Registration is now open for the annual Connections interdisciplinary wargaming conference to be held July 23-26 at the Center for Applied Strategic Learning at National Defense University in Washington DC. Connections serves the professional community of practice around wargames, conflict simulation, and serious games. Let me reproduce the official inviteContinue Reading
Just blitzed my way through Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, a slab of late summer fiction sure to be of interest to many here at Play the Past. This is Cline’s debut novel, though he’s also known for the 2009 film Fanboys. The two titles of the works alone oughtContinue Reading
“To a wargamer,” writes Greg Costikyan in the just published collection Tabletop: Analog Game Design, “wargames are not abstract, time-wasting pastimes, like other games, but representative of the real. . . . You can learn something from wargames; indeed, in some ways you can learn more from wargames than fromContinue Reading
The men of the “A” companies of the 2nd Light Infantry had been hearing odd noises for the last half hour. One of the sentries said that he too had heard the noises and all he had seen was a local farmer out early driving some cows. That seemed toContinue Reading
There is a story that circulates among wargamers about a German Kriegspiel being played out at a command post somewhere in France in 1944, when reports of an Allied attack along the lines of what was being simulated in the game began arriving at the headquarters. The general staff orderedContinue Reading
“Nothing except a battle lost,” wrote Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, “can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” His view was as sober as any to emerge from the killing fields of Waterloo in June of 1815, but the Duke already grasped the extent to which the battleContinue Reading