations. The project examines both U.S. and PRC systems anticipated to have the greatest impact on the conflict: fuel and ammunition. Our ultimate aim is to guide national deliberations on how best to deter a war, and project and sustain U.S. and allied forces in a protracted conflict if required, resolve existing deficiencies, and exploit adversary weaknesses.
Want sharper future forces? This piece argues wargaming is the human engine of operational art in force design—stress-testing concepts, exposing assumptions, and shaping better decisions. From chalk-on-bedsheet ‘Wrens’ to AI-aided adjudication, it shows when simple, rapid runs beat complex sims, and where deep dives matter. Expect strengths, candid limits, and practical tips to fuse wargames with analysis for credible capability development. Plus: a Dutch–JAPCC initiative accelerating a rigorous, repeatable approach for NATO and nations. Start here to design smarter, sooner.
Led by Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), the hybrid wargaming activity brought together more than 200 attendees at DSTG Edinburgh in South Australia.
DSTG drew on expertise from the Joint Experimentation Directorate to assist in designing and delivering the event with custom wargaming tools.
Participants from across Defence and international partners were immersed in a realistic scenario set in 2035. They were able to employ a wide range of innovation, science and technology (IS&T) interventions, combining novel concepts and potentially asymmetric capabilities.
The Joint Operational Understanding and Scrutiny Tool was used to record the wargame and allow participants to step forward and back between turns to explore alternative outcomes.
Data and insights gathered during the activity will be used to reduce risk and inform decision-making across the Defence IS&T ecosystem.
“The operational-level wargame allowed participants to leverage the power of experimentation to explore future capabilities and their potential to deliver an asymmetric advantage for Australia,” said Chief Defence Scientist Professor Tanya Monro.
“This is the capstone event in DSTG’s campaign of experimentation that provides the foundation of our effort to accelerate the most promising technologies into capabilities, giving the Australian Defence Force an edge.”
The focus of the first Innovation and Asymmetry Wargame was to create an environment for Defence to experiment with IS&T options that could mitigate the most significant strategic challenges.
The Military Operations Research Society will be offering a Certificate in Homeland Security Gaming course on 3-5 February 2026.
The MORS Certificate in Homeland Security Gaming examines the challenges of gaming homeland security incidents. The course will introduce homeland security operations and how games and exercises can be used for planning, training, and analysis. Lectures will focus on games and game design with their application to homeland security incidents. The instructors will employ a series of case studies and practical exercises to explain how to design and facilitate these games. At the end of the course, the students will be able to evaluate a natural or human-caused disaster and employ design techniques to model and produce a game.
Our expert instructors will introduce participants to various ways game designs can be used to evaluate and model various types of disasters and emergencies. Participants will:
Learn how to evaluate a specific type of disaster by employing Homeland Security priorities and applying game design techniques
Be familiar with the game and exercises systems of the Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program (HSEEP)
Understand how to model the contingencies of specific disasters using wargame design methods
Develop an awareness of gaming tools to develop realistic disaster-based wargames
MORS also has a forthcoming wargaming course in the UK, and other forthcoming courses which you will find here.
Integrating Nonlethal Weapons into Professional Wargames (Sydney Litterer)
The Contribution of Cyber Simulations to Cyber wargaming (Ambrose Kam)
Matrix Games’ has produced videos of Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War being played by professional wargamers.
David Burden’s Matrix Game Simulation (MGS) system “lets you run a matrix game where the [AI] bot plays all of the roles – both umpire and all the players.” You will find out more about it at his website.
Mixed-media simulation blends multiple modalities into a single experience. This often includes physical components such as boards, cards, tokens, or role placards; digital dashboards, models, and data feeds; and narrative elements that guide player decision-making. The physical layer promotes collaboration and embodied reasoning, while the digital layer enables computation, tracking, and visualization. Traditionally, the connective tissue between these layers has been a human facilitator. In Space Boss, our team is exploring whether this role is increasingly shared or augmented by an AI GameMaster.
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An AI GameMaster is not simply enforcing rules or rolling virtual dice. It functions as a dynamic host that observes player actions, interprets intent, and responds in context. In our collaborative work with AFRL and RIT, we are exploring how to fuse large language models (LLMs), simulation engines, and domain-specific knowledge into a single “thinking” GameMaster. In practice, this enables the AI to:
Introduce emergent events based on player behavior rather than scripted triggers
Inject realistic disruptions
Adapt scenario difficulty and pacing in real time
Role-play non-player actors, including coalition partners, adversaries, or civilian stakeholders
Adjudicate outcomes using underlying models while explaining why those outcomes occurred
Because modern AI systems can reason across text, rules, models, and historical context simultaneously, the GameMaster becomes a living system rather than a static referee.
Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, are learning to play Dungeons & Dragons. The reason? Simulating and playing the popular tabletop role-playing game provides a good testing ground for AI agents that need to function independently for long stretches of time.
Indeed, D&D’s complex rules, extended campaigns and need for teamwork are an ideal environment to evaluate the long-term performance of AI agents powered by Large Language Models, according to a team of computer scientists led by researchers at the University of California San Diego. For example, while playing D&D as AI agents, the models need to follow specific game rules and coordinate teams of players, comprising both AI agents and humans.
The work aims to solve one of the main challenges that arise when trying to evaluate LLM performance: the lack of benchmarks for long-term tasks. Most benchmarks for these models still target short-term operation, while LLMs are increasingly deployed as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that have to function more or less independently over long periods of time.
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The models played against each other, and against over 2,000 experienced D&D players recruited by the researchers. The LLMs modeled and played 27 different scenarios selected from well-known D&D battle set ups named Goblin Ambush, Kennel in Cragmaw Hideout and Klarg’s Cave.
In the process, the models exhibited some quirky behaviors. Goblins started developing a personality mid-fight, taunting adversaries with colorful and somewhat nonsensical expressions, like “Heh—shiny man’s gonna bleed!” Paladins started making heroic speeches for no reason while stepping into the line of fire or being hit by a counterattack. Warlocks got particularly dramatic, even in mundane situations.
The results sound rather realistic, if my own local D&D group is anything to go by.
SAVE THE DATE! Connections UK 2026 will be on the 8th – 10th September 2026 at Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
To help us plan for this for the conference we are very interested in how you feel about Connections, and you can help us shape the Conference, not just in the coming year, but also future years.
We would be really grateful if you would be able to complete the short (2-3 minute) survey via this link.
Comments Off on Some recent wargaming podcasts
Posted by Rex Brynen on 18/01/2026
The Wargame is a major five-part series from Sky News and Tortoise which imagines how a Russian attack on the UK could play out – and invites real-life former ministers, military chiefs and other experts to figure out how to defend the country.
The Army Mad Scientist podcast The Convergence podcast features Mike Barnett and Joe Chretien from the Sustainment Exercise and Simulation Directorate, Combined Arms Support Command discussing their Sinews of War: Theater Sustainment Operationswargame.
Jared Fishman discusses Kriegspiel (and other topics) with Jan Heinemann at the 20 Sided Gamified Podcast.
Comments Off on AFTERMATH: A Venezuela matrix game
Posted by Rex Brynen on 18/01/2026
From the ever-productive Tim Price comes a matrix game about Venezuela in the aftermath of the removal of Nicolás Maduro.
Briefings are provided for six actors: the Venezuelan regime, the Venezuelan military and security services, the opposition, the United States, other external and regional actors, organized crime, and “society, the streets, and informal power”—together with assets, a map, and a basic overview of how to play a matrix game.
Comments Off on MIT Summer Wargaming Institute
Posted by Rex Brynen on 17/01/2026
The Summer Wargaming Institute is a four-day “bootcamp”-style program hosted by the MIT Security Studies Program Wargaming Lab on 12-16 July, designed to teach practitioners and scholars how to design and run wargames for research, training, and analysis. Applicants must be PhD candidates or junior faculty in international relations, political science, or related fields or early to mid-career foreign policy/national security professionals.
Full details can be found here. The deadline for application is March 1.
Comments Off on Simulation & Gaming (February 2026)
Posted by Rex Brynen on 13/01/2026
Simulation & Gaming 57, 1 (February 2026) is now available.
Editorial
We Need Cooperation to Save Our World- and Other Lessons Learned From Gaming
Marlies P. Schijven and Toshiko Kikkawa
Research Articles
Exploring the Usability of Virtual Reality as a Tool to Assess Collective Non-Technical Skills: The Case of Team Communication During a Collaborative Task
Yasmina Kebir, Gaelle Nicolas, Samuel Ferreira Da Silva, Pierre Chevrier, Valérie Saint-Dizier de Almeida and Jérôme Dinet
A Longitudinal Study of Video Games’ Influence on Climate Change Concerns, Climate Refugee Awareness, and Environmental Behaviour Activism
Elena Shliakhovchuk, Micaela Martin, Miguel Chover and Viktor Danchuk
Effect of Playing Digital Games on Reaction Time in Taekwondo Athletes
Asli Dogan and Nihan Ozunlu Pekyavas
Digital Gaming and English L2 Informal Learning in Adolescents
Trung Hoang Minh Bui, Phuong Thi Tuyet Le and Farhan Ali
The Golden Age of Esports Players: Age, Prize Distributions, and Competitive Lifespans From 1997 to 2023
Jimoon Kang
Indigenous Games for Digital Natives: Generative Games From the African Akan Philosophy for Healthy Schooling
David Kyei-Nuamah
Game-Based Learning for Sustainable Development: Impacts on Students’ Perceptions by Prior Knowledge Level
In the Bruges case there are between 90 and 100 students a year, and in Aix there are 70. In both cases the idea is to simulate the EU’s Ordinary Legislative Procedure – so this means players representing Member States (Council or COREPER), the European Parliament, and the European Commission. In addition there are non-legislative actors in both games – lobbyists, campaigners, journalists.
The idea is not to simulate how the EU as a whole works. There is no European Council. No high level politics. There’s no Comitology either. The aim in both cases is to examine how everyday politics in the EU institutions works – not least because the students in both Bruges and Aix-en-Provence are going to be working in their post-university lives on everyday Regulations and Directives like this, rather than the high politics of summits.
The Canadian Army is in the process of modernizing our force through many avenues: capabilities, technology, tactics, training, and force organization and structure. To investigate how new capabilities may fare against modern opponents, wargaming provides an incredible opportunity to test these capabilities and how we employ them in a safe, flexible and cost-effective environment. Wargaming provides us insights into the strategic thinking of both friendly and adversarial entities, capability requirements, and the doctrinal/conceptual strengths and weaknesses of both forces.
The authors recently developed Lifeline Latvia, an unclassified link and node wargame designed to generate insights into the delivery of medical care to a battle group involved in a high-intensity engagement. The prototype game was played twice—with different scenarios—on consecutive days in March 2025. Subject matter experts commanded key nodes and engaged in open play. Combat was abstracted to allow a focus on medical activities. Enemy weapons’ effects were based on open-source information, which was judged sufficiently granular for a medical wargame.
Exercise Canada Paratus (ECP) was a pan-Canadian health security exercise that simulated the challenge of maintaining Canadians’ access to care while managing a high and sustained flow of casualties evacuated to Canada for treatment and recovery. This sort of exercise is essential for identifying gaps in our systems, improving crisis response, and building strong working relationships among the leaders that would need to collaborate during a major emergency like a war. Building on the success of Ontario’s Exercise Trillium Cura (ETC) held in 2024, ECP brought together from across Canada, experts from academia, federal, provincial, and territorial health systems, public sector agencies, private industry, and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Together, they explored how to better prepare for the arrival of wounded and deceased individuals, while ensuring that the broader Canadian population continues to receive the care they need.
In a recent paper from the CISS Munich Working Paper Series, “Wargaming: This is not a game!“, Christian Nitzl critically examines the application of wargaming [in German].
From an ethical and pedagogical standpoint, narrative-based simulations such as The Troubles are designed to provide an immersive and authentic medium that provides the necessary social context to support a safe and sensitive exploration of a controversial and harrowing period in history. Participants are given free agency to engage with their own and that of others’ “political and ideological positionings…related not only to knowledge, but also to action”.113 Players—students—of The Troubles should be active author-readers in this history; from an ethical and pedagogical standpoint, simulations like it provide unique opportunities that other, more traditional forms and modes of instruction often do not or cannot, particularly agency.
Just as museum visitors can choose to navigate through exhibits in different ways, players of The Troubles have the agency to approach the game from various perspectives. Unlike traditional mediums, The Troubles provides an innumerable constellation of objects and cards constantly creating a multitude of narrative nodes and nets of possibility for the student of history.
By drawing parallels between museums and tabletop games in facilitating engaging learning experiences, designers and players of controversial simulations like The Troubles co-author powerful and polyvocal narratives of the past. Through this collaborative process, players gain historical knowledge while engaging in the cycle of historical empathy, critically and morally participating in some of the most complex and harrowing historical contexts.
By revealing gaps, stress points and unexpected outcomes, wargaming helps decision-makers plan smarter and respond faster when the real thing hits. Ignoring these feedback loops risks turning slow moving challenges into sudden, systemic shocks.
Historically limited to traditional warfighting, it increasingly offers a way to stress-test systems against cascading threats, from resource scarcity driving geopolitical tensions to digital exclusion fuelling misinformation.
Our intention in designing the wargame in this way was motivated by concern that insufficient attention has been given to understanding how China’s leadership and war planners may conceptually approach the problem of bringing Taiwan to heel. This was particularly important given our participant composition: while predominantly U.S.-based, the group included a few international players. Participants brought diverse high-level experience, including former U.S. officials from the State Department, Department of Defense, and CIA, as well as the UK Cabinet Office. Several participants had military backgrounds, having served in the U.S. Army or Navy, and a few were established scholars in international relations. Around half the participants had expertise in the Chinese military or the Chinese Communist Party. Therefore, we deliberately designed the game to force participants to confront practical questions Chinese strategists would face when they draft and update their war plans, such as: How much force is enough to compel surrender without triggering U.S. intervention? What surrender terms would Taipei accept? How does Beijing transition from military action to political control of Taiwan to a favorable post-war status quo in the region and beyond?
These types of questions expose a gap in American strategic thinking. Most U.S. wargames focus on operational and tactical military interactions — ship movements, missile salvos, casualty counts, what percentage of Chinese troops land in the north of Taiwan vs. the south. The focus is overwhelmingly on the invasion scenario. They rarely examine the political context that shapes military decisions. This narrow focus produces a dangerous blind spot: the United States prepares for the war it can fight or prefers to fight, not the one China expects to win.
The exercise revealed three scenarios that generated the most debate among participants. First, a limited missile barrage followed by diplomatic ultimatum — essentially, coercion without invasion. Second, a graduated escalation that stops short of attacking U.S. forces. Third, an assault designed to cripple U.S. forces at the outset and present Taipei with a new reality of isolation. Each path reflected different risk tolerances and assumptions about American resolve.
Imagine attempting to predict the outcome of a chess match between two world-class players by studying the tactics of both chess masters and then simulating a single game. What effect might a mis-moved pawn early in the game have on the endgame scenario? If you have ever played chess, you know a single misstep can have massive repercussions down the line. Even if a team simulates this chess match 20 times, it is unlikely it could predict the outcome. A better way to predict the winner might be to train AI on data from every game the chess masters ever played, then let the AI play out millions of possible match scenarios. One could then determine the most likely outcome based on the aggregated data.
This is exactly the approach the U.S. military should take in wargaming. Ultimately, wargaming presents an optimization problem—how should global forces behave to best achieve U.S. objectives? The modern battlespace contains countless variables, making the problem more complex than humans alone can likely solve. Returning to the chess metaphor, AI has proven superior to humans at the game for more than two decades, since IBM’s Deep Blue AI defeated grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Many had argued that humans were better suited to predict the best move in a situation that had never been encountered—a sentiment echoed by many in the wargaming community. This assumption was again proven wrong in 2017 when Google’s AlphaGo bested the world’s top player at Go, an ancient game even more complex than chess.
While AI is growing more powerful by the day, it does have its limitations. Its ability to simulate warfare would only be as good as the data from which it learned. If the learning set is flawed, so will be the model, and every past wargame is flawed in some way. But AI could remove the noise from human adjudicators’ decision-making and produce more consistent and reliable models. It could enable leaders to analyze a wargame in retrospect and test how changing certain variables affects the outcome, answering questions such as: How would an increase in naval forces in this particular region have affected our forces’ ability to close vital supply chains? or How would poor weather have affected the enemy’s air defenses for this particular strike? Answering these questions without AI would require rerunning an entire game, an unrealistic and impractical approach.
DEF CON, which began in 1993, is an international cybersecurity conference. It’s also one of the biggest conferences for hackers in the world. One of the main goals of the conference’s various subsets, or policy villages, is to introduce different perspectives on technology and policy making to different audiences, including government officials, computer engineers, and technical hackers.
Volker Franke, professor of conflict management, and Amer Alnajar, an International Conflict Management Ph.D. student working with Franke as a graduate research assistant, decided to add the perspective of social scientists to the DEF CON mix by running a crisis simulation with a humanitarian angle.
“We had simulated a cyberattack on a nuclear reactor in Switzerland. In the simulated event, we had some radiation fallout, and people needed to be evacuated,” Franke said. “This is where we get to the humanitarian response. What needs to be done to get people away from the reactor?”
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An ambitious goal of their research is to utilize AI when a simulation lacks enough human players to operate effectively. Their hope is to use AI to mimic the roles of humans in the simulation alongside actual human participants. Franke said they are “two or three steps away” from being able to fully dig into that aspect of their research.
Alnajar said AI could also accelerate the design timeframe for simulations. For example, Franke said Alnajar programmed AI to quickly find out what the effects and impact of their simulated cyberattack in Poland would be 72 hours after the strike; a process which “is so intricate that it would require a week of research to figure out what that might be.” Alnajar said AI is valuable in forecasting the quantitative implications of simulated crises by providing numbers about casualties, refugees, and dislocated citizens in significantly less time.
In this podcast, Timothy Peacock and Rebecca Sutton talk about peacegaming and their work at the Games and Gaming Lab at the University of Glasgow. This talk was inspired by their workshop at the UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating (May Peace Prevail), which took place in Glasgow in May 2025.
Trust & Safety: Armed Conflict is a serious game that explores the complex tradeoffs faced by a social media company’s trust and safety team when responding to armed conflict and crisis situations. Developed with the International Committee of the Red Cross, it was created by Copia Gaming and Leveraged Play, written and developed by Mike Masnick, Randy Lubin, and Leigh Beadon, with support from the governments of Luxembourg and Switzerland.
Interregnum is a new leadership and strategic communication simulator from the Polish Naval Academy. You can read about it at Daily Mare:
Interregnum is more than just a game. It is a leadership laboratory, a controlled environment where participants can safely make mistakes and learn how the worlds of politics, strategic communication, and international relations truly function, explains dr Łukasz Wyszyński, head of the Department of International Relations at the Polish Naval Academy.
The system consists of two key components. The first is a browser-based grand strategy game, in which participants compete for influence and resources. The second is a set of custom-designed training scenarios, developed by the Academy’s experts and tailored to specific educational objectives.
According to dr Paweł Kusiak, head of the Game and Simulation Laboratory, participants assume the roles of political leaders operating in an environment of incomplete information. They must plan, negotiate, and make strategic decisions. In practice, they learn how political theory and international relations concepts translate into real-world decision-making processes.
At the start of the academic year,more than a thousand MIT students used the En-ROADS climate policy simulation to role-play as global decision-makers, experimenting with policies such as carbon pricing and clean energy investment to keep global warming well below 2°C. Through workshops and a simulated global climate summit, participants explored how different policy choices affect the climate, economy, and human health while negotiating pathways consistent with the Paris Agreement. You can read about it here.
The core mission of EMCE: City Blackout is to demonstrate how early preparedness and effective coordination reduce cascading effects in emergencies. Players must assess risk, prioritize resources, and act quickly to prevent minor disruptions from evolving into full-scale crises. Throughout the game, participants will be working to mitigate power outages and infrastructure failures while assessing community vulnerabilities. Every round is an opportunity for real-world learning. The facilitator leads scenario briefings, pauses for reflection, and interprets data to help participants explore:
Comments Off on Games of War conference, 24 February 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 06/01/2026
The Faculty of History at the University of Gdansk together with Magnus Ducatus Foundation in collaboration with European Humanities University and the Department of Computer Systems and Technologies of Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics, are proud to announce the 3rd international academic hybrid conference “Games of War”, coming on the 24th of February 2025. The event is held every year on 24 February, marking the anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in 2022. It stands as both an act of academic reflection and a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine and all those affected by war.
Over the past editions, Games of War has grown into a significant international forum for scholars, game designers, historians, and cultural researchers.
1st Edition (2024): Focused on the representations of war and historical conflict in games, exploring how game mechanics and storytelling engage with violence, trauma, and memory.
2nd Edition (2025): Expanded to include the war in Ukraine as a central topic, with Ukrainian academics, game developers, and cultural analysts sharing firsthand perspectives on how games respond to ongoing conflict.
3rd Edition (2026): Will examine the evolving narratives of war, identity, and resilience in digital and analog games — four years into the full-scale invasion, and more than a decade since the invasion in Ukraine began.
Comments Off on Looking back on 2025—and ahead to 2026
Posted by Rex Brynen on 01/01/2026
Happy New Year to one and all!
This past year saw 38,723 visitors (77,451 page views) to PAXsims, down from 56,070 visitors in 2024. The decline likely reflects several factors, including fewer posts during the year (91, down from 113) and the continued migration of discussion on conflict simulation and serious gaming to other fora, including LinkedIn, Discord, and elsewhere. Since the site was established, PAXsims has attracted more than 715,000 visitors and 1.5 million page views.
Over the past year, visitors came from 167 countries and territories, with the largest share from the United States. The top ten locations were as follows:
More broadly, 2025 was a year in which wargaming, policy gaming, and other forms of serious gaming continued to grow in popularity, application, and sophistication. AI has had a major impact on serious gaming in the past year, and its role is likely to grow in the year ahead. While the United States and United Kingdom remain the most important wargaming centres within NATO, there has been notable growth elsewhere—notably in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Denmark, and beyond—visible in conferences, collaborations, and institutional activity. Canada also strengthened its wargaming capacity, although recent contracting changes risk deinstitutionalizing some of that progress.
There are, however, major grounds for concern too. As a field, (war)gaming has struggled to keep pace with a rapidly changing security environment. This is true in relation to technological and battlefield developments, but even more so with respect to major strategic shifts. Much contemporary gaming remains reluctant to grapple seriously with uncertain alliances, contested legitimacy, and emerging threats, and instead remains anchored in what may now be a fading strategic context.
These changes are also straining professional networks and collaboration. In recent months, several American institutions—concerned about political backlash—have quietly withdrawn public endorsement of the Derby House Principles or have ceased to mention diversity and inclusion altogether. Some professional gamers have been reluctant, or have refused, to travel to the United States to attend conferences, support games, or collaborate with US counterparts, citing the political climate or concerns about potential legal or ethical exposure.
Against this backdrop, 2026 may prove to be a critical year. Can serious gaming meaningfully help us navigate and mitigate these emerging challenges? Will it continue largely as business as usual, sidestepping profound changes already underway? Or will wargamers—engaged in a form of anticipatory obedience, a banality of gaming—find themselves complicit in supporting unethical or otherwise problematic policies?
PAXsims 