Wargaming

Before The Forge, there was the Forge. Founded in April 2001 and closing in 2012, the Forge was a community of 4,476 users making 266,041 posts about designing, publishing, and playing new and innovative role playing games.

Currently there is more time and people involved in playing than ever before, but is wargaming the best use of resources?

The 2019-20 Academic Year (AY19-20) in Canada was interrupted by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19). The academic year was about two-thirds finished when the faculty, staff, and students at the Canadian Forces College (CFC), Canada’s joint service staff college, were forced to disperse because of the pandemic.

Games are sharable models of complex human systems and therefore are potent tools for training foreign and defence affairs specialists.

When Jason Matthews and I set out to design a game, we didn’t initially anticipate the Cold War as our subject matter. But when we looked at the offerings already out there (in 2001), the Cold War games were few and far between.

As an educational tool, wargames promise to educate the civilian decision-maker and the warfighter in how to think about war before a conflict ever starts.

While games are a powerful teaching tool, not all games can serve all these purposes.

Educational wargaming is experiencing a remarkable resurgence, reflected in the growth of wargaming Fight Clubs and the embrace of wargames as pedagogical tools in the classroom.