It would be great fun to speculate about the way the Punic Wars might have turned out if Hannibal had possessed a machine gun company. I think, however, that such an exercise would teach us little of value.*
Ludwig Ritter von Eimannsberger
A ‘comparative counterfactual case’ begins with a thorough discussion of an ordinary decision-forcing case. Once that discussion has taken place and students are thoroughly familiar with what actually happened, the teacher replaces a true fact with a false (or ‘counter-factual’) one, thereby creating a ‘counter-factual case’. The class then works through the second game, paying special attention to those things that change as a result of the replacement of ‘what actually was’ with ‘what might have been’.