The Invisible Faction: Designing Wargames That Account for Actors Who Refuse to Play
How to design wargames that surface tail risks created by actors who opt out, obstruct, or simply go silent when your scenario expects them to engage.
E. Sokolov Uncertainty Game
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Designing wargames for what the models miss.
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The Corrupted Source: Designing Wargames That Spread Bad Intelligence Upstream
How to design wargames where a single compromised intelligence source quietly poisons every downstream decision before players realize what happened.
E. SokolovThe Surplus Expert: Designing Wargames That Survive Too Much Subject-Matter Knowledge in the Room
When wargame rooms fill with domain experts, play collapses into consensus. Here's how to design against it before the first move.
E. SokolovThe Borrowed Enemy: Designing Wargames That Resist Generic Adversary Models
How wargame designers can break the habit of recycling last cycle's adversary model and build opponents who actually surprise players.
E. SokolovThe Inherited Playbook: Designing Wargames That Expose Doctrine Copied From the Last War
How to design wargames that force players to discover when their inherited doctrine is solving a problem that no longer exists.
E. SokolovThe Rigged Autopsy: Designing Post-Game Reviews That Actually Change How People Play Next Time
Most wargame after-action reviews confirm what players already believe. Here's how to design a debrief that surfaces what the game actually revealed.
E. SokolovThe Poison Pill: Designing Wargames That Test Whether Players Will Sacrifice Short-Term Wins to Prevent Long-Term Catastrophe
Learn how to design wargames that force players to choose between near-term tactical gains and preventing catastrophic downstream failures.
E. SokolovThe Decoy Briefing: Designing Wargames That Test Whether Players Actually Read the Intelligence
How to design wargame intelligence packets with embedded decoys and signal traps that reveal whether players process information or just act on prior beliefs.
E. SokolovThe Mimic Problem: Designing Wargames That Detect Adversaries Who Learn Your Playbook
How to design wargames and red-team exercises that surface the danger of adaptive adversaries who study your doctrine and exploit its patterns.
E. SokolovThe Empty Chair: Designing Wargames That Account for Absent Decision-Makers
How to design wargames that stress-test the decision gaps created when key actors are unavailable, incapacitated, or simply out of the loop.
E. SokolovThe Unreliable Clock: Designing Wargames That Break When Time Pressure Is Fake
Most wargames treat time as a neutral backdrop. Here's how to design scenarios where deadlines are uncertain, compressed, or actively manipulated by adversaries.
E. SokolovThe Witness Problem: Designing Wargames That Capture What Players Know But Never Say
How to design wargames that extract tacit knowledge from subject-matter experts before it disappears into the fog of play.
E. SokolovThe Fog Machine: Designing Wargames That Degrade Information Quality Mid-Scenario
How to design wargames that systematically corrupt, delay, and contradict player intelligence so tail events can surface before they happen in reality.
E. SokolovPhantom Stabilizers: Designing Wargames That Remove the Assumptions Keeping Your Model From Breaking
Most wargames never break because hidden stabilizing assumptions prevent it. Here's how to find and remove them before the real world does.
E. SokolovThe Competence Trap: Designing Wargames That Expose Expert Blind Spots
How to design wargame roles and adjudication rules that turn deep subject-matter expertise into a liability, surfacing the blind spots experts can't see.
E. SokolovThe Loyal Opposition: Designing Wargame Red Teams That Don't Secretly Want to Lose
Most red teams are unconsciously rigged to fail. Here's how to design adversarial roles that actually threaten your Blue Cell assumptions.
E. SokolovThe Frozen Clock: Designing Wargames That Detect Institutional Lag Before It Becomes Catastrophe
How to design wargames that surface the gap between an institution's mental model and reality, before that lag triggers a catastrophic failure.
E. SokolovSilent Assumptions: How to Design Wargames That Force Players to Surface Hidden Doctrine
Most wargames fail not because players make wrong decisions, but because they never articulate the assumptions driving those decisions. Here's how to fix that.
E. SokolovNegative Space: Designing Wargames Around What Players Refuse to Consider
How to design wargames that force players to engage with the options, threats, and outcomes they've already decided are impossible.
E. SokolovGhost Moves: Designing Wargames That Let Actors Defect From Their Own Doctrine
Most wargames lock players into historical doctrine. Here's how to design for the moment an actor stops following the script.
E. SokolovCascade Blindness: Designing Wargames That Stress-Test Interdependent Systems
Most wargames model systems in isolation. Here's how to design exercises that surface cascade failures before they happen in the real world.
E. SokolovDead Reckoning: How to Design Wargames That Punish Overconfident Intelligence Estimates
Learn how to build wargame mechanics that expose the hidden cost of overconfident intelligence estimates before they fail in the real world.
E. SokolovThe Umpire Dilemma: When Human Adjudicators Break Your Wargame
How umpire bias and poor adjudication design can kill anomaly detection in wargames before it starts.
E. SokolovBuilding Cassandra Players: How to Design Wargame Roles That Predict Correctly But Get Ignored
Learn to design wargame roles that surface overlooked risks through players who predict correctly but lack institutional credibility.
E. SokolovMillennium Challenge 2002: When Red Cell Innovation Broke the Rules
How Lt. General Paul Van Riper's unconventional tactics in MC02 exposed critical blind spots in military wargaming assumptions.
E. SokolovThe Game You Can't Rehearse
Why most wargames fail to surface the events that matter, and what design choices change that.
E. Sokolov