A lot of food for thought here! Comment and let the Connections conference organizers know what you think!

The dynamics of typical Euro-games has been a great hook, getting people who would not play “wargames” into the mix and now asking “when do we get play the Navy games.” There has been some “What the heck can a space game, or a game about plantations, teach me that is relevant to what we do here?” and I hope to get to some that in the KM Forum presentation. I’m still at the brin-storming point, but wanted through some spaghetti at the here and hopefully generate some discussion.

I’ve covered the insights on planning here. There are a few more insights that have come up regarding things we say we do, but really rarely do or don’t do well, (we do sequels really well, but suck at branches; we are really good at intel on the bad guys, but such at the “know thyself” part; and don’t get me started on assessment…). Now we have been moving onto ideas of strategizing, and innovating.

The first question is what is the difference between “strategizing” and “planning”. We have only scratched the surface, but this becomes a hard line to draw with a grey area between when strategizing becomes planning. Particularly if you include the newer “design” issues that almost institutional the “grey area”. The other question is “what does it matter”? Are we debating angels on the head of pin by trying parse what is strategy, what is design and what is planning? It appears to me to have value to understand what we mean when we use the words, but agree that over-parsing can cause a “paralysis by analysis” problem.

The next topic is “Innovating (or innovative) vs Innovation”. Reading Everett Rodger’s Diffusion of Innovation most of us agree something is not an “innovation” until it is accepted and implemented causing a change in behavior. Something that is simply an enhancement, that does not the behavior of the user does not rise to the level of an “innovation” in the Rodgers sense. But when is one “innovating”? Is all research with the potential to change “innovation”? Can an “innovation” occur from a process that does not intend to “innovate”? Are some processes more “innovative” than others? This line of thought comes from reflection on game play circumstances where one is juggling strategies, resources and possible opposition action to inform decision-making. Some options appear “obviously correct” – something many consider “not innovative” and since others can see the advantage and compensate in their plans, is a random, or even short term negative choice “innovative” in that it is unexpected and foils others plans giving you initiative at a later date. Is use of the term “innovative” even appropriate in this sort of discussion?

Next we have “internal” vs “external” innovating. In some games, the constraints of the rules make “true” innovation difficult if not impossible. A “Solved game” for example cannot contain innovation – there is no remaining “landscape” to explore. So what is the “Requisite complexity” a game’s competitive landscape needs in order to allow for innovating, and when does it become so complex that players lose control and are employing “pure coping strategies” with little strategy or room for innovation. So a lack of sufficient tradespace, or too much tradespace internally to the game is bad. How do you address that “externally” with modifications to the game rules to either increase or decrease the complexity of the competitive landscape to allow innovative strategies to develop, without making them too difficult so implement they are only change the game at the margins.

This leads us from innovating in game play, to innovating in game design. This is where I want to get the group to, but need to get them to be game players of some degree of sophistication before they can get into game design. This may be a bias on my part – perhaps introducing “composite game designs” sooner rather than later may add creativity? I fear it will cause confusion. I will address some of the components of game design and the Euro-game design sequence of “putting together” an interesting decision-making situation, and then crafting a narrative around it, vs the more traditional “wargame” process of picking an event and attempting to represent the decision-making associated with it.

Discuss!

Do you find that your professional work with games has affected your enjoyment of gaming?

I’ve realized that after years of writing about games, I don’t look at them in the same way. So many games now seem frivolous, even pointless. I find myself more intrigued by analyzing and writing about games than playing them. I find myself looking at games and wondering…oh, the horror…wondering what requirement the game meets.

Am I a traitor to my hobby? Save me from myself!

This brought out the following response:

No, Mike, you are not a traitor to your hobby… unless I am too. I’ve been inventing games for 35+ years and I do it for the reasons you list. That said, I still enjoy a good game when I can find one but on a professional level I find that the world of M&S is more satisfying because games have no purpose. M&S on the other hand uses the same and even superior technology and very much has a purpose, many purposes as a matter of fact. Training, mission planning, mission rehearsal and after action analysis come to mind immediately. On a more subtle level M&S can be used to derive project requirements, expose new technology opportunities, suggest C2 and C4ISR improvements, enhance joint and coalition operations, and lots more. As I’ve said before, given the proper architecture the same tool(s) could be used for it all.

The author, later clarified his position as meaning ‘games’ in the context of Michael’s post i.e. ‘the bad ones’ – the ‘good ones’ having a solid M&S foundatation behind them and being – in his mind – more part of the goodness that is M&S. I have certainly stuck my foot in it with comments that came off sounding as arrogant, but I think the comment belies a bit of the attitude many in “M&S” have regarding the “lesser” discipline of “playing games” that contributes to the bias against gaming we have been fighting here. Just as my own mis-statements have belied my own biases, this one had a ring of truth to it, which my recent foray’s into “purposeless” Euro-games has led me to re-consider where my own definitions of “purposeful” got in the way of my own understanding.

The long way around to saying “I could have written that comeback myself fewer years ago than I care to admit.” Despite that, I could not resist throwing the B.S. flag on the “games have no purpose line” which led to a rather interesting discussion one can follow here

One of the interesting threads that of that discussion is the age-old “game vs simulation” debate. To some ‘games’are a subset of ‘simulation’ that involve people. To others Simulations and games are overlapping sets of a Venn Diagram with simulations that are not games, and games that are not simulations as well as games that employ simulations and simulations that employ gaming “agents” even without involving people. A number of interesting twists and turns and nuggets of wisdom.

My own, which I have found has done me well in my struggle to inculcate a group into gaming for work-related insights and as an analysis tool is to avoid dealing in nouns – looking at calling things simulations or games, but to employ the verbs – simulating and gaming. My own definition is that simulating is process-centric while gaming is decision-centric. It is not a question of whether a given thing is a simulation or a game, but the fact that one has to deal with both processes and decisions in analysis.

Dealing only with process lead to the pathology that is often found in comparative or “physics-based” sims that the human is a confounding “dB-loss” to the otherwise harmonious music of the celestial spheres of simulated process execution. This begs the question of why we bother with so many efficiency reducing humans in our process loops?

Well, to DECIDE… Yup, something has to decide which process to use when, when to start and end a process, and despite the indication for sims that humans are speed-bumps to execution, they bring “value-added” when it comes to understanding how to arrange process to achieve a goal. Yes, AI progress is being made in ASSISTING in that effort, but until SkyNet takes over, there will not be a machine running the war.

Recent focus on ‘performance chain analysis’ has reinforced this duality of “the process has to work right” at each step in the chain, but you need creative decision-making to queue the right processes in the right order across complementary performance chains. When you aggregate all those decisions together up to the operational level you start to understand why it’s called “operational art” and why we may not want to ever have “AI” doing more than assisting it.

And if you have not joined the milgames yahoo group, its well worth it!

So, having concept development in my job description, and a new submarine force initiative to take a fresh look at Undersea Warfare, I put some grey matter to trying to straighten this situation out. It just so happens that getting this stuff straight on the concept generation end, helps on the experimentation end when employing wargaming. This also will be an entre’ into posting more definitions on the definitions page, of which Matt Caffrey sent me a bunch longer ago than I care to admit.

So where do you go to get info about concept development? There is surprisingly little out there with the “bible” still being the Defense ADaptive Red Team (DART) working paper A Practiccal Guide for Developing and Writing Military Concepts. Even this work gets wrapped up around ‘capability’ and ‘operational concept’ vs ‘concept of operations’ at various levels of war.

It defines a military concept as:

Military Concept – The description of a method or scheme for employing specified military capabilities in the achievement of a stated objective or aim.

How does one create a miitary concept? The DART guide recommends thinking in terms of ends, ways and means:

Military concepts can be viewed in terms of ends, ways and means, of which the concept corresponds generally to the ways. The means are the military capabilities to be employed in the given situation. They may range from the full arsenal of military forces available at the operational or strategic levels to a particular capability such as a weapon system, vehicle, training system or specific unit at a lower level. The end is the stated objective, ranging from a broad strategic aim to the accomplishment of a particular task. The ways are the method or scheme (that is, the “concept”) by which the means are applied to accomplish the ends. The essence of a concept is this description of method. A description of a capability by itself does not constitute a concept; capabilities can be created but not used as envisioned, while identical capabilities employed differently would constitute different concepts. Likewise, the description of a desired objective does not constitute a concept; any number of different approaches or methods, employing various capabilities, could conceivably accomplish that objective. The end is necessary to provide context, and the means are needed to describe what resources will be applied, but the essence of the concept is the way in which those capabilities are to be employed. In this sense, military concepts are primarily descriptions of how things are done.

So means are things – nouns – while ways are methods, or actions – verbs. This would seem prettty straightforward, except for the fact that nothing less than the Capstone Concept fof Joint Operations defines four activities from which all military operations can be constructed – combat, security, engagement and relief and reconstruction – all actions – verbs – which are then called the concepts means! “Ways” are defined as the arrangement of those activities in the planning of a campaign. There is a planning related pathology here that leads to calling a verb a “means” but I will not fisk it out here…

So I will offer the following definitions:

Ends: the objectives a concept is intended to achieve.

Ways: the activities that are performed to achieve the ends. Simply put, Ways are verbs. The Naval Operating Concept for example describes the Ways to achieve the Ends described in the Maritime Strategy (SC21) as, operating forward, responding to disasters and assisting in humanitarian crises, controlling the seas, projecting power and deterring adversaries. Deterrence is also one of the ends in the maritime strategy so its somewhat inconsistent for deterrence to be both and end and a way, but again – grist for a later mill. ‘Operating’, ‘Responding’, ‘Assisting’, ‘Controlling’, ‘Projecting’, ‘Detering’ – all verbs are properly considered “ways”.

Means: are the things that perform the activities. Different concepts interpret this differently making this seemingly simply term, confusing. Several concepts describe verbs as “means”. Others say that means are capabilities. This causes all sorts of confusion when one starts to talk seriously about capabilities.

Characteristics (aka “attributes”): are measurable performance traits of a “means” – an aircraft’s payload capacity, range and maximum speed are characteristics. Characteristics relate to measures of performance – the facility with which a “means” can perform a task. These are often called “capabilities” – while correct in the dictionary sense, this imprecise usage causes considerable confusion when formulating concepts.

Functions: are the categories of tasks that a Means execute that enable Ways to be performed. Traditionally these are organized by the “Napoleonic N-codes” – Adminstration, Intelligence, Operations, Logisitics, Planning, and Training. The legacy “Joint Functional Concepts” addressed these, but it appears that they are now “Joint Capability Areas”. It appears that each of the high level JCAs will have a “Joint Concept” written for it, with “Joint integrating concepts” being written for major secnd tier JCAs. Currently the first example of this is the new “Joint Logisitics Concept” and its initial JIC “Supply”. This situation implies that a “capability” is “the ability to perform a function” making functions and capabilities near synonymous – at least two sides of the same coin. This may be OK for a “Joint Capability” – but as capabilities get parsed into “operational”, “tactical” and “enabling” types, equating a means and capability doesn’t work so well, since it can lead to “ways = means” contradictions.

Capability: Next to ‘concept’, ‘capability is probably the next most ambiguously used term in the military lexicon. There are 136 entries in the DoD dictionary that include capability as either part of the term, or its definition. The word itself is defined as “the ability to execute a specific course of action.” In SC21 the “core capabilities” are the Ways, while in the CCJO, capabilities are synonymous with Means, and the Joint Capability Areas are arranged by Functions. Not a situation that is going to be resolved any time soon. I contend that to be useful at the operational and tactical level a capability is a synthesis of ways and means to perform a function, given a context and set of criteria. This is more in tune with the “old” definition of “capability”:

The ability to achieve a desired effect under specified standards and conditions through combinations of means and ways to perform a set of tasks. CJCSI 3170.01E

For the purposes of concept generation and development, a useful application of the term capability is through the use of “statements of capability”. These take the formal form ‘noun – verb – object – context – criteria’, where the noun is the Means, the verb is the Way, the object is the thing to be affected by the Means employing the Way, and the criteria establishes the benchmark for success in a particualr conctext. The noun can be left off in a ‘generic’ capability statement that is intended to be independent of the means.

Statements of capability (or capability statements) of this form can be combined to form conceptual frameworks that establish hierarchies of capability statements of increasing detail. An example might be “The Strike Force (noun , means) generates F-18 sorties providing (verb, way) four 4-ship CAP stations (object) at a range of 600nm, 24/7 for 30 days (criteria)”. This statement implies a hierarchy of enabling capability statements regarding the ships and aircraft composing the strike force, the logistics that must be delivered to the strike force, maintaining aircraft, manning deck and hanger crews, managing pilot optempo etc. The criteria and context drives much of these enabling capability requirements as the capability statement: “The Strike Force (noun , means) generates F-18 sorties providing (verb, way) four 4-ship CAP stations (object) at 200nm, during daylight hours, for 5 days (criteria)” implies a vastly different set of enabling capability statements than the former statement with far more demanding criteria.

Context in this construct combines aspects of the joint term “conditions” (“Those variables of the operational environment that may affect task performance. Without establishing the conditions under which a task is to be performed, it is impossible to establish appropriate criteria for its minimum acceptable performance.”) with a “line of operations” in a campaign design.

Crtieria deal with characteristics and measures of performance.

The end result of this construct is the ability to define the elements of a concept in specific terms that one can relate to game design elements. When done correctly, the concept development process also develops “proto-game elements” that can lead to a game design that can test the concept. Capability statements infer “unit values” and “combat system” elements that require rules for interaction. I’m experimenting with a sort of ‘matrix-game’ design process to produce a set of such rules. The problem is that this process is one that produces one “game” out of the very large nuber of possible “games” that could be constructed depending on how one decides how effective something should be.

I’m working on an example of the process to bring to Connections and demonstrate, but will report periodically on my progress.

One of the most important is the value, or lack thereof, planning – particularly in the military sense – has on “chaotic” game situations. Its interesting to read the negative comments on many Euro games at Board Game Geek. “I can’t “play” the game – it plays me”. “You can’t figure out how to win, the winner “just happens” at the end”. “Too much is go on to keep track of, there is no way to way to “play to win” just survive until an artibray conclusion”. Our group had a lot of the same kind of comments, and dicussion lead to a distinction between two kinds of fundamental “winning processes” – planning to win, and coping until the opportunity to win presents itself.

The degree of structure to the interaction coupled with the rate at which the game state changes seem to govern what sort of “winning process” is applicable. Traditional wargames tend to be classic “plan to win” games. The structure the interation ocurs within is fairly static, often “Newtonian” in operation. A 7-10-8 armored unit is always worth 7 attacking, 10 defending, and moves with 8 movement points. Never 10, never gets stuck at 6. The CRT doesn’t change. 1 more attack strength point added to a 20-7 battle always has expected results according to the 3-1 column. You can plan, because the situation evolves at a know pace, and the rules prevent “Black Swans” from gumming up the works. Wargamers tend to love games like this becasue they develop “game winning processes” based on planning long term interactions between the ways and means to get to ends. Means are fixed and innovation occurs in the “ways” department. you gauge progress toward ends, and make relativley minor tweaks as you go.

Give a died in the wool wargamer a Eurogame and often they throw there hands up in disgust. “I can never get (insert desired resource here) when I need it”. “Too many things happen too fast, how are you supposed to take everything into account?” “This is stupid, just when I figure out a way to win, the whole thing changes on me.” All gripes that arise from not being able to plan and implement a strategy to win the game or at least succeed in the different “phases” of the game.

It struck several of the group “This sounds alot like the gripes you here coming from Iraq and Afgahnistan”. They were trying to play a “wargame” with its planning conventions, and found themselves in a Eurogame, where the situation is too dynamic and interactive for planning to propagate heirarchically from strategic to tactical levels. That is not to say there is not strategy at each level, the “game winning strategies” are just not neatly heirarchical.

The result which has lead to a very interesting dicussion regading how you “innovate” in thse situation when there is so much novelty involved to begin with? This whole discussion reinforced my own notion of the need for a complement to heirarchical military planning that involves synthetic inference of synergies between opportunities (and threats) rather than always use the analytic deduction of actions from desired ends.

Part of this is what the “design’ movement seems to be getting at, but that seems to be a “conditioning” of top-down “strategy-based” planning, rather than the notion of “coping to keep yourself in the game” (often reactively) sowing the seeds of potential opportunity, most of which will not come to anything, but a few will. This can be done within an overall strategic framework for winning, but becomes a bottom- up “luck = opportunity + preparation” thing than a MDMP style top-down hierarcical planniing problem.

When someone asks “Why are you playing those silly games” this is the first “elevator story” I’m trying to simplify to have in my back pocket

More to come…

Here is my Top 20 Must Play games for 2012:

1) Wei-Qi or Go. Most Western games, Chess in particular, or analytic games of decomposition. You start with all the pieces on the board and the goal is to remove them (in chess, one in particular). Wei-Chi or go is the opposite, its a synthetic game of constructing opportunity from a blank slate. This makes it a very different game from what wargamers in particular are used to. If you have not played this game, and do not want to embarrass yourself, there’s an app for that! Go Free from AI Factory Ltd is a good introduction to the game on your Android device. I have it on my new Kindle Fire. It is not going to make you an expert, but when you can concsitently beat it on level 10, you will at least not embarrass yourself against introductory level players. Many Faces of Go is the best computer Go game, but is 90$ for the full version. It combines Monte Carlo search tree alogorithms with a board comparison to a database of Master level games. SmartGo is a cheaper alternative at 50$ and has a cheaper, iPad/iPhone version. No Android version yet for my Fire ;(

This is the starting point for “out of the box” thinking about strategy for the Western Way of War thinker.

The remainder of the list presents a few examples in each of the game categories I have been working with over the last year as part of study into innovation: “Euro-games”, “Deck-building games”, “Card driven wargames”, and “Block wargames”. I also have a couple computer games. I know I will leave out favorite games in this, but these are ones I either have already acquired, or plan to acquire, for my NUWC “Strategy and Innovation gaming” group. Feel free to opine about why your favorites are better than mine The goal of that group is to create a cadre of “gaming savvy” engineers and analysts by introducing then to a variety of types of games that stretch their biases about games and demonstrate there usefulness as decision-practice engines and as Matt Caffrey refers to them – “wind tunnels” for innovation. I started at the begining of FY 12 with weekly game sessions after work for 2 or 3 hours hours, followed by dinner and discussion. One thing to point out in this list is that many of these games are here because of interesting decision-making mechanics, NOT because of “fun to play” factor (though that obviously helps). Some are definitely “work” to play…

Euro-games a defined by a number of elements, different sources include different ones, but the primary one I use is a “which came first, the game system, or the game narrative”. Traditional wargame design takes a topic – the game narrative – and develops a game system by which to tell the story. The Euro-game is a game system first, which presents the players an interesting co-evolution of decision-making situation, that then has a narrative added to provide a context. Obviously this is a continuum, with various degrees of abstraction in the “narrative” and while “pure” Euro-games are almost conflict-averse and are almost “simultaneous solitaire” games, to me inter player conflict can occur in what I consider a “Euro-game”.

Euro-games

2) Agricola While it builds on the shoulders of several great games, Agricola has several elements that I exploit as part of my program. In my mind it is the “architypal” Euro-game. Its mechanics are “worker placement” meaning that you have options to do tasks based on the number of workers you have. The narrative, starting with your spouse and a hut and some empty fields that you want to build into a flourishing homestead, could be almost any “empire building” narative. The simplicity of the narrative, to me compounds the lessons of decision-making under uncertainty as compared to “executive decision-making” of broader scope. The basic decisions revolve around resource collection and resource allocation. It is fundamentally an economic game where you start from a meager baseline, and build value through the work you decide to have your workers do. The choice of actions increases as the game goes on, but a given action can only be performed once per round, so while this is essentially a “simultaneous solitaire” game at its root, player interaction limits decision options. This aspect of the game, together with the increasing richness of the information landscape, opens this game to criticisms that its “competitive spreadsheet analysis” and not really a “fun game”. Well there is feature not a bug to some (like me ), particularly when it comes to educating folks whose job tends to focus them on tasks that “if planned well, will turn out well” on how to deal with the times the best laid plans fall prey to “the real world”. The major drawback is that it can easiliy become a lengthy affair, often taking more than 3 hours to play be experienced players. Caylus and Stone Age are other examples of “worker placement” type games.

3) Puerto Rico is another form of “simultaneous solitaire” economic development game, one that uses “variable role selection” rather than “worker placement”. Players take turns selecting a role (ability to perform an action at an advantage) after which everyone gets to perform that action (with only the role selector getting the advantage). One has to balance selecting the role with the advantage they feel is most helpful, with the strategy of ordering the actions to acquire objects that are in limited supply before competitors. Compared to “worker placement” games, “role selection” games tend to constrain the decision landscape by scarcity of resources, or the need to create a full “supply/production chain”, with all the decisions being available (albeit not in the desired order, or with the desired advantages. Worker placement games typically have unconstrained resource (or at abundant) resource pools, but present the player with a diverse and complex decision space from which only a few choices are available.

4) Power Grid is an example of a “network building game”. Classic examples of this are the railroad building games. Power grids use of electricity generation capacity and progressing efficiency, add elements to the game play that are to me more interesting than the rail games. Players have to balance increasing the efficiency of their network, with the expansion of their network, since the winner is the player who, when any player adds a 17th city to their network, can supply the most cities with power with the resources at their disposal that turn. The decision-making fly in the ointment is the auction process by which new power plants are acquired. As newer more efficient power plants become avaiable, older models can be had more cheaply – upfront – but will cost you down the road. Resources will also cost you Elecktros (money). It also costs more to build a 2nd or 3rd power house in a city in later rounds, so establishing the configuration of your network is important also. A whole host of decisions to make about relative resource value and supply chain management.

5) Dominant Species Is a “Euro-game meets wargame designer” title. It takes “hex edge and vertex” ideas from “Settler’s of Catan”, the “area-control” aspects of El Grande. Melds them with a very nice “worker placement” mechanic and some very cut throat special power cards to make a sort of “holy grail” of Euro-game mechanics, something many players find overwhelming and unable to adapt to. The biggest problem from a player perspective is that you very easily find yourself just totally at the mercy of other peoples opportunities… gee sounds like the Real World… A great game to show the problems with the Military Decision Making Process applied to co-evolving interaction on a dynamic competitive landscape!

Deck-building games are card games that generally don’t have boards or pieces (expect as tokens to represent victory points or resources). Deck building games come in two main varieties – open and closed. Open deck building games are those where the deck that is built is open and available (usually arrayed in front of the player as a grid or tableau) with its powers and value building over time. Race for the Galaxy and Illuminati are examples. Closed deck building games have the players construct a deck either before game play begins, or during game play and select a hand from it each turn to play from. This is also known as “hand management” and Magic: The Gathering is the archetype. Dominion combines both hand management and building the deck as you go along.

6) Dominion is the most accessible of the deck building games, and combines both hand management and dynamic deck-building. It has “simultaneous solitaire” feature/bug of many Euro-games, but the expansions to it add various ways to interact on a limited basis with opponents beyond the game ending mechanic of card pile exhaustion. The interesting aspect of the game is the wide variety of card types, only 10 of which are in play in any game. The expansions and promos have extended the number of card types to well over 100. The basic game mechanic is pretty simple – you spend money cards from your hand to buy other money cards, action cards or victory cards. So why not just buy victory cards? Well they tend to be expensive and you need to chain together action cards in your hand to draw enough cards from your deck to be able to afford them. And you have populate your deck with a cunning mix of money and action cards to have a good chance of getting the combinations you need. Just because the cards are in your deck, does not mean you will draw them when you need them, so there is always a need for plans B and C… Choosing cards at for inclusion at random can lead to some odd combos, so there are several several types of house rules for bidding, drafting, or vetoing the base game set-up to keep balance threatening combos out (or in – if you are the only one that perceives the synergy…).

7) Race for the Galaxy is one of those games that has a number of really cool mechanics, but takes it almost beyond the pale of “fizbin” when the expansions are all used. The iconography on the cards is also elegant to the point of obscurity at first pale. Once it is understood it becomes second nature, but the learning curve is a bit steep – but that can be a feature when using it to reinforce the point that sometimes as a decision-maker the information is right in front of your face, you just don’t understand it yet… The game is als a great teacher about the relationship between planning and opportunity cost. You have to pay for playing cards to your tableau by discarding a number of other cards from your hand. The more powerful the card, the more cards you have to discard to play it. It also uses a variation on the role-section in Puerto Rico. Each round you select the action you want to perform that round and by playing it you get to execute it with a bonus. Everyone else just gets to execute it. You can explore (2 types), develop, settle, trade, consume or produce. You only get to pick one, and its a blind selection, so you have to anticipate what opponents are going to be doing at times. You win by accumulating the most victory points, either by “consuming” goods for victory points, or by the victory point value of your cards themselves. Its once again “simultaneous solitaire” but the expansions allow for limited military takeovers.

8) Illuminati is the original game of network warfare. The “Conspiracy building” narrative is clever, though many of the later cards are a “reach”. Rather than simply add your cards to a tableau, cards in Illuminati are played adjacent to other cards to form a network. Money passes from the remote tentacles of your web, to the nexus. Unlike the other Euro card games, attacking other players networks to either suppress them or to hack them off and graft them onto yours is a community effort! There are no limits to what can be bartered to get other players to help out in dismembering a common foe (though often as set up to a more devastating one – back-stabbing is encouraged early and often!. The interesting game mechanics are those that relate to the power and vulnerabilities of networks. Especially the notion that no network is EVER as secure as you would like it to be… The large number of cards can make for interesting house rules for a “deck building game” prior to the actual game play can make for a whole “game before the game”, but can make things over-long and tedious in the end without some house rules for hiding victory conditions so it doesn’t degenerate into “kill the guy with the lead”.

Card driven wargames are a rather new innovation. Often attributed to Mark Herman (Now of Booze-Allen fame) with We the People in 1994, Mark took the extremely complex “special situation rules” many games were adding that required complicated dice roles and look-up tables into a deck of cards players drew from so they had a set of special rule options available in a ‘hand’. I would argue that Kingmaker in 1974 was the first “card driven game” and John Prados’ “Cold War” from Victory games was actually the first “card-driven + hand management” game, though Mark evolved the ideas to a “next level”. Richard Borg enhanced the idea further for tactical games which put game actions in the form of cards you played to move and attack. “Battle Cry” was the first of these and the system was expned on to WWII in Memoir 44 and to Ancients and Naploeonics periods in GMTs Command and Colors series. I divide these into games that use conventional cardboard unit counters on a networked point to point or area movement map, and those that use blocks on a board of hexes.

9) Washington’s War is Mark Herman’s remake of his original “We the People” game, with a number of refinements making it simpler, faster and with updated cards. It covers the revolutionary war in an engaging way that simplifies some decision-making through limited card options, but complicates operational decision making in the way it forces players to choose between playing a card for its political value, or for its value to perform tactical action. This dual use mechanic was a unique expansion on the “two -deck” system in Cold War – one for events, and one for tactical interaction. This combined with the inherent “Irregular Warfare” nature of the conflict makes this a timely lesson in the power and limitations of both political and military action.

10) Cold War / Twilight Struggle are two quite different games, but I count them together because of the similar dynamics and subject matter. I have not played twilight struggle, but Cold War seems to more explicitly include the elements of DIME – you had political, economic and military control markers a system of “espionage” cards that let you perform (or block) various information warfare type actions. If you want to demonstrate the DIME concept to someone, its the perfect vehicle, though in that sence almost “generic”. Twilight Struggle on the other hand is deeper in its representation of the actual events and decisions of the time. It is far less abstract in its mechanics than cold War, but appears to be more pol-mil oriented without the “spy-vs-spy” interaction of Cold War and the economic aspect. TS is on my list to acquire now that a new printing has been released. One of my early “melding attempts was a set of linking rules to combine an abbreviated Illuminati network game with Cold War to make a “Post-Cold War” influence development game.

11) A Few Acres of Snow is similar in some ways to Washington’s War, but has more of a Euro game feel to it. I played this once and have been looking to get it ever since. It is another nice DIME game that demonstrates very elegantly the interaction of the military, political and economic aspects of the long conflict between the British and French in New England and Eastern Canada. It combines card play aspects of Dominion (though not the same kind of deck building) with the card-driven game aspects of Washington’s War.

12) Pandemic is interesting in that it is a cooperative game – the players all win, or all lose. Each player has role card that allows a special power. the board is a grid of locations which appear in the two card decks. There are also special power cards that allow one time special powers. The goal of the game is to cure the 4 diseases endemic to the 4 major regions of the world before they become a pandemic. Players move pawns around the board eliminating cubes representing the curing of infected people. The game can be played at a variety of levels of difficulty by varying the number of “epidemic” cards added to the infection deck. There are also recommendations that limit the information the players may share when you play at higher levels. I use a house rule for “heroic” play that restricts strategy discussion to the beginning of a turn, once the turn starts and the card play causes disease to spread, each play must make their own decisions based on the information they have. This also prevents experienced players from “playing the game themselves” while less experienced players sit back and simply do what their told… There is an expansion set that adds an active bio-terroist to the mix, a 5th disease and new role cards. An interesting planning event could pit multiple teams playing multiple games against each other to see which team wins in the fewest turns (or survives the longest number of turns if all fail… Players find themselves drawn to the notion that the narrative for the game would work just as well for a game about a Zombie apocalypse, the little cubes eliminated being various ZOmbie forms, rather than curing sick populations

13) A Game of Thrones – this game is a composite of a number of Euro and conventional wargame design elements. IT has some degree of card play – but is not what I would consider a “card driven game”. The original edition was a combination of the old “Diplomacy” game mechanics (small number of units per side and “plotted” movement for a turn – written in Dippy, indicated by order markers in AGoT). If you are unfamiliar with the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series and the recent HBO adaption, then you have missed out on one of the great fantasy sagas. Taking elements of the historical War of the Roses in England, the story adds some unique elements that must be read (or watched) to be appreciated. The original game had two sequels, one of which was in essence a separate standalone version of one particular subset of the overall conflict. The resulting conglomeration of rules led me to cut and past my own rules summary for the “Complete, original game”, which was haphazardly spread over the three rule books. This has been done officially now, together with some new fan content to make a much better integrated 2nd edition. The is a masterful integration of key aspects of the world and the stories, several game design elements of classic wargames, and some innovative uses of card play to make what might be one of the most cut-throat, back-stab filled games out there. From a decision-making point of view, like Diplomacy, no player can win the game on there own. It requires the negotiation of both short and long term alliances, one of the most elegant logistics systems around. One story spoiler I will have reveal is the most interesting element to me in the game. The Island of Westeros is on an earth-like planet, configured much like Britain, but with a very different orbital dynamic, which leads to a variable ratio between winter and summer, the seasons lasting months on some orbits like ours, but once a generation or so produces a very long summer followed by, in our terms, a multi-year winter. The fragile system of checks and balances between the competing Houses is breaking just as, in the series catch-phrase “Winter is coming” suggests is the worst possible time. A time that triggers the “wildlings” of the far north to surge southward threatening all. So against the conventional backdrop of conflict between houses for domination, they must occasionally pool their resources and cooperate when the Wildlings surge south, or all will perish. This adds a unique element of conflict tempered with cooperation that can change the balance of power!

14) Command and Colors Napoleonics is to my mind the best of the Richard Borg “Block” games. It captures the various advantages and disadvantages of the Napoleonic combat arms (Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery) in a very “miniatures-like” way. The card-play captures the sequential nature of command decision, and commitment of forces. This is a great introduction to “combined arms warfare” where units have mutually supporting strengths and weaknesses when integrated properly. Failure to plan well can leave a vital force at the mercy of an enemy that can exploit its Achilles heel. The ancients games are also good, but to me don’t have the depth of unit synergy the Nappy era does. I’m hoping the series returns to its origin in a US Civil War version… I will put a plug in here for the WWII Combat Command series, which is considerably more complex, and uses counters on hexmaps. It does for understanding the basics of WWII combined arms tactics in the most accessible way I know (but then I’m a reformed Advanced Squad Leader player…).

15) Athens and Sparta is to me the best of the Columbia “traditional wargame’ style block games. Many would disagree and say Hammer of the Scots, which I put second… The game does a very good job capturing the essence of the decision making surrounding the period, and the asymmetric situation between landpower and seapower strategy. The effects of this assymmetry on strategic decision-making is where the key decision-making lessons come in.

Computer games are often not the best tools for teaching the kind of lessons I’m trying to get at with this series of game sessions, but a couple in particular have value as “homework” and in a LAN setting where the players are in one room around differnt computers.

16) Civilization V is a game that is significantly streamlined compared to other empire building games and its own predecessors. This does make it a lot more accessible to new players and gets at key prioritization decisions in a more straightforward manner. ITs a variation on worker allocation, each city produces food, industry, gold, research, culture,and great leaders based on how its population is allocated. Micromanagement is possible, but mostly you can tell it to optimize for one over the others. Your trade network also produces gold, and your buildings and armies require maintenance fees. Your population gets unhappy, the more densely packed your sities beocem and you have to find luxury resources and produce buildings to keep them happy, or in teh worst case, rebel armies appear and rampage around. Your research and Culture production allows you to develop technologies and make cultural advancments that enable you to produce a wider variety of military units, buildings that magnify your cities production of resources, and grant bonuses for certain tasks. Depending on how big a “world” you choose, you are competting with a number of other civilations, and city-states who you can entice to befirend of ally with you based on actions you take, or “foreign aid” you give them. THee are 5 ways to win the game, through research by building a spaceship to leave for another planet, through Culture by achieving a cultural Utopia, through Diplomacy by getting a majority of civilzation and city-states to vote for you in the UN, and by the old stand-by, Military conquest, but being the last civilization to have never lost their original Capital. There is time victory based on points, but I have only won that way once and it was aa artifact of really weird resource placement that stunted the early growth of all the Civs. It sounds really complicated, and in a way it is, but after a couple of games it becomes second nature thanks to a very well designed interface. The definitive “just one more turn” game and being turn based, avoids issues with constantly pausing “real time” games.

17) Gary Grigsby’s Word at War – This is a game published by Matrix games, which I helped form, but it remains the definitive ‘Game’ of world war 2 in my mind. It captures the global strategic logisitcs, and tech investment decisions that faced the various major powers in a game you can actually play in a reasonable amount of time (quarterly turns, even if it goes way long, you talking in the high twenties of turns). It is fairly abstract, with units representing ‘capabilities” more than actual military units. Its area movement and the new edition adds some chrome like leaders and unit experience. In the old days we called this a “beer and pretzels” game – but compared to typical “hard core” computer wargames with hundreds of turns, thousands of units and requiring the actual length of the real war to complete, its actually playable. A great engine for resolving paly between teams demonstrating the military decision-making process.

18) Space Empires, the computer game style board game that is better than most computer space games, because its simple enough to understand! Explore, expand, exploit and exterminate are teh four “X”‘s that make 4X space games. This board game adaptation of what had been computer games of enormous complexity, lets players focus in on the decision making associating with “empire-building” in an economic/military focused competitive landscape.

As I wrote this article I expanded from 15 to 20 and want to call out two “blast from the past” games that have interesting mechanics but don’t fit in the categories above to fill out:

19) Kingmaker. I mentioned it above, and recently played it again for the first time in 20 years and it hit me what was so neat about it. It has a mechanic where each turn you draw a card that has summons on them for the nobles with certain titles to go to certain board locations. The stronger a noble is (in tiles and associated military retinue, the more often he gets called away to deal with the business of his office, usually at the worst possible time when comes to your heir to the throne keeping their head on their shoulders. This elegant mechanic for representing the loss of control associated with power has always been one that makes this game a planning challenge. Especially when you get “rewarded” by another player with a powerful, but flighty title!

20) Freedom in the Galaxy. This 1970s SPI title was actually a retooling of the wonderful “Empires of the Middle Ages” with a Space Opera narrative, in an attempt to leverage the popularity of Star Wars. It has a number of innovations, including a unique map design, one of the first games to have “special power cards” (Characters that gave a bit of role playing aspect to the game) and a the asymmetric “Empire vs Rebellion” story line.

Anyway that is my list, and am waiting to hear from others on games they hope to play this year and what they hope to get out of them!

Reading the story about the newb that stuck his dagger through a Troll’s eyeball scrambling his brain in a DragonQuest game…and the memory it cemented for all participating, I could not help recall a game of D&D I played with my Dad back in the day… I used him as a guinea pig to practice DM’ing and he would run two characters. In one such adventure he had a hulking fighter of exceptionally bad looks but 18+(something decimal) strength. This hulk had a partner who was a cleric of exceptional Charisma. On one adventure the charismatic cleric was turned into a donkey by a wizard. For several weekends, back in 78 or 79, we laughed hysterically at the antics of this ogre-like fighter and his ultra-charismatic Donkey sidekick. How ridiculous, but funny.

Then came Shrek…an Ogre with a donkey sidekick…we laughed about what the odds were that one of our favorite gaming memories would have such a close movie parallel. The world is strange sometimes

And the connection to the professional side is the idea of the power of narrative. Why are memories like this so strong and long lasting? How can we orchestrate moments like this to purpose? Is it possible, or is it the fact that they are spontaneous and NOT “set up” what gives them their power? Even is not a story of desperate odds overcome by phenomenal luck, I am still taken by the power of narrative that while contrived, resonates with the players. I’m a bit of a storyteller at heart having spent many hours in my children’s elementary school classrooms reading to the class “doing voices” and trying to demonstrate the power of a well told story to draw an audience in.

This is an aspect of gameplay I know Ed McGrady has championed for some time, but one which professional wargamers are tough to sell on. I’m not sure how or with what, but like Ed, I’m convinced that professional games that do not pay attention to the narrative “super-charging” a game are not getting nearly as much from their games as they could.

Some of the essays in Greg’s book reinforce that notion.

John Dickman recently posted the subject question which led to an interesting discussion (available on the lists archive if you join).

the discussion went down the rabbit hole of “how hard it was to get the trons representing the information to the right place at the right time”, but I thought that really the “easy” part from the more general point of view of “knowing what right is” (in terms of content, person and timeliness).

I chimed in with the following:

Back to the original question, “How easy (or hard) is it to get the “right” information to the “right” person at the “right” time?” This problem decomposes into an easy case where you know what the right information is, who the right person is and when the right time is. When those three conditions are met, it is because the ”world state” is well under stood (the only way to know the right information), a plan of action is well-known, (when the right decision maker (s) is (are) known, and when there is a well understood ‘theory of action’ for the timeframe over which the “world state” changes (right time).

In cases of mechanical (simple) systems, we know the world state well (initial conditions), we have a plan of action (apply force F at location X), and a theory of action (F=ma). Simple systems can get extremely complicated, resulting in ambiguity in world state, plan of action and theory of action, but theoretically they are “understandable” with refinements in the degree for understanding of the whole system.

For a host of reasons, most related to maintaining an illusion of control, we in the military (and also politics and business) consider all problems to be essentially simple, just exceedingly complicated. That offers the hope of a “right answer” for the right person, with the right information at the right time. The timetable constructs of “industrial age” warfare gave a seductive allure to this formulation, even if the reality never quite managed to meet the promise of the theory.

The rub is that there is different kind of problem out there, one that is not just complicated but truly ”complex”. We all hear what means, but don;t seen to want to really believe it. Complex problems defy formulation of an initial system state. Without that, there can be no understanding of the “dials and levers” we need decide to act on, and worst of all, no theory of action that relates the setting of those dials and levers to changes in that not understood world state. In these situations, the right information is not knowable, neither the right set of actors to take action, nor the timing of when to do it.

It is not a case of “with more information, we can figure it out” but that we CAN’T know enough to guarantee a right answer. We get by in these situation a large degree of the time because changes in the system state tend to occur slowly, so we can get by randomly moving the dials and levers and divining patterns in the outcomes that we can convince ourselves we had something to do with.

The more narrow and constrained we make “the system” we are considering, and isolating outside influences, the more we can make problems of the first type. This is what traditional science is good at, but has decomposed into so many systems that we get lost down the rabbit holes and lose the forest for the cellulose fibers. The bigger the system, and in particular the more people are part of it, the more it becomes a problem of the second type. One we can blunder along attempting to cope with. but never really understanding it, or able to effect it except in the margins, except for a period of “good luck” as was brought up…or as Taleb pointed out about turkeys, “They think they understand their world, right up until Thanksgiving”…

So to answer the question, we have a dichotomy of problems, on the one hand tractable, but not particularly interesting or important; on the other hand, those that are intractable, but critical to “solve” in our favor. Our hubris leading to all manner of “bad outcomes” has its roots not in the politics of hegemonic or uni-polar ambition, but in the ignorance that still feeds our desire to make complex problems simple if we just could figure out the right information based alchemy.

You can’t. And shame on us for perpetuating the myth.

To me wargaming is one way of understanding these difficult aspects and educating decision-makers about the their circumstances, and what “would be nice in a perfect world” (read JV2010…) but unrealistic, and what coping mechanisms you need because of that.

The question is “How?” What are the ways to bring this point home in wargames without making the player feel totally powerless (Ok that may be the reality, but we don’t want him to slit his wrists after the game…:) When is it appropriate to ignore it for other objectives sake, and as a designer, how do you “know what you don’t know” about the information landscape of the situation you are portraying?

Three days before the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was warned in a memo from naval intelligence that Tokyo’s military and spy network was focused on Hawaii, a new and eerie reminder of FDR’s failure to act on a basket load of tips that war was near.

REALLY??

The smoking gun in the new book is a new 20 page memo detailing the activities of Japanese intelligence in the months prior to its publishing on Dec 4th warning:

“In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii.”

Well that certainly narrowed it down for ole’ FDR…but not to Hawaii as the article lead in states. Author and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley doesn’t blame FDR directly, but simply impunes him with “does suggest that there were more pieces to the puzzle”. Yes if it was narrowed to down to a few million square miles what makes us think that sometime in the 2 days after the memo was published they narrowed it down to Pearl Harbor? Shame on Paul Bedard for narrowing “the West Coast,, the Panama Canal and Hawaii” to “Hawaii”.

This sort of flawed reasoning and breathless – if measured – innuendo about “who knew what when” plays into the notion that our leaders, like doctors, should be able to anticipate and prevent all mal-outcomes. IF something BAD happens, somebody should have known and prevented it and if not we want our scapegoat to hang out to dry for it.

This social pathology comes from our absurd notions about the degree of control we have over the world.

The connection to wargaming comes form some of the responses I’ve gotten from the group of engineers, analysts, and scientists I’ve been introducing to wargaming. The theme of many is along the lines of “This game is so complicated, how do you figure out how to win?”

Indeed if after a handful of game plays of moderately complicated games (We are talking Dominant Species, Race for the galaxy and Dominion here, not “Campaign for North Africa”) people are taught the realities of dealing with a simple competitive landscape of 4-6 players, many quickly extrapolate to the problems war fighters face out in the Fleet, and gain a new perspective on such things.

Never mind the perceptive critique here at Chicago Boyz by Shannon Love pointing out that Pearl Harbor (and I would add 9/11) were not surprises of INTENT but surprises of CAPABILITY. Alan Zim’s recent detailed analysis of the attack points out that even the Japanese were not sure they could pull of sailing the requisite fleet of aircraft carriers to within the meager range early WWII carrier aircraft had. They even toyed with the notion of making it a one way trip and scuttling their carriers after the attack (since they anticipated much of the air wings would be lost).

She concludes with the following, that applies to much about life, but particularly about wargaming and its uses (and abuses):

Most historical works conflate the surprise of the general public at Pearl Harbor with the surprise of the military. The Roosevelt administration worked tirelessly to downplay the risk of attack from Japan because FDR didn’t want attention distracted from Europe. Negotiations were still underway, and Americans of that era assumed that no one would attack during negotiations. The military, however, was actively preparing for war with Japan and was not particularly surprised that it broke out. They were only surprised by a radical change in Japanese doctrine and capabilities.

All the conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor hinge on the idea that all the warnings about Japanese attacks should have made it obvious that a carrier strike on Pearl Harbor was imminent. Such theories ignore that the best intelligence estimates of the time said that Japan could not carry out such an attack, and even if they could would not as a matter of doctrine. Nothing in the bits and pieces of intelligence that in hindsight indicated a possible carrier attack on Pearl were interpreted as such, because a carrier attack was thought (as a practical matter) operationally impossible.

The specter of technological surprise has haunted US planners ever since Pearl Harbor. The US military did learn to never underestimate the technical ability of an enemy to strike. Some would argue the US has systematically over estimated such abilities.

We learned a lot from Pearl Harbor but we really didn’t learn not to attempt to read the minds of people from other cultures and ideologies We haven’t learned to plan for the appearance of exceptional individuals changing the rule of the game.

Most importantly, we haven’t learned to plan for things we can’t possibly plan for or to admit that such scenarios even exist. Instead, we assume that all eventualities can be and should be planned for.

No doubt future historians will write “books” about how everything we will blunder into was in retrospect so obvious that the only reasonable explanation was some grand incompetence or conspiracy. In the end, we just really don’t understand most of what is going on and never did or will. Life is about surprises good and bad.

However, looking through the list of incoming searches that WordPress compiles, there are a few others that are rather more interesting:

• “people who lack decision making capability”
• “lazy air force security forces complacent”
• “force field analysis cartoon”
• “worksheets for toddlers on identify common relations”
• “analytical plan for primary school”

I’ll leave you all to draw your own conclusions!