Making sense of our world
We view wargaming as an incredibly useful tool for both educative and analytical purposes. We believe that wargames, by replicating the empirical, dialectic, heuristic, and hazardous characters of strategy and warfare, constitute a unique way to grasp the practical aspects of past, current, and future conflicts.
Thereby, they allow to investigate system dynamics and the decision-making processes of competing actors within specific contexts. They lead to hypotheses and ideas that no other method can produce, providing a unique added-value to defense and security professionals who wish to understand the problems they face better.
Training current and future decision-makers
Our simulations are intentionally designed to actively challenge the participants taking part in them. By immersing them in very concrete crisis contexts and by asking them to make difficult choices with limited time, they effectively provide a perfect training ground for decision-makers to practice. All this in a safe yet realistic environment.
As such, various actors from Academia to Institutions and Businesses have used SSG games to train, test, and upskill their personnel, recruits, or students.
Fighting uncertainty and driving innovation
One of the strongest benefits of wargaming lies in its prospective value. As models seeking to provide better understanding of the overarching dynamics and subtleties of the strategic contexts our clients find themselves in, our simulations allow to explore the unexpected. They naturally highlight potential weaknesses and points of failure, but also opportunities and are particularly effective at generating new innovative ideas and tangible courses of action.
For businesses and public actors embedded in strategic struggles, our simulations aim to provide them with a comparative advantage over their competitors by improving their situationnal awareness and identifying the key factors that will bring them success tomorrow.
A rigorous method with tangible results
Wargaming has been used for millenia in militaries worldwide, starting in India in 600 B.C. with the game of chaturanga, the ancestor of chess. Those simulations have been used throughout the ages to give strategists an edge over their opponents and are still well trusted tools today – their application extending to some of the most complex and important existing strategic conundrums like with the war in Ukraine.
At SSG, our games are systematically the result of an intense research, led by subject matter experts, in consultancy with world leading experts on those topics. All of our members have both thematic and regional expertises and achieved top results in some of the best universities worldwide (McGill, Sciences Po, King’s College London). Some of them are also advancing knowledge in their specific spheres of knowledge, being regularly published in academic journals. Finally, they all received proper professional training in game design and have been designing simulations and wargames for major clients for years.
Strand Simulations Group 