Jobs in Professional Wargaming

 

Connections USA is the professional wargaming conference. Colonel Matt Caffrey, USAF, was ordered to run a conference to further professional wargaming, and the order was never rescinded. So, since 1993, the great and good of professional wargaming have gathered to discuss their art and craft.

Before the pandemic, I was sitting around a table in a bar during Connections USA. As I bought a round of drinks, I realised that the majority of the active professional wargamers in the world could fit around a single table: Peter Perla, Roger Mason, Ed McGrady, Yuna Wong, Tom Mouat, Tim Price, and a handful of others. Professional wargaming was a tiny world in 2017.

In 2026, professional wargaming is an integral part of military education, training and analysis. Practically every defence company of note now has at least a few staff with some responsibility for wargames. Many people are interested in getting into this world, and some of them ask me how to get a job in professional wargaming. I respond by suggesting how they might become a rounded professional because that's the skill set that will actually get them to an interview.

Know your domain

The first step is to become a master of your professional domain. If you want to run a space wargame, you need to know about satellites. The same goes for cyber, air, submarines, and any other area of modern warfare. You cannot expect a political party to let you umpire a game about a "run on the state currency" unless you can persuade them you understand national economics. It helps, of course, to have a subject matter expert to facilitate the game — but you still need to know more than the basics yourself. When I ran a game about a "run on the pound" some years ago, it helped enormously to have an advisor from the Bank of England on the team, but I still spent a week reading before the initial sponsor meetings. Wargaming is a skill, but it doesn't replace the need to be genuinely knowledgeable about the topic being gamed.

Know your craft

When I talk to professional wargamers, I'm often frustrated by how limited their mental toolbox of techniques can be. Wargamers who say they only use "simulations," or only “digital games”, or only “manual games”, are restricting their expertise to a narrow slice of the field. Some insist that every wargaming problem can be solved with a matrix game (or a board game, or whatever their comfort zone happens to be).

To be a master wargamer, you need to be familiar with a very wide range of games,  professional and hobby alike. You should have designed matrix games, used AI to assist a strategic-level game, and understood military course of action analysis (and why it isn't a wargame). You need to know what a hidden scenario is, what a committee game is, and stay aware of developments in roleplaying. Watching someone run a game of Dungeons & Dragons can be a masterclass in conjuring a scenario and immersing players in a game world. A roleplaying session of Call of Cthulhu can teach you a great deal about putting players under mounting stress. Practically every top-rank professional wargamer I know plays hobby games to some degree. So if you don't know what a megagame (or muggergame) is, or what confrontation analysis is, go and find out.

Getting to the interview

There's a wide range of professional wargaming jobs out there and some jobs in serious games, and even more in hobby wargaming, but to get to an interview you need to know the military domain being gamed to a good standard. You also need a genuinely broad base of wargaming experience, spanning miniatures, Eurogames, cyber, multi-domain operations etc.

When you're on that lifelong journey to becoming a master wargamer, I'll see you at the bar. The round's on me, while you tell me about the trials and tribulations of the professional wargaming world. Is professional wargaming an art or a craft? We have never been able to agree, but perhaps you will be able to tell us.
 

Modern Table Top Games are Broken

 

I was playing yet another new set of wargaming rules recently published by Osprey and after a handful of turns I realised I could predict the outcome of the game; the next two hours were merely an exercise in rolling dice.

Modern wargaming rules are frequently well written, include many illustrations and use clever game mechanisms to help model the period and above all, they are simple. Simple is the problem.

In the early days of table top wargames, the wargamers such as Tony Bath, Don Featherstone, Charlie Wesencraft etc. had simple generic rules such as infantry move 6 inches, cavalry 12, guns fire 24 inches, roll to hit and roll to save etc… However, the simplicity of the rules was not an issue. Wargaming involved the non-trivial task of historical research in what was a desert of tactical and operational military history source material. Buying figures was expensive; basing and painting them time-consuming. Scenery was not cheap if from model railways; alternatively took many hours if homemade. Finding opponents and travelling to meet them also took effort. Actually playing a wargame was the culmination of the many man hours; no-one was that worried about the simplicity of the game. They were just pleased to get the toys on the tabletop.

Wargames gradually increased in complexity in the 1970’s and 1980’s, with the WRG rules being classics of the era. The latter took time to study and table top battles were complex events that precluded simple mathematical projections or generalisations that could predict the outcome. The soundest strategy with such rules was usually to apply historical tactics. Of course, the complexity of the games meant most players played a limited number of sets of rules that they gradually became masters of.

The simplicity of modern rules means that there are certain winning tactics, that seem to apply to many of these sets, such as:

1.  More dice- the essence of winning is to get into positions to roll more dice than your opponent e.g. attacking an enemy unit coming around impassable terrain by two or preferably three units.
2. An extension of the above is to attack from the flank, whilst also attacking from the front.
3. Massed artillery batteries work in all periods. Rules allow single pieces of artillery to have an impact, but if you have multiple batteries firing at one target, the enemy unit routinely becomes combat ineffective in a few turns.
4.  In games that give a player the number of dice for their actions based on the number of units, the strategy is to generate a few really low points cost units just to get more dice than your opponent. More dice for movement makes your army more agile.
5. In games where an army routs when it looks x number of units, the aim is always to attempt to kill the enemy’s weakest units, as they are the easiest to kill. Avoid the guards or elite or veterans, aim for the militia or novices.  
6. There seem to be simple game strategies that work irrespective of historical period, scale of figures or set or rules.

Of course, the more dice that are rolled in a game, the more chance of the law of averages applys and the easier it is to predict the outcome. If rules are too simple, is easy for players to project the likely outcome of the game after just a few moves, reducing the excitement that is an essential part of engaging players in a wargame.

Perhaps I am approaching the games with the wrong mindset. Instead of crunching the maths, I should view the toys as real, the battle as history and consider how a historical commander would approach the problems. Don Featherstone said you do not need rules to recreate history, just a player who plays historically.