What Do Games Tell Our Adversaries?

 “In our leisure we reveal what kind of people we are.”

— Ovid

Members of the Chinese PLA Navy play Sebastian
Bae’s Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific wargame.

A recent social media post by Sebastian Bae — game designer, wargaming professor, defense analyst, former US Marine (among many other roles) — shared news that members of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) were playing his modern wargame Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacfic. “I did not have the PLA Navy playing my ‘Littoral Commander Indo-Pacific’ #wargame on one of their ships on my bingo card for 2026. Absolutely wild,” Bae posted. It is an interesting testament to our open-source internet age, where information and products travel the world for use by anyone who wants them...including our potential near-future adversaries. It certainly validates the quality and utility of Bae’s wargame. It also raises questions about what adversaries can learn from the games we ourselves design and use, how such games reflect both the designer’s knowledge of battlefield capabilities and assumptions about elements affecting the outcome of combat.

Bae’s Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific (The Dietz Foundation, 2023) combines more traditional components of chit-and-board wargames with card play, both, as I understand it, cards (and blocks) to track unit capabilities and cards to deploy non-unit strategies beyond those represented on the map-board. It contains several scenarios focusing on Chinese operations in that theater and American naval and marine response, including, of course, the looming near-future confrontation of a potential Chinese attack on or invasion of Taiwan. The game accounts for numerous kinds of vessels, units, technologies, and other strategies working together on various levels, what those in the defense community call “multi-domain operations” (MDO).

In the game description “from the designer” on BoardGameGeek Bae notes:

“The gameplay emphasizes coordination within teams to successfully find and engage the enemy through both kinetic (like missiles) and non-kinetic (like cyber) means. Over 200+ Joint Capability Cards (JCCs) represent a wide range of joint and adversary capabilities. This includes cyber-attacks, influence operations, bomber strikes, submarines, key enablers, and more. The system highlights the importance of reconnaissance, long-range strike, logistics, and cyber capabilities in modern combat. It is designed as an accessible and modular system for both experienced and new players.”

The design reflects shortened play time to avoid imposing on military officers’ heavy schedules and emphasizes and a more basic entry threshold to encourage new players. Naturally the game gained a following among hobby gamers as well as the professional military education community, with some even creating additional scenarios. The game’s scope expanded with Littoral Commander: Baltic and expansions for Australia and the addition of wooden blocks instead of cardstock chits; no doubt plans exist for more expansions.

This article is in no way meant as a review of Littoral Commander Indo-Pacific; but I hope I provide some context for discussing how this commercial/civilian game might inform adversaries of capabilities and strategies of deployment as well as our own estimation of adversarial forces. I’ve kept Bae’s Littoral Commander titles on my adventure gaming radar. The game and its reach represents a breakthrough in modern professional military education accessible to a wider audience. I’ll admit both the subject and complexity, even to a degree an informed civilian might enjoy, remain a bit beyond my usual preference for wargames. Yet I am intrigued and have kept Littoral Commander on my Noble Knight Games “want list” just in case an affordable, gently used copy tempts me (though finding a willing opponent is another matter).

Given his past military experience, government consulting, and game design credentials Bae knows how all the different weapons systems operate, especially when deployed in MDO (as I understand one of the central themes of gameplay). I’m sure he’s also sensitive to avoid infusing his game with any classified information truly useful to adversaries; no doubt government agencies vetted the game just to make sure. And if anything slipped through? Military technology and operational doctrine constantly change and adapt. So intelligence gained through the laborious process of board game development, production, and distribution (not to mention the time for actual gameplay and analysis) has a high chance of becoming obsolete.

Bae mentioned on social media, “We authorized a small batch of Chinese language sets, especially given the fact that they would probably do it without our permission regardless...but did not expect the PLA to televise themselves playing my game.”

Which started me considering what adversaries can learn by playing games we develop to simulate warfare...especially emerging near-future conflicts with modern weapon systems. Wargames are representative abstractions of real-world factors, models allowing us to manipulate elements within a situational context to learn generally how the moving parts work and play with them in scenarios to explore potential outcomes. The way designers approach modeling real-world situations reveals all kinds of information, including but not limited to the elements that can affect a model and their capabilities, what designers know about friendly and adversarial potential, and assumptions about how everything might interact. How we model situations reveals both what we know and our opinions about that knowledge.

Historical Precedent

In trying to examine this and put it in perspective I naturally look back in time for historical precedents to better inform my current view.

Have past wargames informed adversaries?

I’m just an amateur with no ties to the classified wargames no doubt playing out in the secure halls of defense professionals. I’m not sure anyone has a clear picture of the security secrets hidden by adversaries, past and present, in the classified infrastructure...or scrubbed from the record in paranoid purges. I doubt someone at my level knows of any case of adversaries actively using an opponent’s wargame simulation for intelligence purposes. Which doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just that relevant participants in history probably have concealed them rather well if they didn’t eliminate evidence of them altogether. Drawing on my own limited knowledge and contacts, with some welcome help, I thought of several “what if?” situations that might inform an investigation and discussion of adversarial game playing and analysis.

Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU): Recent revelations about British efforts to simulate and analyze u-boat attacks and convoy escort response tactics formed the basis of Simon Parkin’s book A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II (Little, Brown and Company, 2020). The German Kriegsmarine was aware of these efforts thanks to an Illustrated magazine article “Behind the Atlantic Battle” (Feb. 26, 1944), which offered an overview of the personnel and simulations used to train captains to hunt down u-boats. While it revealed Royal Navy anti-submarine training methods, it could not have helped the Germans without them gaining a more detailed knowledge of the simulations. The wargame was not available beyond secure military circles and hence could not have offered the Kriegsmarine much if any practical insight into Royal Navy methods. (For those interested John Curry and Alvaro Radigales provided a comprehensive look at the WATU wargames in Royal Navy Wargaming 1929 to 1945 and the Western Approaches Tactical Unit [The History of Wargaming Project, 2025].)

Cold War Games: The question of adversaries using opponent’s wargames started me considering 1980s and 1990s Cold War games. Fare like West End Games’ Air & Armor and Air Cav, were part of an entire genre of chit-and-board wargames covering a hypothetical Warsaw Pact invasion of the west. The only material I could find online referenced “Seven Days to the River Rhine,” a formerly classified Warsaw Pact military simulation exercise developed in 1979; it’s not clear if this was simply created as a war plan or gamed out in some form like a tabletop exercise. Beyond that I could only make assumptions based on my knowledge of Soviet Bloc nations and whether they used western wargames for training and analysis. But casting my net on social media linked me with a contact who lived under communism during that period. “During the history of the Polish People’s Republic — which lasted for around 50 years — there were not many board games at all, and strategic/war board games were even rarer. As far as I know, none of the known published games explored the idea of a war between the Warsaw Pact and the Western forces,” said Tomek Kreczmar, one of the key figures in the history of the Polish gaming industry and author of I Was a Geek in Communist Poland (Idea Ahead, 2023) and The Die Is Cast: The History of RPGs Around the World and in Poland (LM Publishing, 2024). “The reason for this was censorship, which blocked the publication of wargames — or almost all of them…. The reason for this was, at least according to a few Polish game historians, that the government was afraid that people might acquire real military knowledge, which could potentially lead to an insurrection.” Peering behind the Iron Curtain to find any information about either hobby or professional military games proves difficult. “Of course, this does not mean that the Warsaw Pact did not use wargame-like exercises,” Kreczmar said. “Unfortunately, however, no official documentation has come to light so far.”*

Ukranian teachers learn
the Ukraine 2022 wargame.

Ukraine 2022: Back in 2024 I wrote about Tom Jensen’s modern wargame Ukraine 2022 and how the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science was using it for its Defense of Ukraine course for high school students. Jensen has created several modern wargames. “I was lucky enough to be in touch with several military experts who helped me refine the games,” he said. “Some of these guys were amazing and would read through my rules and give me details like ‘This specific missile wasn’t used on Iraqi aircraft until 1983, you have it available from 1982 — please change that.’ Details that require a lot of research to get to.” Ukraine 2022 was an accessible and accurate enough simulation that Ukraine thought it a worthy tool to teach high school students some basics of battlefield tactics relevant to their current situation. The game is available to anyone from Wargame Vault...including Ukraine’s adversaries. Whether Russian forces used it to train officers or analyze Ukraine’s capabilities (and assumptions about Russian capabilities) remains doubtful, but not beyond the realm of possibility if this had been a more rigorously planned and supported operation. And even if Russia had used it, the technology and tactics have advanced so much in just a few years any intelligence advantage gained would be minimal. Of course, discerning whether any game made its way into the Russian military hierarchy faces the same obstacles as peering behind the Iron Curtain.

Security Risk?

Online discussions in the LinkedIn defense and simulations communities recently acknowledged how anyone can use open-source wargame simulation tools. In commentary on an article by Kevin Williamson about “Exploiting the Simulation Domain” William Kennedy-Long notes “Adversaries are already exploiting open-source simulation environments. Chinese and Russian actors are not only observing but emulating NATO doctrine.” In Williamson’s article he makes an observation noting “Wargames are no longer just training tools. They are collection environments.”

Does the availability of civilian wargames in the hands of adversaries pose a security risk? In our age of global communications and manufacturing commercial wargames can easily reach possible adversaries who might decide to spend resources playing and analyzing them (a big question given modern constraints on time and budgets). Certainly military personnel playing a game on their own could result in lessons learned from the experience on a personal level, but doesn’t occur on such a large scale as to affect an entire nation’s military doctrine and performance. The truly advantageous intelligence might come from games drawing on the latest information about technology and tactics...and those remain classified in official military institutions with security infrastructure to keep them secret.

All the great powers and many “middle” powers use more classified wargame simulations in the far more security minded defense sphere: tabletop exercises (TTXs), matrix games, and even more traditional board-and-chit-style wargames. Open-source, civilian-grade simulation wargames might emerge from these exercises and represent abstractions of real-world tactics and technology in their simulation; but they often remain limited to publicly available information and can prove out of date by the time they reach publication and distribution. This doesn’t invalidate them as training and analysis tools, just puts them at a slight disadvantage to more immediate, classified wargames based on intelligence governments protect behind official security protocols.

Is wargaming allowed in the war room?

I’ve considered how a relatively new and seemingly unreliable technique like wargaming seems to face acceptance penetrating the stolid bastions of society’s stereotypes to have any significant affect on outcomes when few people accept them as valid analytical tools. While wargaming in the professional military sphere (as we know it) really only coalesced in the early 19th century, it’s grown in fits and starts depending on national policy, military doctrine, and even personal influence. People remain suspicious of anything new and qualitatively unproven; bureaucratic institutions even more so. Despite recent academic and military tendencies to examine wargaming through a more analytical, professional lens, it seems they’re only slowly breaking into general acceptance.

Without having a copy to analyze myself, I’d expect Bae’s Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific to offer insight into orders of battle, methods of weapon deployment, unit endurance capabilities, and effective MDO strategies...including what we know or estimate about enemy capabilities. The scenarios also reveal the locations and situations we feel might prove pivotal in a near-future conflict, including the parameters and conditions under which these actions occur. No doubt any professional military analyst, friendly or adversarial, knows the significance of this unclassified information based on open-source intelligence (OSINT). Certainly more rigorous analysis of wargames corroborated with the overall intelligence landscape might reveal or confirm useful nuggets of information. Playing our wargames could train adversaries in both our operational tactics and our assumptions and opinions of various elements simulated in the game. This presents more of a problem when a game represents classified material more closely aligned with top-security realities of tactics and technology...a subject beyond most adventure gaming hobbyists.

Any model, and particularly wargames, abstracts reality to a playable form, representative of a situation and participants, but making many simplifications and assumptions about what’s important and how it all works together. Abstraction limits the scope of available information, leaving out or condensing many elements into playable game mechanics. Gleaning relevant, useful intelligence from wargames, both civilian and classified, provides only a small but significant part of the overall intelligence assessment about our adversaries, their intentions, possible operations, and capabilities. And if we’re worried about our adversaries playing our civilian wargames to analyze for intelligence, I take some comfort that our own military personnel and defense analysts are probably playing and analyzing any adversary wargames they acquire.

Information in games like Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific often consists of capabilities in the public realm, as open-source intelligence, publicly released materials, or unclassified or intentionally underestimated design specifications. These small, abstracted game tidbits might inform the larger picture...assuming military and political institutions take the time and effort to play, analyze, and accept their credibility; highly doubtful given a seemingly universal human bureaucratic proclivity for discounting or ignoring significant findings from dubious, as-yet unaccepted sources like wargames.

Caveat: I’m at best an informed generalist when it comes to professional military wargames, a small part of my overall familiarity with the adventure gaming hobby (with some deeper specializations from my past experience). I am not associated with the military or defense consultants, nor do I possess a security clearance. I see these game-related developments with implications in our real world and offer my opinions from the perspective of someone with a long history in the field of adventure gaming.

* In our correspondence Kreczmar provided an amazing wealth of insight into Polish gaming that may inspire me to explore in future Hobby Games Recce pieces.

“History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.”

— John le Carre