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.
PAXsims 