About

A little about me. I've been designing games of different kinds for around a decade and currently own and operate Conflict Simulations LLC, a small wargame publishing company based in Brooklyn.

I've put out about thirty board wargames. I handle most through CSL's own print-on-demand operation, and Multi-Man Publishing put out Rostov 41 under their SCS series. Three of them got CSR Award nominations in consecutive years (The World Undone: Serbia, 1854: The Alma, and Imperial Bayonets: For Liberty & Lombardy), which I remain somewhat bewildered about. The board catalog is at consimsltd.com/shop. The digital catalog is on itch, under the same CSL brand.

The rest of this site exists because I could never quite learn to code.

I tried. Throughout the 2010s, when teaching yourself to program was supposed to be the thing you were doing, I made serious attempts at Python, JavaScript, C++, and a handful of others I would rather not name. The only language I ever came close to a real understanding of was 6502 assembly, the instruction set for a 1977 CPU that ran the NES and the Commodore 64, and even then I understood it poorly. (If you are getting the impression this is an unusual direction of aptitude, you are correct.)

Then AI-assisted coding got good enough that I could finally ship.

There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, and I am working a minimum wage job with a somewhat relentless drive to create anyway. I may as well use that drive to make things that are interesting, useful, or meaningful. Claude has helped me become creative again after a long lull, and that probably matters more than the tool itself.

I direct, and the tools implement. On ZERO-PAGE, the 6502 puzzle game and sandbox I have been working on, I provided the direction and Claude did most of the code. The same goes for the rest. Auftragstaktik is a tactical OSINT terminal I talked into shape in about two weeks. Veridian Contraption is the Rust ASCII world-simulator I have been building under CSL. Death Of An Empire, also under CSL, is a terminal wargame on the Franco-Prussian War. Buddies is a Claude Code companion that is also a creature-collection game. CatalogDNA started as a tool for analyzing my own four-hundred-track catalog as Le Rug. All of these are projects I designed, could not have written the code for, and shipped anyway.

I did not "build" most of those. I directed, researched, playtested, and shipped. I did not write most of the code. The games, the tools, the editorial eye, and the positioning are mine. That version of the story is worth telling, and a lot of people will be telling some version of it about their own work over the next few years.

The other half of what I ship now is AI tools about the AI itself. Hammerstein is a CLI advisor and system prompt I built around Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's officer typology; I run it before firing any plan with multi-file blast radius, and it's also the system prompt behind the hosted Wargamer mode at hammerstein.ai. GeneralStaff is the open-source autonomous-engineering harness I use to run all this work — verification-gated, BYOK, local-first, with thirty-plus managed projects in rotation. The journal is where I write up what the tools are actually doing, what the benchmarks measure, and where the methodology breaks.

If you came here from the wargame hobby, welcome. If not, this site is what happens when a wargame designer starts shipping in other media.