The following article was written by Lorenzo Nannetti, Senior Analyst at Il Caffè Geopolitico. It was previously published in Italian here. In the first half of 2026, the Caffè Geopolitico team delivered a teaching workshop twice as part of an advanced training course at the Scuola Ufficiali Carabinieri in Rome. The activity, titled "Leadership Challenges in a Fragile Environment, tested participants' ability to read an unstable operational context and translate it into command decisions through a purpose-built international stability policing mission scenario.

Two recent articles in the Canadian media on outside interference in Alberta’s October 19 independence referendum say a good deal about the challenge hostile actors now pose to liberal democr…

Two recent articles in the Canadian media on outside interference in Alberta's October 19 independence referendum say a good deal about the challenge hostile actors now pose to liberal democracies. They also suggest that many of the games and wargames we run on influence operations and disinformation have not kept pace with how the digital-strategic environment has changed. The first is a ground-breaking…

This article was written for PAXsims by Joseph Chretien, a retired Models and Simulations (M&S) US Army Lieutenant Colonel. As a M&S officer, he served in multiple roles that included wargame developer and facilitator for the US Army War College. During his time at the War College, he incorporated experiential educational methodologies into the curriculum. He is also the co-author of several matrix wargames such as…

On October 14, Archipelago of Design will be holding a playtest in Montreal of their Mission Critical climate security game. Date: October 14th, 2026 Time: 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM Location: UQAM, École des sciences de la gestion, Room R-3570 Additional details are below. Tickets are limited, so please RSVP here as soon as possible. On the eve of the 2026 Montreal Climate Security Summit, we invite you to join us once again for an hands-on prototype testing session.

The MORS Professional Gaming Society is offering a number of wargaming courses in October, November, and December 2026. You'll find additional details at the PGS website.

Broadcast in the UK on Sky One from 21 to 24 September 2026, The Wargame places experienced political and military figures inside a simulated national-security crisis. It originates with the award-winning 2025 podcast of the same name, produced by Sky News and Tortoise Media, which first explored the difficult choices Britain’s leaders might face under an escalating military threat.

PAXsims is pleased to present some recent items on serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers. Many thanks to Aaron Danis for suggesting material for this latest report. At War on the Rocks, Dustin League and William Dawson recently discussed when and why AI escalates to nuclear weapons use in simulations: We played a wargame using AI players.

The following article was written for PAXsim by Ben Taylor. Ben Taylor is a retired defence analyst, after a career in Britain and Canada. Working as Colcestrian Consulting, he now supports a number clients with analytical and serious gaming expertise. He is alos part of the organizing team for the annual Connections North professional (war)gaming conference. As of mid-September 2026, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine continues alongside renewed diplomatic activity.

The following item was written for PAXsims by Jordan Nicholls. Jordan is a Human Factors specialist working in patient safety in the UK's National Health Service, with experience across ambulance services, paediatric care and mental health. He is completing a part-time MSc in Ergonomics and Human Factors at Loughborough University, co-edits Patient Safety: Emerging Applications of Safety Science, and has co-authored a paper on the sociotechnical factors behind the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

The September 2025 issue of the Public Sector Counter Fraud Journal includes an interesting article by Madeline Johnson on the use of serious games by the Canadian Revenue Agency. To stay ahead of ever-evolving fraud threats, the Canada Revenue Agency is using serious games, immersive role-playing exercises that simulate real-world fraud scenarios. These games allow staff to step into the shoes of fraudsters and frontline agents, helping them uncover system vulnerabilities, challenge assumptions, and collaboratively design better risk controls.

Defending Defender is a wargame about strategic communications developed by the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). It is based on a Russian attempt to disrupt HMS Defender’s innocent passage through Crimean waters in 2021.  The game is designed for 2-8 players. It does not require a moderator, and no wargaming or strategic communications experience is required to play. You'll find the Dstl press release here. The British Forces Broadcasting Service have also covered the game—you'll find their report (and another video) here.

Are you looking for a position in wargaming or other serious gaming? Don't forget to check the job opportunities section here at PAXsims. If you're advertising a position, email us and we would be pleased to add it to the list.

The Lithuanian Armed Forces' new wargaming handbook, Įvadas į karžaidą , is now available. The handbook addresses: What is a wargame? The relevance and importance of wargames. Characteristics of a wargame. The process of designing and implementing wargames Wargame themes Together with references, definitions, examples of Lithuanian and the Baltic representation in wargames, and additional resources. It is a very well put together guide, and I hope that an English-language version is forthcoming one day.

An arbitrator ordered the newspaper to reinstate Karen Attiah, who was fired after posting about “white men who espouse hatred and violence” following Charlie Kirk’s killing.

In The Atlantic (paywalled), Simon Shuster argues that NATO has done little or no planning for a potential nightmare scenario: a simultaneous Russian attack on NATO and Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Western military planners do not seem eager to talk about their nightmare scenario, much less prepare for it. But they tend to agree on how it would begin: a coordinated, near-simultaneous attack on opposite sides of the planet, in which Russia targets a NATO member in Eastern Europe while China makes its move against Taiwan.

RAND have just released a new report examining how growing AI adoption might affect a future conflict between the US and China. RAND researchers developed Camp(ai)gn, an unclassified operational-level wargame, to explore that question. In this paper, the authors offer initial takeaways from ten iterations of Camp(ai)gn featuring a hypothetical 2035 U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan and played by more than 20 RAND researchers and affiliates.

We might also note that PAXsims itself now receives a a substantial amount of visits from China (including Hong Kong), with traffic having grown substantially in recent years. PAXsims visitors, 2026 (to date) If you're a Chinese wargamer reading this and you might want to contribute an article, contact us!

At Armchair Dragoons, Ian Brown offers an overview of—and some thoughtful reflections on—the June 2026 Connections US professional wargaming conference. As previously noted at PAXsims, the Connections US 2026 conference presentations can be found here.

Medevac!, designed by Ian Robinson and Ed Farren, is a serious game addressing the challenge of stabilizing, transporting, and treating battlefield casualties. Players are forced to make difficult choices about triage and treatment, while dealing with friction and uncertainty. 260812 Medevac! – The Fight to Save Lives - PAXsimsDownload The game is more described more fully in these YouTube videos, and is available for free from the Fight Club International (FCI) analogue games channel at

Trump says more Americans are working than ever. There’s a remarkably intimate explanation.

The following piece was written for PAXsims by Stephane Benoit. I own bigBITS Tactical Cyber Security Operations in Québec City, and I also work full-time as a Vulnerability Analyst for the Government of Canada — a hacker by night, a VA analyst by day. My background is in Python and automation, which shapes how I think about building tools rather than just running them.

PAXsims is pleased to welcome its newest Associate Editor, Jerry Hall. Jerry Hall is a retired U.S. Army officer whose final 20 years of service focused on modeling and simulation, wargaming, and exercise planning and control in the Indo-Pacific region. He currently serves as a senior wargaming and simulation consultant and supports U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) J7. He is also the founder of Art of Command™, an initiative dedicated to helping people think, decide, and lead under uncertainty through historical research, wargaming, and AI-assisted command learning.

In the last few years, LinkedIn has emerged as a major professional network for those interested in conflict simulation and other serious games. Indeed, not a day goes by that I don't see something of interest posted by one of my wargaming colleagues. This is hardly surprising: LinkedIn has a cultivated professional ambiance, whereas other social media platforms seem niche (Bluesky), out of fashion (Facebook), or outright toxic (X).

The UK Resilience Academy has published a new insight paper, Wargaming in a Resilience Context. Authored by Rob Grayston, it argues that resilience exercising should borrow deliberately from military wargaming, adapting tools like matrix games, serious games, and megagames to encourage group discovery, surface problems and contingencies, and build a genuine willingness to challenge plans—all within a safe-to-fail environment rather than a scripted, consequence-free tabletop.

This short video on how to play a matrix game was developed by members of the wargaming team at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, HI.

Registration is now open for the 2nd edition of the AWL Wargaming Conference, to be held 15-17 September 15–17 2026 at the Military University of Land Forces in Wrocław, Poland. The theme of the conference is "Comprehensive Security: Advancing Wargaming in Military and Non-Military Domains." The registration form can be found here.

This past week, CNN Academy and the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin once again held a week-long journalism simulation, combining social media, press conferences, interviews, field reporting, and OSINT challenges with workshops and masterclasses. The scenario was a version of the humanitarian health simulation we held last year in Abu Dhabi. Some 22 students took part, divided into six competing journalism teams, while a dozen others (drawn from UCD students as well as members of the NGOs 

Nicolas Penseyres has just published a piece on wargaming in Switzerland at Stratos (the Swiss Armed Forces Scientific Review), in which he notes that Switzerland has lost much of its past wargaming tradition. He also makes some suggestions on how to rebuild this. You will find the full article below. From Stratego to StrategyDownload

Tickets are now live for Connections UK 2026. The conference will take place on Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 September 2026 at Brunel University of London, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge. This year’s conference will be a smaller, shorter and more focused event, limited to 100 attendees, while continuing our core purpose: bringing together professional wargame practitioners to share experience, develop practice and advance the art, science and application of wargaming.

Last week was a very busy week for professional wargaming. On June 23-25, the Connections US conference was held in Monterey. Those very same days, DSET was underway in the UK. And on June 23-24, Wargaming à Paris was underway at the École Militaire, organized by the Académie de défense de l’École militaire (ACADEM) and the Centre interarmées de concepts, de doctrines et d’expérimentations (CICDE).

Last week I had an opportunity to playtest Reasonable Worst Case, a UK pandemic preparedness and response simulation, in my "complexity seminar" on alternative analytical methods at the Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University. The simulation has been developed by PAXsims research associate Zinzi Sibanda, who is also part of the simulation team at CNN Academy (where she has been working, appropriately enough, on public health simulations).

PAXsims is pleased to present some recent items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) games that may be of interest to our readers. Thanks, as usual, to our supporters on Patreon. The YouTube channel French Wargaming discusses how the French military conducts professional wargames with Maxime Yvelin and Antoine Bourguilleau of the Bureau Jeu de Guerre of the Commandement du combat futur (CCF).

Kevin Williamson is a senior ORSA (operations researcher and systems analyst) at Metrea. He provided this material for PAXsims. One of my passions is searching for RED Wargaming literature and products ever since USNI Proceedings wrote about China's "Blue Team". At the time, I was working as a Wargaming SME for Matrix Pro Sims supporting Marine Corps University's wargaming program under Tim Barrick and some of what the article covered struck close to what we had been wargaming. 

The video proceedings of the Assises Françaises d'Étude du Wargaming 2026 conference held at Sciences Po Lyon in April, are now available. You can also check out our earlier conference report.

Today's New York Times features an article on why decades of wargames and warnings about Iran's ability to close the Strait of Hormuz went unheeded by the Trump Administration. Four possible points of failure are suggested in the NYT analysis: President Trump may have expected Iran's government to collapse quickly before it could act on the strait, partly based on Netanyahu's assurances that regime change was achievable, and buoyed by the recent capture of Venezuela's Maduro.

Shashank Joshi—the outgoing defence editor and incoming Washington bureau chief for The Economist—has constructed a UK defence expenditure simulator, in which YOU the PLAYER, CHOOSE YOUR OWN defence investment plan ADVENTURE. Give it a try here. The comments the simulation makes your proposal—including who in the services, Whitehall or the Cabinet hates your investment plan and leaks criticism to the press—are worth the price (£0) of playing.

The 2026 conference of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association (NASAGA) will take place in Rochester, New York on 14-17 October. This year’s conference theme is “Sustaining Human Connection through Play in the Digital Age.” As our lives rely more and more on digital tools, we end up spending a lot more time interacting with our phones, tablets, smartwatches, and computers on our own.

The Saratoga Foundation has published a report by Roger McDermott on How the Russian General Staff Conducts Wargames. Key Insights & Takeaways The Central Structural Paradox: Russian General Staff wargaming integrates command-staff games, strategic exercises, mathematical modeling, and political-military signaling to make war intellectually manageable. However, it operates under a severe institutional constraint: it successfully disciplines tactical and operational assumptions but inherently prevents objective strategic feedback from challenging top-down political authority.

On Tuesday 2 June 2026, the Beyond Compliance Consortium (BCC) is offering an online demonstration and reflective discussion on Gaming for Humanitarianism at the York Festival of Ideas, from 1200-1300 BST. Join Rebecca Sutton (University of Glasgow), Marc Linning (Center for Civilians in Conflict) and Daisy Abbott (The Glasgow School of Art), to learn about and see a demo of the BEYOND training tool, a serious game supporting individuals and organisations who work to address harm and need in war.