My First Wargaming Experience

I’d heard about wargaming for a long time, and always assumed it was something reserved for think tanks, government, and the military — never imagined I could actually take part in one myself.

The session I joined was KTT’s public-education wargame, a version designed for the general public, run for the Ganghu Civil Defense Team by the Taiwan National Security Research Institute.

A civilian-oriented wargame lets ordinary people understand military affairs at a more macro level — resources, service branches, government-level thinking — rather than just arguing about weapons, bombing runs, and offensive versus defensive advantage.

The whole session ran with twenty participants plus a facilitator and three assistant instructors, and each of the twenty people played a distinct role. A civilian-version wargame is basically a large-scale tabletop game, with clear rules, objectives, resource limits, and a turn-based structure. Since it’s meant to be a game experience, it also has a clear win condition.

In this public-education wargame, Taiwan’s objective was to sustain its will to resist. The PLA’s objective wasn’t to occupy Taiwan — it was to destroy Taiwan’s will to resist.

In other words, in an extreme scenario, even if many areas were occupied, as long as Taiwan still had enough will to resist by the time the game’s set number of rounds ran out, Taiwan won.

This actually reflects reality. If you simply compare military mass — troop numbers, weapons stockpiles — Ukraine and Russia aren’t remotely comparable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is approaching its fourth year, and Ukraine is still fighting hard, without collapsing or letting Russia achieve its original military objectives.

During the game, because of the time and resource limits on each round, tunnel vision set in easily — everyone’s limited attention stayed locked on just their own assigned task. It’s a lot like the real world: everyone only has 24 hours, and everyone’s focus and thinking has limits — whatever’s beyond that limit just gets ignored.

That’s usually how conflict starts: not getting the resources you need and feeling overlooked, or being unable to properly deliver on the part you’re responsible for.

I didn’t have any real solution for the conflicts that came up. All I could do at the time was trust that everyone working alongside me was pushing toward the same goal.

Because our facilitator ran the session so thoughtfully and guided our discussion so well, our Ganghu session didn’t really stick to the strict six-minute-per-round time limit — otherwise we probably would’ve ended up in total chaos, arriving at some result without even understanding why.

Even though most participants had already read through the briefing and manual ahead of time, there were still a lot of questions in the moment that needed help from the facilitator and assistant instructors.

I’d recommend that any group interested in joining set aside enough time — three hours is nowhere near enough. At most, it’s just a warm-up to get familiar with how the game runs. A real wargame, one where you can actually work through strategic discussion and response, probably needs something like 3+6 hours.

Either way, this wargame experience showed me the challenges and the sheer real-world complexity that any administrative team faces. If I ever come across a news article or piece that oversimplifies and reduces a situation to some easy conclusion, I can now respond more calmly, knowing that reality is far more complicated than that.

And as someone preparing for civil defense, the biggest thing this wargame gave me was seeing the role I might play within the larger system. As it happens, the role I was assigned was the fifth column. In the scenario, the fifth column had two major objectives: sabotage infrastructure, and guide PLA strikes. Sabotaging infrastructure mostly means causing shortages of everyday necessities — water, power, communications, basic supplies — to break the public’s will to resist. Civil defense probably can’t stop fifth-column sabotage at its source, and it’s hard to react in the moment it happens. But civil defense groups can help the public get prepared in advance, so that when something like this happens, people are less affected by it — which lowers how much these acts of sabotage can actually damage the public’s resistance.

If civilian self-reliance improves, then losing water, power, and internet doesn’t have to throw society into chaos (or at least fewer people panic), and the fifth column’s ability to have real impact shrinks. That frees the government to focus more fully on the military threat, instead of being forced into hard trade-offs between internal chaos and external resistance under limited resources.