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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 01

This is one of Megagame Makers megagames, designed by Jim Wallman and played in Anerley Town Hall in south London. The Invasion from Mars website has the game rules and the map as well as some background info on the downloads page. I played the part of General Stanley Buck, a loyal and competent commander of the Democratic Republic of Cydonia's Army Group West (AGW) (in reality about Corps strength, three two brigade armoured divisions plus air and sea components with appropriate logistics support). (details of some typical units) At the game start AGW is already committed and has captured the Eastern end of the West Continent (link to map). This gives a firm jumping off point for the next phase of the offensive and the military balance shows that AGW slightly outnumbers the New Cydonia Colony (NCC) forces. In…
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Another side of the COIN

I ran my game of being an Afghan farmer "The Other Side of the COIN" at the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group's (CLWG) annual conference yesterday afternoon. This was its second outing, you can see my onside report from the first run here. Since the last outing the game has developed further to address some of the comments that the players made then. In particular I had a set of individual objective cards to drive some behaviours and give the players something to focus on that was essentially different each time the game gets played (and also makes the farmers all slightly different from each other, there is a danger that they all do the same thing). The other advantage of the cards is that it stops a purely economic rationality setting in immediately and just converting to grow poppy (because the…
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FiReControl’s Failure

The Public Accounts Committee have opined that the FiReControl project wasted £469 million pounds. A sobering report, all the more so if you were one of the people that worked on the project. How could things go so expensively wrong? I read the whole report from the PAC  see if I could work out from their evidence how the failure occurred, and what I could learn from it. Largely I understand why it happened, and I can see some of the things that I was responsible for mentioned positively in the NAO & PAC reports. It just wasn't quite enough to make it work. Fortunately (for me) I wasn't involved in the procurement and so I don't believe that I was directly responsible for the problems that occurred (for example not having a decent contract with appropriate milestones), or managing the…
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What you missed at CLWG in September 2011

Three interesting games and a load of cake! We started with Peter Merritt's 1814 political game which looked at how Napoleon's Marshals dealt with the oncoming defeat of France and the transfer of power. Following that Andrew Hadley brought out his game about the Athenian invasion of Sicily. We then finished with Rob Cooper's game about the seizure of the Mecca Grand Mosque in 1979, complete with head-dress. 1814 and all that Peter put on this game to try out some ideas about how you could run a game about the decline of the French First Empire. The players were mostly Napoleon's Marshals (although Jim Wallman was Napoleon). There was an interesting mechanic of collecting cards to show which of the likely candidates for ruler of France you could evidence support for (five in total, including Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Bernadotte, Napoleon's…
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Strategy Study Notes

I am currently (Aug 2011) studying module B301 "Making Sense of Strategy" with the Open University. This is a final year (third year, level 3) undergraduate module which forms a core part of their BA in Business Studies. I have an exam in mid-October 2011, so I thought that rather than use index cards (as I did when I did my at the University of Glasgow (1989-1992)) I would stick all the core ideas and other facts to cram for the exam into some wiki pages, which I could then edit and refine much more easily. Also I will probably then convert all it into something easily printable to re-read as many times as possible prior to the exam. So here  are my Strategy Study Notes. Related articles Library Services Open Day - Thursday 11th August 2011 " University of Glasgow Library () Stakeholder Management…
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