The Canadian Games Studies Association 2026 conference will be held on June 11-14 at Concordia University in Montreal. [T]his year’s chosen theme is “On Repeat”. Beyond the Montreal “threepeat,” this theme also references the many ways games, players, and game studies are shaped by returns, loops, cycles, respawns, and replays. We particularly invite submissions that […]
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The Canadian Games Studies Association 2026 conference will be held on June 11-14 at Concordia University in Montreal.
[T]his year’s chosen theme is “On Repeat”. Beyond the Montreal “threepeat,” this theme also references the many ways games, players, and game studies are shaped by returns, loops, cycles, respawns, and replays. We particularly invite submissions that explore repetition in its many resonances: as game mechanics, as experienced by players, as nostalgic returns or reboots, as found in historical and cultural cycles, and in revisiting as scholarly practice, to name just a few possibilities.
The conference programme can be found here, and additional information (and a registration link) can be found here.
Simulation & Gaming 57, 3 (June 2026) is now available. Editorial Review Research Article
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Simulation & Gaming 57, 3 (June 2026) is now available.
Editorial
How to Use Games and Simulations to Help Our World Become More Resilient in Times of Crisis
Marlies P. Schijven and Toshiko Kikkawa
Review
Effect of Virtual Patient (VP) Software on Pharmaceutical Education: A Systematic Review
Rafaella de Oliveira Santos Silva, Vanessa Alves-Conceição, Sabrina Cerqueira-Santos, Dyego Carlos Souza Anacleto de Araújo, Kérilin Stancine Santos Rocha, Fernanda Oliveira Prado, Mayara de Almeida Lima Ribeiro, Luana Andrade Macêdo and Divaldo Pereira de Lyra, Jr.
Research Article
Perceived Impact of High-Fidelity Simulation-Based Learning on Engagement and Motivation Among Undergraduate Nursing Students in Qatar
PAXsims is pleased to present some items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers. If you enjoy our content, consider becoming one of our Patreon supporters. All contributions go to supporting the website and related projects. At War on the Rocks, Stephen Bittner argues that Acquisition […]
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PAXsims is pleased to present some items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers.
If you enjoy our content, consider becoming one of our Patreon supporters. All contributions go to supporting the website and related projects.
At War on the Rocks, Stephen Bittner argues that Acquisition Reform Needs Its Own Wargame—or, more specifically, “an operationally grounded comparison of how specific, congressionally-controlled acquisition policy decisions shape battlefield outcomes under a realistic adversary scenario.”
The design requirements are specific. The game should model at least two acquisition scenarios against a common starting point, with results expressed in terms a staffer or appropriator can use — how many days of combat operations remaining stockpiles could sustain, how many missiles are loaded and ready to fire at the start of a conflict, and how quickly a needed weapon can actually be delivered to the field. The variables should be the levers Congress actually controls: multi-year purchasing commitments, contract competition thresholds, flexibility in how money moves between accounts mid-cycle, and investments in specific industrial chokepoints under the Defense Production Act’s industrial capacity expansion provisions.
For example, raising the head of contracting activity’s sole-source authority from $500 million to $1 billion, for instance, is exactly the kind of statutory change the game could model: a contract that previously required higher-level review now stays at the service level and reaches award faster. How many additional Tomahawks does that faster timeline put in the field by the first day of a conflict? The answers are what Congress needs to move proposals that currently die without numbers. While munitions deliveries are the most legible link between acquisition decisions and battlefield outcomes, the methodology applies to every aspect of warfighting affected by acquisition decisions and policies, from satellites to base infrastructure to next-generation weaponry.
The most direct path runs through the next defense authorization bill, directing the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Center for Naval Analyses to design and execute a joint acquisition-reform wargame series. Findings would be delivered to the armed services committees alongside the president’s annual budget request, providing a structured, adversarial-tested comparison of what specific acquisition reforms would have put in the magazine before the shooting started. As someone who has watched reform proposals stall in committee, not because they were wrong but because they arrived without numbers, I can say with some confidence that a wargame product formatted to answer that question would move proposals that currently do not move.
A five-phase wargaming framework for force planning adopted across the Department of Defense will eliminate incoherence in the application of wargaming for future force design and improve outcomes for the capability development process. The sequence of games in this framework are a logical guide for every component of force planning, from establishing the nature of future problems to selecting the most likely form factor for solutions. When these phases are collapsed or skipped, force design efforts risk validating solutions before problems are understood, deriving requirements from incomplete concepts, or allowing technology availability to substitute for operational logic. The framework does not claim predictive authority or deterministic validity: It provides a disciplined structure for inquiry, traceability, and institutional learning within a broader cycle of research. It will improve how wargames are implemented within a campaign of learning. It also benefits sponsors, game designers, and players since a clear process prevents the misapplication of their talents and expertise and ameliorates misunderstanding of the purpose of a game.
The five game types they describe are:
Problem Discovery. A strategic-level game asking whether a fundamentally different military problem will exist in 10–20 years. The goal isn’t to solve anything yet — just to determine whether the current force will be adequate for the future environment.
Operational Concept. Once a problem is identified, this game tests whether an existing operational concept can address it or whether a new one is needed. It runs two comparative games — one with existing means, one with a proposed new concept — to see which holds up.
Gap Analysis. This game deliberately sets up the current force to fail, stress-testing the new concept with existing capabilities to expose what’s missing. Crucially, the authors warn against injecting new equipment too early, since doing so masks gaps rather than revealing them.
Capabilities Identification. Having revealed the gaps, this game measures them with enough precision to generate actual requirements — the performance parameters a future solution would need to meet. It shifts from operational to tactical focus and brings analysts and technology developers into the room alongside warfighters.
Solutions Testing. The final game presents candidate material and non-material solutions to users — ideally younger players who will actually operate the systems — and tests whether they work in practice. It applies design thinking rather than systems thinking, and serves as a final check before major acquisition investments are made.
The Canadian Army has been using a series of wargames to support force modernization.
If you were planning to modernize an army, to change its structures, reposition units and commands, identify gaps in capabilities, introduce new equipment, and bolster its reserve force, where would you start?
Over the past year, an Army Modernization Team has conducted over 400 surveys with soldiers at every level, held working groups, developed some 3,000 documents, and created around 17,000 data points, all with an aim to informing a modernization plan.
Central to that activity has been an ongoing series of war games, exercises designed to challenge conventional thinking and broaden the range of ideas as the Army strives to align its resources with the demands of the current and future force.
…
Lessons from the war in Ukraine have exposed many of the Army’s capability shortfalls, but the exercise forced discussions on structure rather than equipment, explained Major Ed Farren, project officer with the Modernization Team, “because new kit and old structures are not going to get you the best right result.”
Ed highlights both the problems of many past wargames (and not just in Canada):
The Army has been conducting war games of various types for decades. But without a digital repository for the reasons and results, “there’s often a lot of repeating the same questions,” said Farren. “Every couple of years, someone wants to look at the same thing, [but can’t] check the back history to see what was done or how it was done, and therefore build on it.”
Farren was part of a 2024 unclassified tactical war game exploring infantry optimization. The contest of a battlegroup versus a peer foe in the Baltics generated valuable data about capabilities the Army requires, but it did not represent the “large sea-change that the Army wants to bring in.”
The top line of the postgame report could have read, “the Royal Canadian Infantry Corps requires the Royal Canadian Artillery to have more guns with longer range and more mobility,” he said.
“One of the lessons was that it doesn’t really matter… Yes, a platoon with a drone is better than platoon without a drone, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the adversary’s sense and strike complex was pretty much unassailable, and no one else was able to deconstruct that through either jamming, counter uncrewed aircraft systems, or counter battery. It’s teaching us a lesson that we already know — combined arms is the answer.”
In this series of games:
To produce the imaginative thinking modernization requires, the modernization team applied an approach to wargaming based on John Boyd’s 1976 methodology of destruction and creation – gaining strategic advantage in complex, uncertain, and ever-changing environments by continuously breaking down and rebuilding mental models. The approach provided the foundation for his decision-making cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act, known as the OODA Loop.
In January, a working group of six teams, representing all components of the Army, tackled the difficulties of structural change, using a gamification approach to force interactive discussions as participants worked through questions about where a unit or capability should reside, train, operate, and fight — in major combat operations and what Farren called “left of war scenarios.”
“It became obvious during the conversations that the fight discussion lacked a bit of granularity,” Farren observed. “How well does this thing fight? There was a lot of disagreement about what should and shouldn’t be in a brigade, other than the fact that people were referring to the brigade structure that we currently have.”
Three months later, in April, the modernization team hosted a tactical war game in Valcartier, Que., in which the current structure was compared with an alternative. “It wasn’t an ideal structure; it was just materially different,” he said. “We removed a light infantry battalion and we added more tanks, and we added different equipment based on the planned equipment program.”
The players were comprised of the command team of 5 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group and other members from the brigade, split into blue and red teams. They executed four runs through the game, one set in 2027 and employing equipment and capabilities the Army expects to have by then, and the other three in 2033, “which is where the planned equipment program stops,” said Farren.
Both sides received enhanced capabilities in line with 2027 and 2033, but where blue received much of what the Army will acquire between now and 2027 just to reach a state it should already be at — think ground-based air defence — the red side was able to employ elements of machine learning, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
“One thing that game really helped show is the sense of urgency,” Farren noted. “In 2027, not only were the results not good, the option space for the brigade wasn’t good — it could only really fight in one way. In 2033, the brigade commander had more options on what to do. In 2027, he had to be defensive. In 2033, he felt more empowered with capabilities to be offensive, which meant red felt less assured of winning, and was a bit more hesitant.”
This fall, following the release of Inflection Point 2025, the Army’s action plan for modernization, the modernization team led a war game on mobilization, set during the first five months of the next global war, when the Army and the nation were still in a transition period from peacetime structures and processes to a wartime footing — mandatory military service and nationalization of industry were not included.
In April, NATO SAS Panel has launchd Research Task Group (RTG) SAS–219 High North Scenarios for Wargaming and Analysis (Winter Storm 2030)—details below.
It was a bitter victory. After occupying a chunk of NATO territory in the Baltics, my team successfully converted the land grab into a diplomatic coup, winning major concessions from the United States that would refashion Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor. I was President Vladimir Putin, and I had just secured a big win for my project of Russian aggrandizement.
Thankfully, this was not reality. It was a war game organized by the German newspaper Die Welt and the German armed forces, designed to test Berlin’s readiness for a security crisis brought about by Russian aggression and American indifference. I’d been invited to represent my home country of Russia; there was a certain piquancy in playing the man whose invasion of Ukraine pushed me, as well as many of my friends and colleagues, into exile.
The results were chilling. The game, which took place last December, made plain how plausible a new Russian attack is — and how vulnerable NATO would be to one. The war in Iran, handing Russia a fresh advantage and fracturing the West further, has only worsened the situation. The exercise made me worry that unless NATO countries get their act together, another invasion could be coming.
MINDSPACE is a browser-based wargame built on the DISARM Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures framework — the structured taxonomy used by NATO, the EU, and national disinformation units to catalogue and analyse influence operations.
You play Red Team or Blue Team across four scenarios: election interference, military deception, health disinformation, cyber attribution warfare.
Red’s job is to capture population nodes by driving belief in a target narrative above 60%. Blue’s job is to hold the information environment until the clock runs out.
The mechanics encode real cognitive science. Each node tracks Belief, Resilience, Polarisation, Saturation, Emotional State, and Source Trust. Flood a node to trigger the illusory truth effect. Provoke anger before amplifying — emotional priming drops Resilience and the narrative spreads faster. Try to debunk a high-salience community and watch the backfire roll.
Every action maps to a DISARM TTP code. The post-game debrief annotates everything you did against the framework and gives you a performance grade. The game is the training.
Red starts with a budget advantage in most scenarios. Attacking the information environment is cheaper than defending it. That asymmetry is a design feature.
Free in any browser. No install.
Registration is now open for the Professional Gaming Society 2026 Wargaming Emerging Technologies Workshop, a unique forum dedicated to advancing the art and science of wargaming in an era of rapid change. This will take place on 21–24 September 2026 in Alexandria, Virginia. The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 31.
Tanks and Bridges is a civil-military disaster wargame simulation designed to test NATO convoy management during infrastructure emergencies, often featuring scenarios like the Via Baltica. It focuses on navigating tactical challenges, including accidents, road closures, and civilian-military cooperation on critical transport routes.
U.S. Strategic Command and the Naval War College have conducted their annual Deterrence and Escalation Game and Review (DEGRE), a multi-day wargame held in Newport, Rhode Island that brought together senior military leaders, strategists, and allied partners to stress-test American deterrence strategy in simulated global crises. You can read more about it here.
In April, CAPTRS ran its C3C outbreak simulation with nearly 200 scientists and public health officials at the CDC’s Insight Net annual meeting in North Carolina, walking participants through a fictional escalating respiratory illness spreading through World Cup host cities. The exercise was designed to fill a gap in conventional tabletop drills by replicating the cognitive pressure of a real crisis rather than staying at the level of theoretical discussion. The simulation also had players first assess the scenario individually, then reconcile their assumptions with the rest of the group, surfacing the kind of hidden misalignments in data and priorities that tend to derail coordination when an actual outbreak hits.
This course introduces analog serious games (e.g. board and card games, narrative games) as tools to explore and foster food system transformation and challenges the participants to design new and/or adapt existing games and test them in a final event where they can showcase their prototypes.
Participants will design, facilitate and test serious games using real food system case studies provided by us.
Participants will learn about existing serious games, design, play and facilitate and assess game sessions using multiple approaches, including Q-methodology, visual research methods, and thematic analysis, applying multiple frameworks such as the Nature Futures Framework, multispecies, post growth and boundary crossing frameworks.
The course brings together researchers and practitioners working on analog serious games for food systems, covering (co-)design, facilitation, assessment and impact in food system contexts.
Want to hear about the games featured at the 2026 Serious Games Arcade? Then listen to Scott De Jong’s Serious Game Arcade podcast.
At his Substack, Kenneth Payne uses AI to create a think-tank simulator. Choose a political leaning (or real-world counterpart), ask for policy advice, and presto!
conferencesCentre Interarmées de ConceptsFranceWargaming à Paris
The Académie de défense de l’École militaire (ACADEM), in partnership with the Centre Interarmées de Concepts, de Doctrines et d’Expérimentations (CICDE), is hosting the inaugural Wargaming in Paris (WàP) event at the École Militaire, Paris, on 23-24 June 2026. In a strategic landscape defined by the return of great-power competition, wargaming is emerging as an […]
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The Académie de défense de l’École militaire (ACADEM), in partnership with the Centre Interarmées de Concepts, de Doctrines et d’Expérimentations (CICDE), is hosting the inaugural Wargaming in Paris (WàP) event at the École Militaire, Paris, on 23-24 June 2026.
In a strategic landscape defined by the return of great-power competition, wargaming is emerging as an essential tool for analysis, anticipation, and decision-making support. The programme includes immersive sessions and live game demonstrations, plenary talks and short presentations, and direct exchanges with practitioners, researchers, military personnel, and institutional stakeholders. The aim is to bring together different perspectives, share lessons learned, and build a shared strategic culture around a tool that remains underutilized.
Wargames Connections Suisse will hold its fourth annual conference on 19-20 September 2026.
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Wargames Connections Suisse will hold its fourth annual conference on 19-20 September 2026.
Wargame Connections Suisse 2026 (WCS26)
Location: Centre Général Guisan, Pully, Switzerland
Dates: Saturday & Sunday, September 19–20, 2026
Greetings fellow strategists, analysts, and decision-makers.
As we prepare for the 4th Edition of Wargame Connections, I want to take a moment to define what we are gathering for. This isn’t just a conference; it is a crucible for Operational Wargaming.
What is Operational Wargaming? While tactical games focus on the “how” of a single battle, and strategic games look at the “why” of national policy, Operational Wargaming sits in the critical middle ground. It is the art of designing and executing campaigns. It is where logistics meet maneuver, where political constraints collide with military necessity, and where the fog of war is thickest. We simulate the complex interplay of forces across a theater of operations to test doctrines, expose vulnerabilities, and refine decision-making under pressure. It is the bridge between theory and reality.
Why attend?
Deep Analysis: Move beyond the surface level of conflict simulation.
Professional Network: Connect with the leading minds in the field.
Historical Context: Hosted at a venue steeped in Swiss military history.
Future Focus: Shape the methodologies of tomorrow’s operational planning.
The stakes are high, the thinking is deep, and the community is waiting.
Mark your calendars for September 19–20, 2026. Save your seat through an email to infowargame@protonmail.ch. Stay tuned for the full agenda.
Let’s push the boundaries of operational thought together. See you in Pully.
simulation and gaming newscruise ship outbreakpaleomicroorganismpublic healthWorld Health Organizationzombie pathogens
Earlier this month, the World Health Organization convened the second iteration of Exercise Polaris, an infectious disease outbreak simulation involving 15 countries and more than 20 regional health agencies, emergency networks, and partner organisations. Building on Polaris I, the exercise is designed to stress-test a global coordination mechanism for health emergencies, the Global Health Emergency […]
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Earlier this month, the World Health Organization convened the second iteration of Exercise Polaris, an infectious disease outbreak simulation involving 15 countries and more than 20 regional health agencies, emergency networks, and partner organisations. Building on Polaris I, the exercise is designed to stress-test a global coordination mechanism for health emergencies, the Global Health Emergency Corps (GHEC) framework. More broadly, it underscored the importance of effective multilateral cooperation during global health emergencies.
The exercise scenario for the original 2025 exercise centred on an outbreak of “mammothpox,” a fictional pathogen with modest transmissibility and a fatality rate described as falling between those of mpox and smallpox. The simulated response was complicated by fragmented information and inconsistent action across countries. In one scenario thread, an Arctic researcher boards a cruise ship while infected, spreading the disease to fellow passengers.
Participating countries in Polaris I included Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ethiopia, Germany, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Mozambique, Nepal, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Uganda, and Ukraine, with additional countries attending as observers. Regional and global organisations — including the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the International Organization for Migration, and UNICEF, and UNICEF — also took part, alongside established emergency networks including the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, the Emergency Medical Teams initiative, Stand-by Partners, and the International Association of National Public Health Institutes. In total, more than 350 health emergency experts participated from across the world.
As described by the secretary general of the WHO, “[Polaris I] was a rare opportunity for governments to test preparedness in a realistic environment, where trust and mutual accountability were as critical as speed and capacity”.
Further details on the first Polaris exercise can be found in the WHO press release, and also in media reporting by The Telegraph.
simulation and gaming newsMcGill UniversityPOLI 452
The centrepiece of my POLI 452 (conflict simulation) course at McGill University is a group serious game design project worth 30% of the overall grade, but the course draws on a range of other assessments too: three short online quizzes during the term (5% each), a mid-term project update (5%), simulation activity credits (10%, based […]
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The centrepiece of my POLI 452 (conflict simulation) course at McGill University is a group serious game design project worth 30% of the overall grade, but the course draws on a range of other assessments too: three short online quizzes during the term (5% each), a mid-term project update (5%), simulation activity credits (10%, based on participation in games, events, and webinars), a research paper/development diary (10%), and a final exam (25%). I’ve included the latter below.
Part A of the exam asks students to evaluate a serious game proposal. The proposal itself is AI-generated, which means the question hopefully does double duty: it tests their understanding of game design processes and key considerations, while also encouraging them to apply critical thinking to AI-generated output.
conferencessimulation and gaming newsAssises Françaises d’Étude du Wargaming
The following report was written for PAXsims by Pierre Ducasse and Charlotte Le Mounier. This spring we had the honour of attending and presenting at the third annual Assises Françaises d’Étude du Wargaming (AFEW), held on 23 April at Sciences Po Lyon. The theme this year was “Wargaming and Uncertainty.” We were there to present […]
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The following report was written for PAXsims by Pierre Ducasse and Charlotte Le Mounier.
This spring we had the honour of attending and presenting at the third annual Assises Françaises d’Étude du Wargaming (AFEW), held on 23 April at Sciences Po Lyon. The theme this year was “Wargaming and Uncertainty.” We were there to present Cyberwarfare, a card game we designed in Spring 2025 as part of Professor Rex Brynen’s POLI 452 Conflict Simulation course at McGill University. It was a remarkable day, and we’ve tried to capture the highlights below.
Opening Remarks
Général de corps d’armée Alain Lardet, Military Governor of Lyon, opened the conference. His remarks centred on the importance of planning in the military profession, and he grounded them in wargaming history: from Von Reisswitz’s first kriegspiel in 1824 through to the ongoing Orion 2026 exercise, a large-scale wargame running since January in conjunction with CICDE under Project ANTIGONE, aimed at identifying cognitive and confirmation biases. He emphasised the essential role of rules in structuring what a wargame can and cannot produce. It is worth noting, however, that rules are also a vector for the very biases the exercise aims to surface: a designer’s vision, embedded in the rule set, can inadvertently foreclose the open-ended strategic experimentation that gives wargaming its analytical value.
Keynote: The Pedagogical Value of Wargames
Pijus Krūminas (ISM University of Management and Economics) delivered an excellent keynote through a pre-recorded video on using wargames to teach decision-making under uncertainty. Drawing on game theory and bounded rationality, he argued that models are tools for understanding the world, not descriptions of it, and that human players are fundamentally not rational actors. We were particularly struck by his point that having students design games, rather than merely play them, produces a deeper engagement with uncertainty: a good game has no optimal solution from the outset, and building one forces you to confront your own assumptions and biases as a designer. This resonated directly with our own experience in POLI 452.
Panel 1: Uncertainty and Wargaming
David Vallat (Sciences Po Lyon) pushed back on the Clausewitzian view that war’s uncertainty places it beyond rigorous analysis as a form of art. On the contrary to the analytical positivist view of wargames, he advocated instead for a constructivist, systemic modelling approach. The designer, conscious of their cognitive limits, builds not to describe reality but to maintain an interaction with it. He emphasized the importance of learning to learn to be able to adapt more easily to new settings. This led to a stimulating discussion on rules design: whether semi-rigid matrix game formats or simpler rigid rules better serve analytical goals, and whether complex emergent behaviour can arise from simple rule sets.
Thibaut Fouillet (CAPRI, AFEW president) made what was perhaps the sharpest provocation of the morning: rolling a die is not uncertainty — it is variance. If the statistical distribution is known, you have probability, not genuine unknowability. He identified two recurring design failures: omitting deception manoeuvres entirely, and treating logistical unknowns as the sole source of uncertainty. He argued that wargaming’s real value lies in functioning as an analytical process, not a simulation of chance. His reference to the CSIS Taiwan wargames illustrated how simulations can also serve a political purpose that we should acknowledge, and he evoked purple teaming as an example of how human planning can generate richer strategic insight than rigid kriegspiel, through ex post adjudication of two opposing strategies.
Stéphane Goria (Université de Lorraine / Inria / IUT Charlemagne) presented a compelling framework combining swarm and cluster game formats with AI decision-support tools. The AI assistant is designed to leave decisions with the player while offering a post-hoc evaluation and advice on solved games, where the computer bases itself on probabilistic computations (Markov decision process). Early results with generative AI as an assistant were encouraging, and the discussion raised an interesting question: if two players are both assisted by the same AI, do copy-cat strategies emerge?
Panel 2: Training, Uncertainty, and Wargaming
Malo Cornuaille (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) examined Active Defense and AirLand Battle through the lens of wargaming history, tracing General DePuy’s ambition to reduce warfare to a mathematical equation. He argued that this drive toward quantification and determinism, shaped by the postwar culture of RAND and operations research, risks wargames losing their essential function: modelling friction, fog, and the contest of wills.
Louia Efongo Besise and Prabpreet Singh (IAE Paris-Est) gave an informative presentation comparing three games on South China Sea tensions, analysing how each embeds different assumptions about international maritime law and Western coalition frameworks. Their path into wargaming, through Philippe Lépinard’s courses at UPEC, closely mirrors the kind of entry point that courses like POLI 452 provide.
Philippe Lépinard (Université Paris-Est-Créteil) presented findings on using cartographic and hexagonal supports as pedagogical tools in management education, including both paper maps and the Vassal game engine. His results showed a surprising ease among students in engaging with cartographic material, and an ability to organise hierarchical command structures across tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
Free Wargames and Workshops
The afternoon featured stands and workshops from Delphine Picavet, Valentine Descombes, Hélène Servent-Fortin and Aleksandre Pavlovic (Inria Intelligence Lab) on using simulation as a decision-making sandbox; Mathéo Boccoz’s COIN game Les grains de la discorde — Insurrection en Cannellie; and Antoine Débarbouillé presenting Pytharec and its suite of creations including LPM Strategikon, LOGOPS, and Fleet Tactics. The Sciences Po Lyon Public Factory students also presented a matrix game on lithium nationalisation in Chile. We unfortunately did not get to engage properly with most of them, as we were manning our own stand for the duration, though what we glimpsed looked very promising.
We were thrilled with how Cyberwarfare, our POLI 452 game, was received. The game models three-way cyber conflict between the United States, China, and Russia, with players investing in offensive and defensive capabilities, completing intelligence and cyberwarfare missions, and managing escalation risk through unattributed attacks — cyber conflict being, by its nature, a domain defined by uncertainty: about attribution, about the capabilities of adversaries, and about the escalatory consequences of every action. We had rich conversations with researchers and professionals alike, received genuinely useful feedback and suggestions, and were honoured by the level of engagement from people working in the field. It was deeply gratifying to see a game born in a McGill classroom find an audience at a professional conference.
Closing Keynotes
Patrick Ruestchmann (CICDE, in partnership with CESM, ACADEM, and the EMA) opened with a useful framing: uncertainty exists both pre-action and post-action. He presented findings from Project ANTIGONE, which uses sociometric measurement during semi-rigid matrix games to track interaction between different player groups. The results were striking: expert groups interacted little and with decreasing intensity, suggesting a bias toward certainty; student groups remained stable; and mixed groups showed high interaction that grew before declining, reflecting initial difficulties overcome through sustained exchange.
Patrick Bouhet (EMAAE) argued that France’s approach to uncertainty remains deeply Cartesian and Clausewitzian, distinguishing between exogenous fog of war and endogenous friction. Technical advances have improved transparency at the object level, but not at the level of intentions, which is where wargaming retains its value. He drew on the current Iran situation to illustrate how uncertainty about war aims forces strategic rethinking, and made the case for allied wargames as a tool for improving interoperability and C2. His most memorable practical suggestion was using wargames to put NCOs in officers’ roles, including scenarios where an officer is lost and a subordinate must step up.
Enguerrand Ducourtil (CESM) closed with a naval perspective. Operations unfold simultaneously across three domains — surface, air, and submarine — each with a different level of transparency, the submarine being the least visible by far. This asymmetry makes standard wargaming representation inadequate, which is why the French Navy has gravitated toward brain games. He flagged the challenge of representing the data layer — its security, reliability, and filtering — as central to both naval wargaming and AI integration. On adversary behaviour, Russian submarines remain far less observable than Russian ground forces, with a tendency toward a defensive “bastion” posture despite strong offensive capabilities. He closed with a neat encapsulation of the day’s central design problem: wargames must choose between treating information as exogenous at the strategic level, or integrating it and being dragged to the micro-tactical. Finding a middle path remains open.
Many thanks to the AFEW organisers and to Sciences Po Lyon for hosting. It was a privilege to present alongside researchers and military professionals working at the frontier of wargaming in France, and we left with more ideas, and more questions, than we arrived with. We hope to be back next year.
Posted on behalf on Connections US. Registration for the 2026 Connections (US) conference is now open. This year the conference will be hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, CA. This form will register you for our three-day unclassified conference running June 23-25. Please register early – there is no conference fee, and you […]
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Posted on behalf on Connections US.
Registration for the 2026 Connections (US) conference is now open.
This year the conference will be hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, CA. This form will register you for our three-day unclassified conference running June 23-25.
Please register early – there is no conference fee, and you can cancel with us later if it turns out you are unable to attend. Registrants will receive important additional conference information by email.
Our conference theme for 2026 is “Wargaming Beyond Boundaries: Embracing Innovation.”
The current draft agenda is available here. The agenda will be updated as we approach the conference.
(The registration form and agenda are set up with Google Forms and Google Sheets, which some military networks may have trouble accessing. If you find you cannot view the pages from work, we recommend trying again at home.)
Please feel free to share these links with those you think might be interested, and check the conference website for updates as we approach the conference, including hotel room block information.
