Decision Games

This page provides a home for complete decision games published by Tactical Notebook. Whether a tactical decision game or a decision-forcing case, each decision game consists of two or more articles, each of which is best engaged in sequence.

The Tactical Notebook
How to Play Decision-Forcing Cases
Also known as an “historical map problem,” a “decision-forcing case” is an exercise that puts participants in the shoes a real person who, at sometime in the past, was faced with one or more difficult decisions. While usually engaged by a group of people who are engaging the problem at the …
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3 months ago · 3 likes · Bruce I Gudmundsson
The Tactical Notebook
Platoon (Background)
Your name is Charles Victor André Laffargue. You were born, on 24 September 1892, in the tiny village of Ligardes, in the south of France. (A census conducted the previous year counted 470 inhabitants.) Your father, who practiced veterinary medicine, was sufficiently prosperous to be able to send you to the preparatory school in the town of Agen, some 40 kilometers away…
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18 days ago · 2 likes · Bruce I Gudmundsson
The Tactical Notebook
A Skirmish in Nicaragua (Problem I)
Written by Lieutenant Harold D. Harris, USMC, this problem appeared in Volume XI (January 1936) of the Infantry School Mailing List and Volume 21, Number 11 (November 1938) of The Leatherneck. At dawn on 27 February 1928, a pack train, convoyed by a Marine patrol, pushes out of Estelli, Nicaragua, along the trail to Yali, loaded with supplies for the company of Marines on outpost duty there…
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23 days ago · 1 comment · Bruce I Gudmundsson
The Tactical Notebook
Trading Places
The year is 1858, and you are an officer serving in the planning department of the Ministry of War of the Kingdom of Prussia. The head of your little bureau, which is largely concerned with the making of maps, the composition of contingency plans, and the writing of reports on foreign armies, has just instituted an in-house training program for you and your colleagues…
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a month ago · 3 likes · 6 comments · Bruce I Gudmundsson
The Tactical Notebook
Lieutenant Clausewitz (Background)
The following exercise is both a decision-forcing case and a tactical decision game. To be more precise, it places you in the position of a real-world person (Lieutenant Carl von Clausewitz) engaging a fictional problem posed to him by his teacher (Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard von Scharnhorst…
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3 months ago · 1 like · Bruce I Gudmundsson
The Tactical Notebook
Tactical Dreams
This page, from the splendid Regimental Rogue website, contains lots of examples of what it calls "Tactical Narratives" or "Tactical Primers." These are substantial articles that use the literary device of successive dreams to offer a series of increasingly sophisticated solutions to a particular tactical problem. (For that reason, we call them "Tact…
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2 months ago · 2 likes · Bruce I Gudmundsson
The Tactical Notebook
Sergeant Arendt (Background)
This exercise serves neither as an argument for particular courses of action nor a criticism of decisions made in specific circumstances. Rather, it exists to give participants opportunities to immerse themselves in problems faced by a real person at some point in the past, and, in doing so, cultivate such martial virtues as decisiveness, critical thin…
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3 months ago · 1 like · Bruce I Gudmundsson