Playtests before March 2026

As part of the SPS playtest evenings I ran a very small version of the intended scenario on Discord, with about ten or so players.

There’s a rough description of what I learned out of the most recent playtest below. This is written to enable me to “think out loud” and “work in public”, and should be treated accordingly.

( Also I wrote up some of the outcomes from a much earlier session on this on the Chestnut Lodge Wargaming Group blog )

Lessons learned:

From having three teams play at three “levels”:

The playtest evening had three different teams playing at three different “levels”:

  • The UK Government, just at an extremely high level, two or three players making decisions on behalf of the UK government on what actions to take, and what aid to provide where. These decisions would be made with having one eye on long term consequences and choices, such as whether to rehouse everyone on the interior, or to somehow clear the flooded areas and rebuild that infrastructure.

  • Organised Crime, a relatively small group of criminals with pre-established connections to each other. If I remember correctly some were inside the affected area, and some were outside.

  • Property Protection Vigilantes, a group of displaced people with the aim of protecting their homes and communities during the disaster. Consisting of about 20 to 150 households, with a ragtag collection of small boats, and home-made or scavenged weapons of any kind, or legally owned shotguns. This group would be asked to pick a location on the “new coast”, from which members would commute from to patrol their former homes. Their new location would be no more than two miles away from their original town or village.

Having three different teams that effectively work at three different levels was interesting and useful, and as always I’m grateful to the playtesters for taking part in what was a relatively experimental format.

This outcome helped convince me this is definitely an asynchronous game. For me an “asynchronous game” is one that isn’t played as a single event but it something players do while they get on with the rest of their lives. Say a game played over email, or played over Discord - players get the results of the previous turn, and are then given, for example, two weeks to submit orders for the next turn. This means they can adapt playing the game around the existing commitments in their life, and it gives them a great deal of choice about how much effort the game needs - rather than needing to be in a specific real world or virtual location, and dedicating all of their attention to that all the time. Also there’s a lot of evidence for people having better ideas, and getting more out of studying or researching something, if they’re given time to dwell on the subject, or go off and do something else. Just like real life the players will have time to research a location or a technology if they want, or can have that “shower thought” about what to do next - which is far less likely in a more intense, and far shorter, traditional wargame experience.

Being even more ambitious, the turn length, both in how long players are given to submit their orders, and how much in-game time those orders are meant to cover - might be decided dynamically. For example, if the game usually has orders to cover one in-game month every couple of weeks, a particularly fraught in-game situation might mean players have only one week to submit orders for the next turn, but those orders will over cover the next three days; or maybe a particularly calm situation might mean players still have the standard two weeks, but their orders would cover three months rather than one month.

( I’ve taken part in a game before that worked on a one-to-one relationship between in-game time and real time, with no ability to schedule orders - so if the ideal time for your attack ships to launch is 5am, then you need to get up at 5am. It’s an interesting idea to experience once, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and I don’t think it adds anything of use to serious or recreational gaming )

From the players’ actions:

A summary of the notes I made, in approximate chronological order for the three teams:

UK Government:

  • Call a COBRa meeting.
  • Get all of the homeless survivors into emergency accomodation
  • Start planning for how to deal with all the larger issues:
    • health, finding more permanent homes, disease, power loss, supply disruption.
    • Water supply is now contaminated with saltwater and sewage.
    • The flooded area is full of bodies.

Organised Crime:

  • As the area is difficult to police, petty theft would be easy, and could be combined with aiming for high value machinery that will be in high demand shortly ( farm machinery, any vehicle, construction machinery ).
  • In a call back to the pandemic in the UK, they set up the kind of organisations that will receive rapidly deployed government benefits, such as relief distribution.
  • Increased their smuggling operations, as there are now a lot more entry points into the UK, and Manchester and Birmingham are relatively close by land. Of course this depends on how safe flooded areas are to traverse in small boats.
  • They registered a lot of small lenders, as ways of distributing funds to the needy, in order to launder money. They would offer loans at reasonable rates, and will reach those that the main banks won’t lend to.
  • They will then use their capital to take over legitimate construction businesses, expecting that large scale reconstruction will be needed if the waters subside.
  • Another option they were considering was “potentially start to destabilise the region”, not completely, but in a way that would put different areas under the control of local groups.

PPV team:

( if shouldn’t really need to be stated, and I’m assuming that more than two people will read this, but locations and populations were picked with, at best, a “Wikipedia” level of knowledge. And attitudes and actions in a game - either this playtest or as and when the full game runs - shouldn’t be regarded as authoritative statements on what the populations would do, or what we think they’d do. There’s huge issues here around participation and representation, which I aim to explore thoughtfully in the game itself )

  • Originally located in Whittlesey, they are now relocated to a Morrison’s car park in Cardea.
  • If I remember correctly, parts of Whittlesey are still above water, but it is entirely cut off from the land around it.
  • They “commute” to Whittlesley in canoes to protect property and retrieve valuables.
  • They raise funds via local cake sales, and incendary online crowd funding.
  • They actively resist attempts to be relocated, and concentrate on just build flood defences around Whittlesbury, and a new road.
  • There is increasing extremism in this community, partly as a method of getting attention and funding online.
  • They experience a rise in conspiracy theories, which makes sense as this was a sudden and devastating flood.

Highlights that gave me more to think about:

Just thinking through these moves by the teams shows where I really need to think through how “asynchronous play” will work. For example, in a previous playtest another group of displaced survivors were called the “Sutton Bridge Floodies”, who would exist in this version of the game too. If the Whittlesey PPV were to adopt a more extreme explanation of why the flood happened, and intended to build a “land bridge” on top of the road - now underwater - from their current to former home, how would the Sutton Bridge Floodies react? And given the likely nature of social media in 2048, combined with widespread 6G connectivity and solar power, that decision is likely to be very quick - far, far quicker than the three months turns this is based on.

Similarly the playtesters put a great deal of thought into the scenario and the roles they played within it; part of the plan for the Whittlesey survivors was to resettle their homes, and then appeal publicly about the lack of government support, with is directly against the UK Government’s position that this territory is “lost”, for years if not decades if not permanently. Also they would work with Organised Crime, who are creating access to a wide range of construction and farming machinery, with regard to the “land bridge” and/or defending Whittlesbury from further flooding - and it’s not as though the “Organised Crime” members would turn up in shades and black hats, sounding like some kind of East Anglian version of the Sopranos - with the government being overwhelmed, what choice do those from Whittlesbury have?

Aspects that would need to be researched before or during the game, or confidently invented. For example, what is the attitude of the Royal Navy and HM Coastguard and RNLI for operating inland in such a crisis? This kind of flooded area is particularly hazardous to any kind of boats. These kind of questions would have to be answered in advance, otherwise the entire game would grind to a halt while I obtained a sufficient answer.

As the PPV team suggested, can you build an unofficial road, if the water is calm enough? If you put enough soil on top of where an existing road was, does that give you a stable enough base to build some kind of impromtu dirt track for getting to and from somewhere that’s flooded? If large groups of people are left without other direction, and without other options, would they try this, and can you stop them if they do? And if the idea is foolish or ridiculous, how will it fail? If players, genuinely inhabiting a role, advocate for something like this - I believe it’s up to me to determine whether it works or not, rather than tell them whether are or aren’t “allowed” to try.

This kind of situation about raised the concept of “air bridges” ( as per West Berlin ), and what vehicles the MoD would have access to that could create a “land bridge” - especially on the assumption that the existing road is a little underwater and mainly free of obstructions, and intact? But would they use those vehicles for this function?

As commented on by one player with experience of law enforcement, even this little two hour “theatre of the mind” game generated useful discussions, for example thinking through how Organised Crime will take advantage of the situation to steal large vehicles. But how are they tracked or marked, especially with the technology available in 2049? Well then why not break them up into spare parts, fence the spare parts abroad, and then use the money obtained that way to other succeed in other aims? And what does that mean for the availability of that kind of machinery in a region that desperately needs it?

For lessons learned I think that point is what, to me, justifies the entire format. Organised Crime illustrated that the turn structure of wargames, beyond mere discussions of a potential future, is of such a benefit. While we only had two turns, from their success early on they were already planning to get people and/or influence and/or money into local authorities for the subsequent turns. That was an ideal illustration of the “decisions and consequences” loop, and bringing out the subject matter expertise within that team, whereas it’s not a range of options I would have come up with, for example.

Overall

Thinking about all of this makes me realise that ideally I’m not quite the GM in the game, and maybe no-one is. In a TTRPG ( TableTop RolePlaying Game ) a GM or GamesMaster is arguably an authority on the world. Assisted by the source material they have the final say in how everything works - and especially around the relatively limited set of options within TTRPGs. Whereas for this I’m maybe the lead researcher, but otherwise SMEs among the players are the sources of authority and knowledge. Also I’m intrigued by the “West Marches” idea of different parts of a game being run by different people, but that’s potentially contentious in a serious game, and something for me to discuss another time.

And, an original and valid criticism of the idea, in that it is just too big. But trying to build a game this big leads to such interesting and useful options, that I can’t help but be drawn to it.