I wrote a couple of things elsewhere

I’ve written a couple of pieces in another couple of places: On the Milmud blog I wrote up my recent experience of using an online LLM to help me research relevant facts quickly, you can read that here. On LinkedIn I’m running a poll-based game about how an invented organisation should handled a potential cyber security issue, if you’ve got an account on LinkedIn you can participate here. Otherwise my latest episode of weeknotes, covering the last couple of years, are due out any day now…

June 12, 2025 · 1 min · 86 words · Nick Drage

Currency Quest, getting away from gold

Coding Medieval Worlds, exactly that. I had the pleasure of attending Coding Medieval Worlds recently. The description from the event’s website is a great summary: “Coding Medieval Worlds is a workshop series that brings together game developers and historians. Run as a fully online forum for discussing shared problems and ideas, CMW has had attendees from almost every part of the world discussing the issues of representing and encoding medieval themes into historical and medieval-fantasy gaming.” ...

March 5, 2025 · 5 min · 897 words · Nick Drage

Gaming highlights from the last sixteen months

These are the weeknotes1 on the games I’ve played since I last wrote up my weeknotes…. about sixteen months ago I think. These are highlights of the games I’ve played that either were particularly notable, or are a strong recommendation for or against playing them. I’ve divided up the short reviews and thoughts into fairly arbitrary categories below: And yes, I really should get into the habit of writing up notes as I go along - which I’ve started doing with Chestnut Lodge Wargaming Group games, I’ve included links to games I played there below. ...

January 21, 2025 · 20 min · 4099 words · Nick Drage

Water Water Everywhere

A prediction of what will be underwater when the sea rises two metres. Water Water Everywhere I helped run this session as part of the CLWG design conference; CLWG being the Chestnut Lodge Wargaming Group. I believe the organisation is around forty years old, and is much more focused on the design of new games rather than playing existing ones. Well, I say “helped run” the session, I mainly took notes while my co-designer, Terry Martin, asked the questions. ...

April 17, 2024 · 6 min · 1132 words · Nick Drage

A week of fun spread over months.

Playing. These are the weeknotes1 on the games I’ve played2 purely for fun3 in the last few months. There’s very few listed below, which is very disappointing to look back on… I can’t help thinking I’ve missed a couple. But I do have a “new” Xbox360, and I’ve been tidying up some space, so maybe that will change. It kind of needs to change, considering how much time I spend thinking about games and game design. ...

July 6, 2023 · 7 min · 1433 words · Nick Drage

Game Design Manifesto

version 0.8 Something I’ve been thinking on for quite a while, but reading this manifesto on the Trick’s Tales blog finally got me to write this up… version 0.1 anyway. And, of course, this is a personal manifesto that influences my commercial work, but isn’t a limit to my commercial work. Game Design Manifesto Fight the difficult problems. For example planning, executing, and resolving simultaneous moves is very difficult, especially in person, but that’s why this is a personal manifesto. I need to try and go where others haven’t, to avoid competing over the same ideas, or through failure illustrate and document what cannot work. When possible all games have online and/or hybrid and/or solo options. IGOUGO1 is easy to adjudicate but it suffers from being unrealistic and with many designs it reduces player engagement while the inactive players wait for the game state to change. Designing “We-Go” methods is more challenging, but has many benefits and is more realistic. Dispensing with “turns” is next, different actions require different levels of commitment to removing other options, a game should reflect that. The speed of decision making is a factor in real world success, games should reflect that. ( I’m hardly the first to think this ). ...

March 22, 2023 · 7 min · 1439 words · Nick Drage

Free and online cyber security solo games

This is a sporadically updated list of online games that illustrate useful points about cyber security. For those I’ve tried, or intend to try, I’ve listed them below, with some brief thoughts so you can decide whether to spend time on them yourself. Please do contact me if there’s something out there I should play to consider adding it to the list. Despite my history in professional wargaming I’m especially interested in solo games that let players learn at their own pace, in their chosen context, and without even the most ephemeral consequences for errors. ...

November 3, 2022 · 6 min · 1141 words · Nick Drage

Weeknotes for Wargames, Wizards, and Warriors.

As fifty percent of my readership complained about the breathless bulleted format I’ve been using, which is a very fair point to make, I’m experimenting with different formatting this “week”, although I’ve much less material. Considering how I create these blogs I should be able to generate an index easily, so it’s trivial for people to see if there’s something of interest each time. ( A newsletter that does this really well is the tl;dr sec newsletter, the format actively encourages picking and choosing the sections relevant to you, I aspire to do the same. ) ...

May 26, 2022 · 9 min · 1897 words · Nick Drage

Team sports as an emerging theme...

My previous week: Looking back on the previous week, I only realised that “playing as a team” was a common thread through the most significant and/or interesting events when I was putting together this weeknote. I watched a presentation by CrowdSec a “free and open-source collaborative IPS”. I need to experiment with the software, but I was impressed by the team behind it, and their approach to making something like this work while also keeping one eye on the business model. I’d be interested to hear from anyone using it, or with strong experience in how well crowd sourced threat intelligence works out. I took part in a couple of playtests of the Minimator game - operated as part of the work of the Research Institute of Sweden. This is a well put together game, probably aimed at policymakers, to explain basic concepts in how cyber defence and zero day markets work. There’s a lot of work gone into the game, and still a lot to do; but there’s definitely something in this and I’m optimistic about what the project will achieve in future. I was a sounding board for someone working through their career options, and they highlighted how much leading and being part of a team meant to them. I realise that aspect of work probably means more to me than I expected, my involvement in PlaySecure being the most obvious… but increasingly I find myself pushing to work with others before I’ve a fully formed idea. This has led to some promising concepts, but there’s also been many times that hasn’t worked at all after auspicious starts. At some point, but only after something has paid off, I should work out my “completion percentage” on ideas. Separate from that team based theme though, I watched Vivo; a delightful film, well paced, engaging, suitable for children if you’re up for “adult themes” and some definite peril. Not quite at the level of Hamilton... but still... definite peril...

December 23, 2021 · 2 min · 329 words · Nick Drage

Lies and Circuses

My previous week: Various tribulations with online stores. Maybe I’m getting old and weary, but it seems harder and harder to just pay for something and then get what you paid for; or to trust any of the online review sites, which are obviously being gamed. I attended the National Cyber Deception Laboratory’s symposium. This was a good day, with some useful and quotable points of view - I expect to blog some summaries of different presentations as they go online. I’ve always been puzzled and frustrated why cyber security, as an industry, doesn’t engage with deception more, hopefully this event is the sign of a change in approach. I attended, and kind of helped run, and spoke at, the Enterprise Circus, which operated under the PlaySecure brand. This was a lot of fun, and I think like main event back in March 2021, it got a few people thinking something new. As always the aim is to just try something a little different, rather than just being yet another conference saying the same thing. A different approach to video call backgrounds

December 16, 2021 · 1 min · 182 words · Nick Drage