Chapter 1: Why Design Wargames?

For the entirety of human history, war has been humanity’s greatest and most urgent crisis. From the earliest civilizations, people have built abstract systems to distill warfare down to a set of conventions that could be reproduced and studied. Chess is quite literally a simulation of medieval-era tactical combat, with pieces representing the arms available at the time. Go is an older and more abstract attempt at the same impulse, focused on encirclement, territory, and strategic planning rather than individual engagements. Both are wargames. They may be disconnected from us in the modern era, but the intent behind them was martial simulation, and that intent is what matters.

This raises a question that wargamers have been arguing about for decades: what exactly is a wargame? I have heard compelling definitions from dozens of designers and none of them agree. My own position is close to the famous line about obscenity: I know it when I see it. But if pressed, I would say a wargame is any simulation of a struggle between two or more sides engaged in martial or existential conflict, defined as such by its designer. That last part is critical. A game cannot be a wargame if the designer did not intend it as one. The definition belongs to the creator.

This means the category is broader than people assume. Twilight Struggle is a wargame. Root is a wargame. It is essentially a COIN system with animals standing in for historical factions. The Undaunted series is a wargame. Advanced Squad Leader is a wargame. Campaign for North Africa, where you track individual water rations for Italian soldiers, is a wargame. All of these sit on a spectrum of complexity and abstraction, but they share the same fundamental purpose: modeling conflict in a way that gives players agency within historically or thematically grounded constraints.

What makes wargames unique among strategy games is the narrative they produce. Any game can be strategic. A euro game can demand hard optimization decisions. But wargames offer a kind of operational freedom that generates stories. Not scripted narratives handed to the player, but emergent ones built from the interaction of historically plausible forces, terrain, logistics, and human decision-making. When you play a good wargame, you are not just solving a puzzle. You are participating in something that feels like history, and the decisions you make create a narrative that is believable because the simulation underneath is honest about its constraints.

ASL is probably the most vivid example of this. It is a gameified version of World War II as it existed in the movies. Tactical, dramatic, full of small-unit heroics and desperate last stands. But it works because under all that drama there is a simulation engine that respects the reality of infantry combat. The stories it generates feel earned. That blend of player agency and historical plausibility producing a coherent narrative is what separates wargames from other forms of strategy gaming.

This matters beyond entertainment. After the Prussian defeat at Jena during the Napoleonic Wars, the Prussian general staff developed Kriegsspiel, a series of sophisticated exercises in which officers role-played forces on a game board, wrote orders for a neutral referee, and resolved engagements with dice. The insights from those exercises contributed directly to the Prussian military reforms that would destroy the field armies of the French Empire within weeks during the opening campaign of the Franco-Prussian War. Today, wargame designers have been utilized by the CIA, the Pentagon, major corporations, and NATO-member militaries as a means of understanding complex strategic environments and empowering participants to develop critical thinking skills. One of my own designs, 2022: Ukraine, was adopted by a NATO-member military for training exercises. I mention this not to boast but because it says something about the medium itself. A small commercial wargame, designed by one person in Brooklyn, produced insights that professional analysts found useful enough to put in front of soldiers.

The reason is straightforward. War is a system. It has inputs, constraints, feedback loops, and outcomes shaped by decisions made under uncertainty. A wargame forces you to engage with that system on its own terms. You cannot play a simulation of the Eastern Front without confronting the logistical realities that determined its outcome. You cannot simulate the Franco-Prussian War without grappling with the fact that Prussian officers could act on initiative while French officers waited for orders from an emperor suffering from gout. I recently compared Russian institutional failures in East Prussia in 1914 to the same failures in Ukraine in 2022. The same organizational dysfunctions, the same command rigidity, the same inability to adapt, separated by 108 years. Wargames are one of the few tools that make those patterns visible and visceral rather than academic.

The State of the Hobby

We arguably live in the golden age of wargaming, though it remains a niche hobby. The worldwide community of active wargamers is probably in the tens of thousands. Maybe more if you count the people who buy games and never play them, which is more common than anyone wants to admit. But compared to twenty or thirty years ago, the hobby is more accessible than it has ever been. VASSAL allows anyone with an internet connection to play almost any published wargame online. Board Game Geek provides a centralized community where you can find opponents, read reviews, and discover new designs. Print-on-demand services mean a designer no longer needs a five-figure print run to get a game into players’ hands.

At the same time, wargaming remains a hobby for a specific kind of person. The games are expensive. The rules are long. The time investment is substantial. You are not going to impulse-buy a $90 boxed wargame the way you might grab a party game at Target. The people who buy wargames tend to be either collectors with disposable income or obsessives who find the combination of history and strategic decision-making irresistible. I am firmly in the second camp.

The hobby has also been slowly expanding into the broader world of board gaming. Twilight Struggle brought euro-gamers into the fold by packaging Cold War grand strategy in a card-driven system that felt familiar to people coming from Dominion or Pandemic. Root did the same thing by disguising a counterinsurgency simulation as an adorable woodland adventure game. These crossover successes matter because they show that the core appeal of wargaming, strategic depth grounded in thematic coherence, is not limited to grognards. The audience is wider than the hobby’s reputation suggests.

For aspiring designers, this means the barriers to entry are lower than they have ever been. You do not need a publishing contract to get a game in front of players. You do not need to attend conventions to find playtesters. You do need a genuine interest in the subject you want to simulate, a willingness to do the research, and enough stubbornness to push through the parts that are tedious rather than fun. Wargame design is an academic exercise as much as a creative one, and you need some kind of drive to put yourself through it. But if you have that drive, the tools and community to support you exist right now.

Who This Book Is For

I am trying to write the book I wish I had when I was just starting out.

When I began designing wargames, I had played a fair number of them but had no idea how to build one. I knew what I liked in the games I played, but I could not reverse-engineer the decisions that produced those qualities. Why did one combat results table feel right and another feel arbitrary? Why did some games capture the character of a conflict in thirty counters while others failed to do so in three hundred? How did experienced designers decide on hex scale, turn length, movement factors? These are not questions you can answer by playing more games. You answer them by designing games, making mistakes, and paying attention to why things did or did not work.

I have been designing games for over a decade now. I own and operate Conflict Simulations LLC, a small wargame publishing company out of Brooklyn. I have designed and published nearly thirty wargames covering conflicts from the German Peasants’ War of 1525 through the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022. My designs have been published by Multi-Man Publishing, one of the major publishers in the hobby, and three of my games were nominated for Charles S. Roberts Awards, which is the closest thing wargaming has to an Oscar. I have designed games at every scale from tactical to strategic, using hex-and-counter, area-control, point-to-point, and hybrid card-driven systems.

None of which is to say I have all the answers. Every new design teaches me something I did not know, and I still make mistakes that would have been obvious to a more experienced designer. But I have made enough mistakes across enough published designs to know which ones are common, which ones are avoidable, and which ones you just have to make yourself before the lesson sticks.

This book is for anyone who wants to design a wargame and does not know where to start. That includes hobbyist wargamers who have always wanted to try their hand at design. It includes euro-gamers and board game enthusiasts curious about the wargame side of the hobby. It includes people in professional wargaming, whether defense analysts, educators, or researchers, who want to understand how commercial wargames are constructed. And it includes designers who have already started a project and gotten stuck, because getting stuck is normal and most of the solutions are knowable.

What this book will not do is make you a historian. You need to bring the interest in your subject. You need to care enough about the conflict you want to simulate to do the research honestly. What this book will give you is the framework to turn that historical knowledge into a playable game, and the practical guidance to take that game from prototype through playtesting to publication.

Several pioneers of the hobby have written about wargame design before me, most notably Jim Dunnigan and the staff of SPI. But many of those books were written thirty or forty years ago and do not account for the innovations in game design, digital playtesting tools, and publishing options that exist today. The underlying principles of wargame design have not changed, but the practice of it has. I hope this book bridges that gap.

How I Got Here

I bought Totaler Krieg as one of my first wargames and was immediately intimidated by it. I was not ready for that level of complexity, and it sat on my shelf for a while before I found my way into the hobby through a different door.

What eventually hooked me were John Tiller’s PC wargames, specifically the First World War Campaign series. These are giant battalion-level simulations that cover entire campaigns in granular detail, and they were my first experience of genuinely feeling immersed in history through a game. Moving battalions through the Argonne, watching a corps-level attack develop across multiple turns, seeing the operational picture emerge from hundreds of individual unit decisions. That was the moment I understood what wargames could do. Those games informed my design sensibility in ways I am still discovering. The operational scale, the attention to order of battle, the feeling that the player is a commander making real decisions within real constraints. All of that traces back to those Tiller campaigns.

My first self-published game was 1916, a strategic simulation of the Battle of Verdun that I put together after months of playing old GDW titles. The mechanics drew from the SPI school of design. Straightforward odds-based combat, simple movement, the kind of system where the game gets out of the way and lets the situation speak. It was rough in ways that are obvious to me now, but it worked, and seeing people play something I had designed was addictive in a way I was not prepared for.

Since then I have designed games on topics ranging from ancient Marathon to the Prigozhin mutiny of 2023. I have built modular game systems that share rules across multiple titles. I have designed grand-tactical simulations of post-Napoleonic conflicts in the age of rifles, Cold War hypotheticals, and a hybrid card-driven game on the Great Northern War that deliberately breaks the hex-and-counter format. My game Sedan 1940 is essentially an analog version of the Panzer Campaigns PC series, and it is dedicated to John Tiller’s memory, because without his games I would never have started designing my own.

The purpose of this book is to open up the world of wargame design and shatter the assumption that designing wargames is excessively difficult or inaccessible. It is exactly as difficult as you make it. A small, focused game with a clear thesis about its conflict can be designed, playtested, and published by one person. I know this because I have done it nearly thirty times. Here is how.