Origin
I started with Avalon Hill's PanzerBlitz and Squad Leader in the late 1970s. What held my attention was not nostalgia or collecting; it was planning what units would do, working through tactics, and seeing how a scenario made choices matter.
Practice
Planning
Deciding what units should do before contact, then adapting when conditions change.
Tactics
Understanding terrain, timing, force employment, risk, and second-order consequences.
Scenario design
Building decision environments where students face meaningful problems, not scripted answers.
Scenario-design method
A good training scenario offers different problem sets for the student to solve. My scenario design has been in the professional military education domain. I typically construct three problem sets:
Environmental
Terrain, weather, infrastructure, time, friction, and other conditions that shape choices.
Friendly
Capabilities, limitations, sustainment, command relationships, and internal coordination problems.
Enemy
Threat behavior, pressure, counters, timing, and action that forces staff decisions to matter.
Echelon and models
Depending on echelon, these problem sets may interact or appear in sequence. Models can help analyze design work, especially as they make patterns easier to compare, but they do not replace professional judgment.