Global Reflections: Insights from Wargaming Conference

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Focus: SPA Perspectives

Categories: Capabilities, Modeling, Simulation, and Analysis

Global Reflections: Insights from the Inaugural Wargaming Conference in Poland

Connecting Professionals through Wargaming

Author: Ian Brown, Wargame Analyst, Group W, an SPA Company

Alexandria, VA | October 28, 2025

On October 14-15, 2025, I was privileged to attend the inaugural conference on “Wargaming as an Analytical and Training Tool in Military and Civilian Environment,” held at the General Tadeusz Kościuszko Military University of Land Forces (AWL) in Wrocław, Poland. In some ways, the genesis of the conference itself, along with my attendance, was the result of one of the fun quirks of the professional wargaming community: if you meet one member of the community, you’re only one or two degrees removed from knowing all of them.

In his recap of the event, conference organizer Major Łukasz Wójciak (Head of the Department of Territorial Defense, AWL) observed that the idea for this event came from his visit to Quantico early in 2025, along with the participation of AWL cadets in the “Commandant’s Cup” wargaming tournament run by Marine Corps University (MCU). As it happened, his AWL cadets did so well in the tournament that they made it to the championship phase, which was held in person at the Modern Day Marine (MDM) exposition in late April 2025. Coincidentally, Group W, an SPA Company, and I had wargame demonstration tables at MDM as well.

While his cadets fought their way to a top-three finish in the tournament, Major Wójciak talked with me and many other professional wargame exhibitors demonstrating their games at MDM. He left MDM with a peek behind the curtain on the extensive contours of professional wargaming within the US military and across NATO partners.

With Poland on NATO’s front line, Major Wójciak was keenly aware that any crisis with Poland’s unfriendly neighbors could unfold quickly, and the Polish Armed Forces would need to be ready. Wargaming could be a vital tool for enhancing that readiness—and so the seeds of the conference were planted, to leverage the expertise of the professional wargaming world to ensure that Poland and her partners and allies were as ready as they could be should a future crisis involving all of them arise. And with the contacts from MDM, that expertise was only a degree of separation away.

An International Assembly of Expertise

Throughout the summer the conference came together. I was invited to take part both in a discussion panel and to demonstrate the wargame I displayed at MDM, which I had developed as a personal project. The conference agenda was an impressive “who’s who” of professional wargaming across NATO—aside from representation from the Polish military itself, speakers and panelists came from King’s College London, the Center for Naval Analyses, French Future Combat Command, the NATO Joint Force Training Center, the Royal Danish Defence College, RAND Europe, Lithuania’s ISM University of Management and Economics, and private companies such as the UK-based Matrix Pro Sims and France’s Pytharec.

The representation from across Poland’s military and civilian government was itself a statement of commitment to using wargaming for their armed forces. Attendees came from virtually every branch and specialty of the Polish Armed Forces as well as offices of the federal government, including a panelist from the Chancellery of the Polish Prime Minister. This was serious business for them—sufficiently serious to be worth devoting several days of their time to hear from the many different wargaming experts present.

Highlights from Dynamic Panels

The conference panels were spread across two days, with topics including:

Wargaming as an Analytical and Training Tool in Military and Civilian Environments

New Horizons of Wargaming—Competences, Practice, Future

The Modern Process of Wargame Design

Wargames as an Implementation Tool for Innovative Technological and Tactical Solutions for Modern Armed Forces

Wargaming as an Analytical and Training Tool in Military and Civilian Environments
New Horizons of Wargaming—Competences, Practice, Future
The Modern Process of Wargame Design
Wargames as an Implementation Tool for Innovative Technological and Tactical Solutions for Modern Armed Forces

The panel I was asked to speak on was “The Use of Commercial Wargames in the Training Process.” My fellow panelists and I discussed how we used commercial games to fulfill military training and educational goals. Our vibrant talk highlighted contrasts between playability and realism, how to adapt games for military learning objectives that were not part of the game’s design philosophy, and what games each of us had used for our respective military audiences (my background for game application was largely U.S. military services, with the bulk of that time being supporting the Marine Corps’ educational schools at MCU).

In my segment, I also drew from my professional background to discuss the warfighting theories of Marine Corps maneuver warfare doctrine and the contributions of American military thinker John Boyd to that doctrine. A goal of using wargames for military training and education is enhancing the players’ decision-making skills—how could wargames be used to exercise and challenge players’ OODA (observation-orientation-decisions-action) loops?

Networking Opportunities at the Wargame Expo

It so happened that I was able to show one possible way to integrate OODA loops into wargaming at the conference’s wargame exposition. As mentioned above, part of my invitation to the conference was to demonstrate a game I developed in my personal time, which I designed to quite literally “gamify” maneuver warfare doctrine and put a tactile OODA loop on the game table. I had great conversations with members of Polish, British, French, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Finnish, and German defense forces on my game.

But equally illuminating were the other game designers present at the expo. Established companies like Center for Naval Analyses and Matrix Pro Games had their wares on display, as did several other unique European companies.

Scaling Collaborative Creativity Across NATO

This jam-packed event left a lasting impression on me regarding the scope and scale of applied wargaming across NATO partners. A comment from one panelist stood out: NATO nations “need to standardize data but not creativity.”

The panelist explained that common formats for data inputs, outputs, and reporting could allow wargame results to be effectively compared, shared, and understood. Simultaneously, an open architecture that allowed for innovative designs without getting crushed by the boot of standardized bureaucracy would maximize creativity and collective improvements.

As this conference made clear, virtually every NATO country is implementing wargaming in some fashion—connecting those efforts under a common architecture will make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The demand signal for such an architecture is there. Attending events such as this helps build the picture of what human and organizational assets underlie the demand signal and which could be leveraged for a future common framework.

A Professional Milestone

On a personal level, it was a great honor to be invited to represent the United States on the presentation stage among our partners and allies, and I look forward to sharing ideas and developments with the new NATO wargaming connections that came out of this conference.

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