New Book: Dark Places- professional wargaming of dark themes

 Stating the obvious, all wargames are dealing with the darkest elements of human experience, that of conflict. However, there is a subset of wargames that are used to explore the darkest elements of conflict. These games are routinely run behind closed doors and rarely, if ever, does the existence of such games reach the public domain, let alone the details. Sometimes these games are part of professional military activity, sometimes part of academic research. Both purposes use the vehicle of designing and playing a wargame as a way to generate different insights from merely reading and attending conferences.

The games in this book were carefully chosen to reduce the risk of offence. They demonstrate the ways of running such games, but without using current or recent conflicts as examples. They include:

Bosnian Mercenary: Gaming the Chaos of the Disintegration of Yugoslavia

WMD 1945

My Aunt’s War: Civilian Experience of War

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Gaming Surrender

Pickett’s Charge: Using Drama

The Button: Nuclear Decision Making

Exercise Hard Rock: Civil Defence

The Tank Factory: Military Management of the Economy During Wartime

The reader should be clear that these games on dark subjects matter and often have real world consequences. This  book is the first to shed some light on these types of games with actual examples.

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New Book- Wargames from World War II: Examples of Axis and Allied Wargaming Rules and Umpire Guidelines

 

It has only taken me a decade to complete this book. It gives actual examples of games played during World War II, a war in which wargaming was just seen as another tool for training and operation planning.

The games played just before and during World War II mattered. As a result of those wargames, battles were fought, campaigns were launched; lives were lost, lives were saved. An overview of such games has been covered in the literature before. This book is different as it aims to examine the detail of these wargames by including primary material; extracts from source documents, wargaming rules and umpiring guides from the pre-war period until 1945.

Included are detailed guidelines on the German use of wargaming during the war based on post war analysis by the American military. This includes outlines of best practise and the value of these games.

Samples of the German map based tactical exercises set at platoon and company level.

An example of a British attack on a village.

British and American umpire manuals with rules for arbitrating field exercises, sand table and map wargames.

A Royal Navy carrier wargame: Find Fix and Strike (1944).

I did a talk and uploaded it to YouTube History Wargaming Book Channel