Always on the lookout for wargame practitioner stories, this one floated up recently:
Kingfish ACE: Strategy, Creativity and Air Power
Published June 22, 2023
By Airman 1st Class Spencer Kanar / 377th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. —
Kingfish Agile Combat Employment (ACE) is a strategy game with a strong emphasis on creativity and player freedom. The game centers around a hypothetical scenario set in the Western Pacific where players are tasked with employing forces to generate air power while overcoming the game’s various challenges and obstacles.
“Kingfisher is an educational wargame to teach everybody in the Air Force about ACE concepts and the importance of being able to generate combat air power from austere locations,” said Capt. Melia Pulliam, Air Force Wargaming Institute wargaming director.
At the Air Force Wargaming Institute wargaming is used to develop insights or options for identified problems. The process of wargaming assists decision makers by generating data and ideas analysts can utilize in problem solving.
Members of Team Kirtland recently had the opportunity to learn and play the Kingfish ACE wargame.
“We’re trying to create a wargaming instructor team for Kirtland,” said Pulliam. “In the future those instructors will be able to take the game back to their units or agencies and be able to host their own games.”
King Fish ACE encourages players to explore creative solutions in the game that could be used in real life.
“Every game a team comes up with something new,” said Pulliam. “We’re so used to saying this is the solution to that, but this game gives you the freedom to come up with something different and put it to the test.”
When asked about the benefits of the game for Airmen, Master Sgt. Charles Kuykendall, 377 Force Support Squadron Airman Leadership School commandant spoke on how the game helps airmen bridge the gap from classroom to real world.
“We can bring in Airmen from a non planning or logistics background, allow them to think for themselves and problem solve, and they immediately gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of ACE as a concept and become more capable Airmen as a result.”
As Kingfish ACE continues to grow throughout the Air Force, Team Kirtland is proud to be a force of positive change for an ever evolving Air Force.
kirtland.afb.mil
The game’s title Kingfish derives its lineage from Vietnam where Tactical Airlift Control Elements would use the callsign Kingfish after successfully opening an airfield.
The article had three accompanying photos that show a bit of the game:
The game in the pictures looks alot like a worker placement game. As the topic appears to focus on logistics I guess that makes sense. Intrigued, I dug a bit further and found other photos that show more.
For instance, this one shows a map and the game box.
A better close-up of the game board.
This is an entire series of photos found on DVIDS. Look at those minis!
The 705th Training Squadron executed Air Combat Command’s first Lead Wing Command and Control Course preparing Lead Wing “A” staff for operations in support of an air component commander in any theater, at Hurlburt Field, Florida, from Aug. 23-26, 2022. The LWC2C is designed for immediate student immersion into joint and Air Force doctrine using Kingfish Agile Combat Employment game boards; U.S. Air Force Col. Troy Pierce, Headquarters Air Force Directorate of Plans and Programs, designed the original board game entitled Kingfish ACE to first introduce Airmen Air Force-wide to the concept and challenges of ACE. (U.S. Air Force photo by Keith Keel)
Taking Agile Combat Employment C2 to the next level for Lead Wings
Military collaboration in wargames
A recently published journal article in the Proceedings of the 2023 26th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design is very relevant to wargame practitioners who strive to create wargames like Kingfish ACE. “Understanding Military Collaboration in Wargames”1 gets right to the point educational wargames like Kingfish Ace and my favorite wargame this year, Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific (The Dietz Foundation, 2023) by Sebastian Bae, strive to deliver.
The military has developed wargames to explore their doctrines and train operational concepts. Wargames are often designed to teach educational objectives and share and produce knowledge. The success of a wargame design depends on how it achieves these objectives. Players are the main actors in wargames and often group into teams. The final result of the wargame depends on the collaboration and interaction between members of each team. Therefore, this work aims to understand how collaboration occurs in wargames. Moreover, we observed the activities and processes during a large-scale wargame to gather how the players collaborate. A better understanding of collaboration in wargames may provide insights for game designers to improve the wargames design process to consider how players collaborate.
Abstract
Part of what makes this journal article so interesting is that it is not written by Americans studying American wargames. The authors are from Brazil and the wargame they observed was a joint wargame run by the Brazilian Armed Forces Command and Staff Military School named AzuVer, a clipped compound of the words Azul (blue) and Vermelho (red).
Wargame designers, be they practitioners or commercial/hobby, could benefit from a read of this article. Many hobby wargames are two-player experiences. Some (few?) games are playable by teams by design and others with some work. Wargames like Littoral Commander or the CPX run by the Armchair Dragoon at Origins are team events.
Maybe the hobby wargaming community could get some ideas from wargame practitioners, eh?
- Ouriques, Leandro, Carlos Eduardo Barbosa, and Geraldo Xexéo. “Understanding Military Collaboration in Wargames.” 2023 26th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), 2023. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10152624.
Feature image courtesy USAF
The opinions and views expressed in this blog are those of the author alone and are presented in a personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Navy or any other U.S government Department, Agency, Office, or employer.
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