The global future of wargaming in Lithuania

Ian Curtiss:

Pijus, thank you so much for joining here at the Risk Gaming Podcast. I'm super excited to chat with you today. So, I think we met in the UK the first time, well, I guess both times I think was at Connections UK, is that right?

Pijus Krūminas:

It's that order. Yeah, first Connections, making the connection, and then at Kings.

Ian Curtiss:

You gave a presentation that I just loved about wargaming, and kind of your theory of it. And so I want to dive into it, but first I want to give you the opportunity to explain kind of how you landed at wargaming, because I think you're at a really interesting place, career wise, to be so heavily involved with the wargaming community, given that you work at a school of business, and economics. So, I'm curious to hear your story to this.

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah, so indeed I did my bachelor, and master's studies in political science, and then I switched to economics for my PhD, and I've been teaching at a private business school. So, basically, we have management department, and economics finance part, and I've been teaching here since 2012, and I started more with the political science subject. And one of the thoughts I had is how to make the seminar activities more interesting, initially, because with time you see that getting readings through in time to discuss during the seminar with the majority, sometimes it can be quite challenging. And at the same time, I was teaching comparative politics through methods. So, that's around 2015, 2016 I was teaching through focusing on models. So, it's a little bit of mathematics, and so on. And sometimes those models don't necessarily come alive. They make sense once you solve it, you see how they work, but internalizing them might be challenging.

And at about the same time, I got hold of Phil Saban's book Simulating War where he discusses how he used wargaming to simulate battles, and so on, including some very simple examples of how you can use a pack of cars to simulate an Napoleonic battle, or something. And that gave me idea that maybe I could turn some of those models that we discussed in class into a game that we could play with students during the seminar. So, with the me talking part of the class, I would present the model, and how it looks like mathematically. And then in the seminar, these groups of students would play out with some adjustment of the same model. Since I've been a hobby gamer for a long time, since my teenage years, and maybe not so much wargamer at the time, but yeah, and then that's how it started.

Even now, if I meet the students whom I had eight, or so years ago, first thing they would remember is from the classes is the things they've played through rather than the things they learned properly, so to say. And so that started my use of small games to illustrate specific models we covered, whether it's a game theoretic model, or other kind of model. And then a couple of years later I've talked with the head of the program for economics, and politics, so basically undergraduate program in political economy. And I said maybe we could form a course focus specifically on wargaming as a methodology because the way the program is structured that it's very mathematics heavy from the very start. So, they cover a lot of different types of models from empirical econometric models to game theoretic models. So, wargaming in the sense could be this additional way, or additional tool in their portfolio on how to understand reality, and how to represent reality better.

Basically the same thing we did in class where they played out, but in the course they would become creators of the models of those interactive models. And so, we started that with that just before COVID hit. So, that was not the most fortunate time, because midway through the class we had to move to online, which was not the most convenient way if you want to use, because specifically analog games. We managed this through a help of vessel, some PowerPoint matrix game, et cetera. But it was, it was a bit more challenging. And since then we've been having this class every year with new students coming in, and learning it.

In addition, last September around the time we first met, we launched this wargaming lab at the university, also kind of a project activity that would give us a little bit more room to explore the potential of wargaming, for example, for research, or whether we could include in our research cycle just to cooperate with other institutions here who might need wargames to simulate whatever situations they would need to simulate, et cetera. So, we sort of expanded this all side with one seminar in one class, and then expanded over the years.

Ian Curtiss:

So, I teach some classes at university as well, and I'm at a business school, and I'm just so curious, and I'm just so excited by this whole thing of there's so many similarities in what we're interested in. And I'm curious from your student's perspective, how do you encourage them to model political economy as a game in particular? Because when we talk about these, we meaning the community, talk about these much more difficult to measure concepts, people get so jittery to gamify them, and to put hard numbers, or to put hard metrics on these things. So, I'm curious, how do you engage that with your students?

Pijus Krūminas:

So, one thing I do is basically I give them freedom in terms of the topic as long as it broadly fits within the political economy. So, they can go more into historical examples, or cases that they want to model something more present. And I think giving that freedom of selecting your theme that you want to model also makes them a bit more open, and turning that topic into the model. So, maybe it's not for everybody. Not everybody would necessarily like to work on a kinetic war game, or something purely for example, because of the topic, but then election, or something like that. Or we had a game, not this year, the year before we had a game for example, on privatization processes in the nineties in the Lithuania. After the Soviet Union collapses, the state has a lot of stuff it doesn't really need.

So, privatization takes place, and how it turns out, and to who are the winners, the losers, et cetera. So, there's this different types of topics, and I think students here in this case go with what they know they can work with, and what they want to work with. And I think that's important that I did not so far prescribe specific topics. That might change if we find sponsors, for example, who would like to have specific games come out of the course. And it might well come true someday, but so far since the students were working on the topics that they wanted to, they work what free, in terms of the subject matter. Now of course [inaudible 00:06:31] for selecting now how rigorous they are afterwards, that's not a question for discussion, but I think it worked out well in this case for example, and sometimes it leads to interesting collaboration.

So, this year one of the student groups worked on Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 15th, 16th century. So, one player plays the GDL, and the other players play Poland, Moscow, then the Teutonic order, and the Tartars, the Crimean Tartars. And then they went to the summer school in Germany that we had this year also on wargaming specifically. And they met some people there who were techs person related to one of the other nations, and so they could provide additional materials on the topic, et cetera. So, they sort of then spend out a little bit broader collaboration involving people from other countries to help develop those specific countries as they are represented in the game.

Ian Curtiss:

Oh, cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, question. So, you're at the school of business economics case studies are a common thing in business schools. And I always talk about how games a war game, or a risk game is taking a case study, and delving way deeper into it, because you actually get to create the case as you go through it. And I'm kind of curious to hear your take on that, specifically because you're based at a business school.

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah, I agree with you here, especially because war games are bespoke, so it has to have very specific subject matter because otherwise it becomes too abstract, and it becomes too abstract. It might still be fun to play, but the question is what kind of lessons you take out of it. Broadly, some sort of soft skill improvement, or something like that, but not something that relates to a very, very specific topic. So, I'm with you on that. I myself, I teach in the economics, and finance programs, so I have personally less to do with the case study part, which usually falls under more under management studies here. But what we did, I can give you an example. So, we have a project currently funded by the research council here on how businesses respond to a poly crisis environment. And so in spring we ran a couple of sessions with business, and public sector representatives specifically of potential to a poly crisis.

And that makes it a very, very specific case study, because it's Lithuania today, and what would happen if additional crisis overlap? And that I think what what's an important characteristic of that is that it's becomes not only a way to learn, for example, for the students, but also if you get practitioners in, they get to experience this case study knowing that this is not a case study that happened to somebody else. It's not a hypothetical case study, but it's something that can very realistically happen, and that they would need to react to. So, in that sense, I'm fully with you here that a war game, a specific bespoke war game provides this experiencing a case study rather than just filling out the answers that you have the question list, or whatever, but you experience, and most important, you get feedback from the system. And that you have to react to it again instead of, "Okay, that's my solution", and that's how I would approach it.

Ian Curtiss:

Yeah, exactly. That's always why I lean towards games versus cases was because the students are always kind of trying to guess what happened in real life. And then even after the class discussion, or after the individuals, however you structure the discussion, everyone makes their decision, but then the case inevitably goes to, "Okay, this is what actually really happened." And to your point, you never get feedback from the system, you never get that agent's sense of agency from your decisions that you make when you're studying the case study. Which brings me to the original thing that drew me towards your work, and your research was your presentation at connections a year ago. And I remember you defined wargaming in your presentation as the combination of game theory, agency theory, and relationship theory. And I just think that's just a beautiful way to describe it. So, I wanted to get you here to delve into that deeper for us.

Pijus Krūminas:

Thanks. First of all, that's a very kind of you. So, my basic idea here is a sort of wargaming stands at the crossroads of different social science methodologies. And I took for the example, divided them into two large parts. So, one group is specifically focused on determining the relationship between different factors, agents, or whoever. And that can be purely, or it's mostly purely empirical models such as, I don't know, regression models, econometric models, or system dynamics models. And the other part is where you talk the model's model decision making capacities. And so that's sort of less about defining the relationship, and the trend, but also making assumptions usually about the actual behavior. So, behavior modeling such as game theory where you would of course make assumptions about rationality, and so on, and so on to model specific situations, or agent-based models where you would give rules to individual agents, and then run a computer simulation for thousands, or hundreds of times, in terms of a simulation to find out whether you have emerging patterns, or not.

And wargaming can benefit from those different areas, or research. So, for example about emerging macro patterns from agent-based modeling. So, from low-level behaviors to going from micro level to macro level. In terms of game theory, it's about, again, of course it's more based on assumptions but about the potential relationships, actions, payoff structure, and so on. So, the structuring of the incentives, and everything, especially for example, if you talk about mechanism design. So, if in a war game you need to set up specific incentives, you can look at mechanism design literature, and how this works where you want policy to achieve a specific goal, and then you structure your policy based on that specific goal for example. And the other part is one thing is to make assumptions about how the world works. The other is we need to know how actually these things work. And that's where all of these relationship-focused models can contribute because there's whatever topic you take, there's likely plenty of literature discussing the empirical evidence of specific relationships that you can transfer into your world.

So, wargaming can borrow from all of those. And I think at the same time, wargaming can give to each of these different fields. So, it's not a unidirectional but more of a bit bidirectional relationship in that if you have a game theoretic model, a war game can allow you to test the assumptions, or behavior. So, what would the players making decisions consider rational, and what behaviors they would demonstrate? I have now a student who's writing her bachelor thesis using a game, and she'll basically run two versions of the same game. One will be a simultaneous game where you have to plan actions, both players have to plan actions for a longer time, and the other version where you move right after one another without pre-planning, and to see whether behavior changes, and in what ways just based on the micro-change in the rules, basically nothing else changes.

So, if we are coming back to the game theory models, that gives room to test the actual behavior, so that you don't have to rely on assumptions so much. In terms of agent-based models, again, agent-based models are based on rules set for the agents that then they get simulated. And here again you can see what actual behaviors people do. So, instead of giving the rules, you see based within the rules context, that is, so if you have a game, it has to have some rules at the same time you can see to what extent data, and the relationships that you define for a war game based on the empirical literature affects those player decisions. So, I think it's a little bit of a contribution to wargaming, but also contribution by wargaming as a modeling methodology that can help communicate with these different approaches, and among researchers working on the different methodologies.

Ian Curtiss:

And this is the beauty I find of this whole methodology in this community world of gaming as an analysis process. And this is part of the beauty, and the frustration is it's really hard to get hard data oftentimes from games in a practical manner without putting them into a computer, and just running them a thousand times. Like you said, nobody has the time to play a game a thousand times, right? So, I'm curious twofold. One, how do you leverage the games to achieve learning outcomes with your students in the political economy sphere? And then secondly, how do you sell the game upwards in the university? I know you're at a private university, which I expect is quite a different whatever incentive than maybe public universities do. I'm hearing both downward towards the students I guess, and upwards towards the administrators, and such.

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah, I think I'll start with the upwards. I think it's a bit of a shorter answer here. I think being at a private business school is more flexible in many ways. And at the same time we have competition from the public institutions, and that's also means competition on tuition, because mostly it's not too difficult to get a tuition-free education in Lithuania, I mean in the public institution. It's really not a big challenge. And then therefore that means that we have to compete in this environment where we have tuition against institutions that don't have it. And among other things such as teaching quality, research quality, et cetera, you have to have something that also sends out. So, I think wargaming is this thing that also makes us stand out nationally. And also there's simply not a lot still going in the civilian context generally in applying wargaming across civilian institutions, educational institutions.

And I think that can make us attractive. I think the university sees this, and I definitely cannot complain about the lack of support. So, there's definitely support for this, which I'm very grateful for. And if we're talking in the downwards direction. So, yeah, I think I had a comment that I like already some time ago at the end of the course when students said, "No, I hate board games, but these make sense." So, I think the important part is comes from demonstrating that a game can be more than just a fun way to spend time. It can still be a fun way to spend time, but at the same time teaching something. And this helps to connect the subject to the learning outcomes of the program in general, because it contributes directly to their modeling skills.

And that's what's expected, it contributes to critical thinking, and it contributes to independent thinking, and independent learning through the games making decisions, and then arguing why you made one, or another decision. And in the end, when they have to provide their own projects, it's not only the rule set that they have to provide, they also have to provide sort of designer notes where they explain why they made one, or another choice for the game mechanics. So, I think the important part is not so much telling guests going after briefly overviewing the course content, and the start are just going for a game to demonstrate that you can have a game that also teaches you a lot.

Ian Curtiss:

Well, you mentioned there I think is so interesting, the powerful part of it of design, game design is you said the rules, and the game notes. And so not only are you as a designer having to think about what are you modeling, and you have to create an argument, and a thesis behind your argument, but you're building actively, you're building strategic empathy as I call it, for what are the decisions that people, and individuals have to make in these scenarios. And so not only are you thinking about the policy paper of what is this situation, what is the scenario, what are the things going on, understanding the trends, so on, and so forth. But then you have to put yourself in the shoes of decision makers, and say, "So, what are the decisions that people make in these moments?"

And that's a totally different outcome, and a totally different service that you provide to player instead of a reader, it's the player they get to get both the analysis of the trends, and the policy side of it, but then also the actual decision making process, which I just think is so cool. I'm curious, do your students see that that way, or they're all, I imagine undergraduates, and so how does it play out for the undergrads?

Pijus Krūminas:

One of the things we discuss, actually, when we play even from the very start is whom you are you representing in the game? And do you get the perspective of who you are? And basically when they start working on their own games, that's one of the first questions that they have to answer. So, who exactly are the players? Because knowing that question shows you what decision space you can have, what goes outside of the player control, and what is under the player control. If you don't answer that question, who are you as a player, or basically as you said as the decision maker, then you can have a game. But the question is what will it show, and what will it simulate? So, by putting your limits on whom you represent, it might be something quite broad like the government, it's like the big G.

It's not something too specific but still allows you to define it, because that means that the game will be in relation to other actors that interact with the government. So, you are not, for example, looking at internal divisions, and so on coalition building, or on the other hand you're going to go to a different level if the modeling the same topic, you look at individual members of the cabinet, and how then they interact. But I think that making distinction who the player is, and who different players are, I think that is an important part in making them understand that the game is about a decision-maker, and the more we want the game to simulate a specific situation, the clearer we have to be who the player is. Coming back to your previous question, when you asked about the upwards, actually we had an interesting talk today, and the university an upwards talk so to say.

And I think one also thing that came through quite strongly was the expected impact that it could have on the society in terms of education, and making decision-making better, and also working with different sectors to help them make better decisions, either through participating in games, or giving them skills that they need to learn the game. So, I think there's also now an identification of these activity with longer-term outcomes, and that outcomes that are outside of the university, and that are broader spillovers in the society, in the sectors that we work with. And I think that's also, well not think based on today. I mean it's clear that it's also seen as this sort of an activity that also create a common good.

Ian Curtiss:

So, before we wrap up your students experience, so I know you ran one of the games that I designed the EV games, and I want to ask about that, but I'm also curious, what are the biggest surprises you've seen from your own students, and the games that they've designed? What are some examples of really, because I imagine you get some really interesting insights, and surprising models from the student body.

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah, so that's a great question. One thing that stands out is the variety of topics is I don't think we've ever had repeating topic that would be chosen. So, certainly, you see the different interests come out of the designs, and other times it can be just integration of the games they know well, and transforming those mechanics into something else like I mentioned, the game on privatization, how they use some of the mechanics, for example, from ticket to ride totally makes sense mechanically, thematically in their own games. So, these connections, because wargaming is more of a niche hobby in terms of commercial hobby gaming here than... I mean everywhere it's more of a niche here, definitely due to the history, and everything, therefore the experience of students to modern games is often limited. So, they know the main ones they do like playing them, and then how they transform this knowledge of the games that they play more often into the games.

It's really interesting. Or sometimes we've had a game on gerrymandering, and it was a very, very mathematical game, so a totally different approach to what I would expect, and it worked. You added some randomization elements, and so on so that it's not a game that you just solve sitting together your teams, but it was very, very, very mathematical, very specific, very precise. Nothing outside of the model, no Chrome nor anything. It's just you sit here, and you draw the boundaries. I think this first, yeah, so the topics, the different approaches either coming from purely mathematical stuff for more of a narrative structure, a game that provides more narrative, and also this influences that you see of more traditional board games, or more common board games, and how they get transformed to help the students do their game.

Because I know that from the games we play, what is seen is that the ones that we start with usually also has the largest impact on their own designs, because they start thinking already what to do. And so you play something, and then it carries over the mechanics from those, and et cetera. So, it's interesting how these early games can definitely have the impact on the final models that the student game presents.

Ian Curtiss:

That's beautiful. What a great example. That's just such a great story of how, in general, humans we're limited by the models that we are given. We only know how to apply the models that we're given. I don't know if you read Playing With Reality by Kelly Clanson?

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah, I have.

Ian Curtiss:

Yeah, beautiful book, and she talks a lot about this, but there you have it right there in the classroom. That's too perfect.

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah. And then yeah, we did your games. One great thing about it is that most of these games are still about war in one way, or another. Most of the games we play are about war. And in a political economy class, I mean, that's fine, that relates to politics especially that has some economic elements, but it gives a sort of a narrow view of the field in general. It's very good to learn different mechanics, and so on. Everything is fine. But having a game that focuses specifically on political economy that's away from the military issues gave the students a great opportunity to see, again, how games can be applied to these different contexts. Contexts that are very current, like electric vehicles in China where they can take roles that are more different than from one another than in most of the modern board games, war games that we play, were still, even if it's a symmetric, the players are somewhat comparable.

In the case of your game, you know what, you have the different manufacturers, you have the government, you have consultants, if I remember correctly, and everything. And that puts them in the very different roles, including in the roles that they might start interning for, like consulting, internships, manufacturing company, internships in management, and so on. That's something that they might start doing this year, or the next year, or so on. So, that's also very, very close to them. That's very close to the field that they study, and it also shows a different topic than the majority of games that we use in the classroom.

Ian Curtiss:

Awesome. And don't be too kind. So, what broke in the game? I'm curious, this is always part of the fun of running games, and so forth. What was the difficulty, and where did the game break for you guys? Or did it break? Maybe it didn't, but I'm sure it did.

Pijus Krūminas:

No, it worked well. I think the consultants were doing quite well in terms of providing advice, and getting the influences that they need to, to carry out the services. I think I might have messed up the calculation, or two towards the end in the Excel file that's more on me, but it didn't hurt the game flow, or it didn't hurt the narrative that emerged from the game. And I think one important thing generally when going into this type of game, you can be a sort of rules enforcer, and you have to let everybody know that it might very well be that you will make a mistake, or two in the rules, and that's totally fine. We're not here to do a letter perfect play, and so on. But no, the game worked well. I think initially you need a little bit of a warmup for a round, or two because that's not the kind of game we mostly play.

It's a little bit different. You also, especially you need a lot of engagements, you need the players to find out whom they need to work with together, and what they need to trade with each other in order to improve their position, et cetera. So, no, it went well, and I think that it opened a different perspective. It opened a perspective into a different topic, and also a different approach to most of the games we have played by the time later. We also get to play some matrix game scenarios again to show the variety. I like to have variety in the class. I think that's important. So, they don't also get stuck on a board game as a classical standard in rigorous board game, rigid board game as a board game, you have a way more variation in terms of what it is, and this example work well plus the topic is very relevant, and very current. So, also helps to get attention, and also that's something that they've heard about, and if they've heard about it that's easier. It becomes easier for them to engage with the topic.

Ian Curtiss:

Good. So, I always talk about the games that I make, and the research that I do, and stuff is about, I call gray zones of society, where the boundaries are moving in society, and political economy being a very active area where this is happening. But gray zone is oftentimes talked about in war activities. My expertise is in China heavily, and so everyone talks about China's gray zone activities, but Russia of course does a lot of gray zone activities, and you're in Lithuania just very close to Ukraine. I just was looking at a map the other day that said if you are in Italy, you are as close to the war in Ukraine as Alabama is to North Carolina in the US. Admit, I didn't see, or no Lithuania in that map, but certainly you're even closer probably like Washington DC perhaps, or Maryland. But there's a long history of gray zone activity in Lithuania, and the Baltic states, and so forth.

I'm curious from a wargaming perspective, so much wargaming is about traditional kinetic war. One thing that we're trying to do with the Lux is just talk about all the different risks involved, which includes such a broader definition of concerns that people have instead of war games, and winning a war, it's risks, and mitigating risks, whether that could be security risks that might be monetary, fiscal human life risks. It could be all sorts of things that we model in our games. So, I'm just kind of curious, you're pursuing this cutting edge field of wargaming in political economy on the cutting edge geopolitically of so many geopolitical issues today. Yeah, I'm just kind of curious, how is this all playing out for you in your field, and how you see the field being applied there in Lithuania? You're just on the cutting edge of so many things, and it's so interesting to see them intersect.

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah. That's a very good question, and I think that's also where it's the key benefit of wargaming, or risk gaming is at the crossroads with a lot of uncertainty with a broad range of scenarios that could happen. I mean, if you have a kinetic war game, it's still something that you could also reasonably analyze using other methods, because you have a lot of data, and so on. Of course you have new technologies et cetera, but it's also something that it's easy, not easy, but it's possible to analyze using other means. The problem with the gray zone situations is that you don't. You don't have the data. You don't know, okay, so these are suddenly the cables getting cut all across the Baltic Sea bed don't know. So, okay, how do you stop that? What could be the reactions, et cetera. So, it's a gray zone both in terms of its ability to say that it's not my fault by some one of the countries to the east of us, but it's also gray, in terms of we don't know how different responses could work.

And I think that's where the risk gaming, or wargaming allows to test out these different strategies in a safe, and relatively cheap environment where you can use the experts to play out this, or that scenario, and see it doesn't mean that it would necessarily be the case that this scenario wouldn't realize scenario would unfold in such a way then no, but it allows you at least to explore the possibilities, and explore the bad, bad parts that could come out of the actions, or through the lack of different actions like the lack of clear stance on specific issues, and so on. And I think, [inaudible 00:32:07] for example, I did in spring when we had this many polycrisis simulation is exactly focusing on these non-kinetic effects. So, I think I can tell that we had an event that was, first it was tariff related hit on the economy, or the local economic agents.

Then it was a increased presence of Russian, and Belorussian troops along the Kaliningrad, and Belarus border of which was not in our simulation. It was not spilling over to a hot conflict, but it affected investment climate, and attractiveness of the country for investors, and also selling this et cetera, and so on. So, we didn't do go into this kinetic war phase, we just looked at what could happen otherwise that would affect the economy, so that the participants could try to look into, "Okay, so what could be the possible options, and what could be the possible strategies in these cases?" And I think it's important to play out the potential kinetic scenarios, and there are tools for that, but I think that is a very, very important part of the use of wargaming, or risk gaming is exactly that covering of hybrid threats, and hybrid attacks, and everything that's related to that.

One reason being that we simply don't have enough data to find a good solution for that rather than just exploring. The other thing is that there can be a broad variety. So, if you have a blue versus red kind of game, you give the red the creativity to go off with new things, not just by looking at what's already happening, but giving them space to explore different strategies like the spring of the last year when for several weeks schools, and some of the higher education institutions would receive calls that there's a bomb planted at a school.

Ian Curtiss:

Gracious.

Pijus Krūminas:

I imagine it's a dozen schools suddenly getting parents getting their kids because of the actuation. And that happens day after day after day, checking the response of the different institution, et cetera. Before it happened, I mean I'm not sure, maybe somebody did consider these scenarios, or not, but playing a game of blue versus red would open the possibilities for the red to be creative in coming up with the scenarios, and making the life difficult for the blue in the game, hopefully making life easier once you are out of the game because you know the different ranges, and different options that the opponent, the enemy would have.

And I think coming back to the second part of your question on the regional awareness of wargaming, I think it's increasing, I'm not necessarily talking specifically about Lithuania, but talking around the Baltic Sea for example, I know if you noticed last time we were at Connections, there were a lot of people from Sweden, for example, from the different institutions, but the Polish are organizing their first wargaming conference in October, and also want to sort of get people from the region from Central Eastern Europe to come, and join it. So, I think there is this general awareness of the method is increasing, and I hope this spills over into picking it up more, and more to analyze these different types of threats. Or I think one other important example could be obvious, very specific question that could be analyzed is the rules of engagement. What do you do if a single drone crosses your border has recently happened in Lithuania in July twice.

So, what do you do with that? Do you engage, or not? Under what conditions if you have little green men appearing somewhere. So, what are the rules of engagement in those cases? Because at the time, making decisions might already be too late. You have to be prepared for that, and I think using a risk game can allow you to explore that range of rules of engagement. There was this Operation Bolabank, it's a solo game which models exactly the similar question of the rules of engagement. It's in 1994, it's in Yugoslavian wars, and I think it's about the Danish forces that have to answer the question. So, what our rules of engagement, and what do we do if we're getting shot at et cetera. So, of course it's a commercial game so it's more rigid in its rules, but if you turn the same topic into a more open professional game adjudicated game within a more open decision space, that could be a very important question to analyze using war games because that can allow you to test different reactions that the opponent could have.

Ian Curtiss:

To wrap things up, two questions. What five, or so games would you recommend for a wargaming class, and then specifically what are your favorite economic, or political economy games?

Pijus Krūminas:

Okay, so the first question I can answer with what I always start with, and it's the Shores of Tripoli by Kevin Bertram at Fort Circle Games, because it looks beautiful for the first engagement that's very important, and also it structures the narrative well. So, it's a topic that my students, well, I'm not sure if anybody properly knew anything about it, including me before I got the game about the Tripoli Pirates, and Tripolitania, and how the US got involved there. Despite that, the narrative flows so easily through the game that it gets... It's really easy to engage students, plus it also has a lot of dice rolls, it helps build excitement about the potential outcomes, and especially if you get 20, or 50, so dice, and no successes, and so on. So, it has a lot of feeling, and emotion in it. What then I like to play is Joint Company by Karl Werle.

Because it allows posing interesting questions because first of all, it's sort of the topic is economic, and you are basically shareholders running a company, in this case East India company, but it also has all these questions hiding behind their players action. So, what are you actually doing in India? Of course you bought a nice retirement house for somebody in your family, but how it relates to the events that are happening in India, and those, as you know are definitely not the good events. So, your actions can have very negative consequences. The game award system incentivizes you to prefer your own personal gain even over the companies. And I think this leads to interesting questions that can then be discussed. They also always use Maria from the history games. It's a light war game, but to get the point to point movement, battle mechanics, and how you can use cards as a first introduction goes well.

I also used for a couple of years already, I used the British Way, one of the coin games with Steven Rangazes, and I think it works very well because we play four scenarios, there are four games in parallel, two games of two scenarios, basically. So, in total four games there's sort of coin light in that sense that they don't need four players, there are two player games, so maybe students get to play in teams, et cetera. But what helps there is that the model is very... It's easy to see the model, but the game models, what are the different relationships, and so on. So, I think that the game works really well as this illustration. And because we run two scenarios, we can then compare. So, if the core system is similar, you have some modifications, and how they can help you tell a different story, whether it's Cyprus, or Malaya, or one of the other scenarios.

So, you have the same core, you have two different stories that have the context, and with the same model tweaking it. Steven does a great job at showing how these different situations unfold. And this year we also played Churchill, which I think added this diplomatic element to the games that we explored because the war is very abstracted there. You advance towards Berlin, or you advance towards Japan, but that's, or invest there. But a lot is going through the cards where you send one, or the other guy to deal, and negotiate over different issues. So, I think that's based on the recent years, but that was it. Maybe two more mentions, if I may.

Ian Curtiss:

Let's do it.

Pijus Krūminas:

One thing, when I have a larger group, for example, I sometimes have, in Lithuania we have a paramilitary organization called the Rifleman Union. It is civilians, but they do cooperate with other state institutions, and there's a youth branch. So, they invited me to talk about wargaming, and we have 60 teenagers, and you can't run a physical game with that situation. So, I took Take That Hill also by Phil Saban, and then the Fight Club International released it, but I made it a PowerPoint version of it. So, I can easily move stuff, and I ask them to vote using Slido, because basically it narrows down to five choices per your unit, so it's easy to vote basically. Then we run this once, or twice, and I mean after return you internalize how it goes, then I show how it would look like if you map out all of the relationships.

So, basically map the model out, and it's so confusing suddenly something that you learned easily to get within one, or two turns. So, that is a good illustration. And also this year with my students, I played Dan Bullock's, Gods Will Have Blood, it's about the French Revolution where it's a solo game. So, the players also, all the students acted as that sort of voted for what decisions they would make. And you are the judge during the French reign of terror, and during the French Revolution, or the magistrate, or whoever you are. And so you have to either condemn somebody's proposed to condemn, or not, or somebody to say, "Okay, they're innocent", and we made it a bit ceremonial.

So, I asked, gave students cubes of different colors, and specifically add them to put them into the bag as their own votes, et cetera. So, it gave us a bit of a narrative experience, but I think it also worked well to show how the game can also be emotional, and how it can tell a story of you as an individual, and as a player in a game, in any kind of a game, actually, you get pushed by the system. So, sometimes you would want to break, but the system forces you to do something that you maybe would like not to do, et cetera. So, I think that was also an interesting experience. So, sorry for expanding a bit more on this question.

Ian Curtiss:

There's nothing like the French Revolution to educate people on how systems can push you towards terrible ends.

Pijus Krūminas:

Yeah.

Ian Curtiss:

Well, Pijus, this is fantastic. I so appreciate this, and love the conversation, and you dove so deeply into so many different aspects of this. Thank you so much for joining us.

Pijus Krūminas:

Thank you. And I hope you to catch at one of the other wargaming events, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

Ian Curtiss:

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I hope so as well.

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