Note: I have used AI here to aid some research AND drafting. Where that occurs will be obvious.

.

Wargaming Weekly asked a question a fortnight ago: is John Curry’s Applying Deception in Wargaming the most important wargaming book of 2026?

.

I mentioned in the newsletter I’d look at this, as I think its perhaps aimed at the wrong audience.

.

I haven’t read it, so I can’t answer that. But the question is worth taking seriously anyway, because the answer to any superlative about wargaming is another question. Important to whom?

.

The book, as reported

I’m going on the review.

Curry’s framework, as Wargaming Weekly describes it, defines military deception in three parts:

• Condition the target’s belief, so that the target changes their behaviour, so that the deceiver gains an advantage.
• It splits deception into A-type — ambiguity-increasing, flooding the target with plausible options until they can’t choose
• M-type — misleading, selling one specific false story.

The techniques listed are all mechanical: dummy counters revealed by scouting, complete pre-game orders that must be followed until contact, faster movement raising your chance of detection, fake orders the enemy can intercept, hidden combat strengths.

And to his credit, one of the reported points is a restraint rather than a technique: “If one of the aims is to learn about a historical or current situation using a wargame, sometimes it is better to limit or even omit deception.” That’s a designer who knows what his tools would cost a learning situation. I’d want to read how far he takes it.

.

Important to whom?

Here’s where the superlative runs into trouble, and it isn’t Curry’s fault per se — more a ‘leading headline issue.’

The word “wargame” is being stretched, and the people stretching it are the professional side. In the issue immediately after the Curry review, the same newsletter covered Magnificent 7 — described, in its own words, as “a solitaire business wargame about building a resilient hedge fund in the face of China’s April 2025 export controls on 7 heavy rare earths.” In the same issue: Phil Sabin’s Take That Hill!, a tactical hex-and-counter game, getting a digital release.

Those two things are in the same newsletter under the same word.

Y’all know my stance on the ‘bigger tent’ approach to conflict games, historical conflict games, and real wargames.

If you don’t its very simple. A wargame involves kinetic action between two or more parties in the game.

Parties in the conflict, mind not people at the table. A solitaire game is still a wargame if what it depicts is a fight. If there is no kinetic action, then it can be a war/military/social/historical or philosophical strategy themed game.
But it aint a wargame.

And yes, that is a complaint. But let’s be clear about what I’m complaining about, though, because it isn’t the professional side existing and it isn’t the traffic between us they borrow from the hobby and the hobby borrows back, and I read both, they all have a place of course. What I object to is one word being asked to cover different activities, because a book can be genuinely indispensable to one and close to irrelevant to the others.

.

A superlative that doesn’t say which one it means is speaking for an audience that was never asked, and it then seeps into the area where it isn’t relevant. We can be AWARE of the notions. We can be aware of how the professional ‘wargamers’ do their thing from the armchair and the umpired rooms. That does not give it legitimacy in the wargamer hobby per se.

I should be fair about who was asking. Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha is a freelance wargame researcher, analyst and designer. He bought the book and read it inside a week, which is more than I’ve done, and he plays Kriegsspiel.

His own two designs are worth a look, because they land either side of the line I drew earlier. Iron Horse is a two-player game about uncrewed ground vehicles in Ukraine — mines, FPV strikes, recce drones, twelve turns, a twenty-five kilometre kill zone. Two sides, kinetic action, and its deception sits in where you choose to put the mines. That is a wargame by any definition, including mine, and a good idea for one. Shadow Fleet is about Russia’s sanction-dodging oil tankers and which delivery node they’re aiming for. Also interesting. Also called a micro-wargame. Nobody shoots at anybody.

That’s the stretch happening inside one designer’s output, and it’s why I don’t think the word is being abused so much as worn out. The review was written from inside the professional side, for the professional side, and at that job it does fine. It’s the headline that reached across.

.

Curry’s book, as described, is written for people running structured exercises with limited-intelligence requirements. That is a real and serious field, and an old one. RAND’s Social Sciences Division built the first political-military simulations in the early 1950s — the “Cold War Games” — and fought the mathematics division over them, the mathematicians’ models launching nuclear weapons quickly while the social scientists’ showed restraint. That tradition is seventy years deep and it is not a poor relation of the hobby.

It is also not the same activity as two blokes pushing counters across a hex map on a Tuesday night.

So my answer to the question is: probably yes, for one kind of wargaming, and I’d want to know that before I decided it was important to mine.

Which brings me to the part I can speak to first-hand.

.

The point: deception mechanics do real work

Not theory.

On my table.

Right now.

Ukraine ’44, played opposed against Steve. The blind-play layer ran the entire game with formations set up blank side up, strength unknown until contact, a couple of decoy markers a side. You cannot know what you’ve caught until you grip it, and by the time you’ve gripped it the real strength has moved west. That’s A-type deception at featherweight, and it produced twelve turns of genuine uncertainty. I like that game more and more.

Jena, in Vive l’Empereur. The fog rule cuts movement, range and firepower. It doesn’t pretend to conceal anything — it takes away your reach.

Those two are worth putting side by side, because the cheap one did more. Ukraine ’44 got more fog-of-war out of counters turned face down than far heavier treatments get out of a great deal more machinery.

.

The counterpoint: a good deal of it is bookkeeping, and some of it is theatre

The other half of the story.

Dummy counters work until your opponent learns the counter mix. Then they’re arithmetic. You still know that the dummy/real is where it is, so a beeline can be made to it.

Hidden strength values push work onto whoever’s tracking them, which in practice is one person with a notepad.

Pre-game orders deserve a split verdict. An order you merely promise to follow binds the player, not the general that friction is administrative, you’re obeying a note you wrote. But an order that takes time to change is a different animal entirely. Look at the reality the TCS series imposes: poor planning, and deceptive moves by the enemy, can force a player right out of his own OODA loop, because changing the plan costs him turns he hasn’t got etc etc. That is not hiding anything from me. It is stopping me acting on what I already know. Big Difference .

Because underneath all of it, the objection I keep coming back to:
a rule cannot make you not-know something.
It can only stop you acting on what you know.
Those are different things, and pretending otherwise is where deception mechanics turn into theatre.

Which is exactly why the Jena fog rule is the better piece of design. The designer didn’t try to conceal. He removed reach.

.

The big one: you cannot deceive yourself

Most of what I play, I play alone. So does a growing share of this hobby, and the entire purpose-built solitaire market is premised on it.

You set the position up. You know what’s behind every blank counter, because you put it there. Dummies, hidden values, false orders — every one of those techniques assumes a second mind to fool.

.

I tested it deliberately. I ran Ukraine ’44 solo to see whether the Soviets could reach the river-junction pocket faster with nobody resisting properly. They couldn’t. The design’s arithmetic held with the deception layer effectively switched off, because there was nobody left to deceive. Meanwhile the Jena fog rule kept working solo because it removes capability, not knowledge. The TCS system does the same thing. BOTH sides generate orders that take time to change. You live with your decisions.

And it isn’t only a solo problem. I played the Soviet side of Von Manstein’s Backhand Blow this week, opposed. I knew the counterstroke was coming. I knew roughly when, because I’d read the campaign. So did my opponent.

The whole operation depended on Vatutin reading German concentration as withdrawal his own chief of staff called the build-up at Krasnograd a prelude to retreat while the counterstroke was already running. That’s the deception the battle turned on, and no rule in any box can put it back, because both players have read the same books.

.

That’s the deeper version of the problem I suspect. It isn’t just that a solo player can’t bluff himself. It’s that historical wargaming has a public solution. The outcome is in print. Every deception mechanic in a historical game is being asked to work against players who already know the answer. – ’cause dang we smart !! 😊

So here’s the design principle I’d put up against Curry’s list:
the deception mechanics that survive are the ones that constrain capability, not information.
Fog that shortens your range works alone, and works against a man who’s read Glantz.
Orders that cost time to change work on both.
A blank counter you placed yourself does not. An intercepted false order doesn’t do much either, when both of you know what the real plan was.

Four of the five techniques in the reported list are information-hiding.

.

And this is where the two audiences come apart

There’s a structural reason the professional side can build deception the way it does, and it goes back to the roots of RAND.

Those RAND games ran with umpires and a control cell — a body of people holding the hidden information, adjudicating what each side was allowed to learn, and deciding when. That is the machinery the whole tradition is built on, and seventy years of professional practice has assumed it. Curry’s readers are facilitators. A facilitator is the second mind. Dummy counters, intercepted orders and hidden strengths all work perfectly when someone outside the game is running them.

The hobby player has no control cell. Solo, there isn’t even a second player. And in a historical game, both players have read the same account of what happened.
.

So it isn’t that Curry’s techniques are wrong. It’s that they assume an institution the hobby doesn’t have, and the superlative that started this never mentioned which of the two it was speaking for.

I don’t know whether Curry addresses solo play, or the historical-knowledge problem, at all, I haven’t read him. If he doesn’t, that isn’t a flaw. It’s the answer to “important to whom?” arriving from the other direction.

And here’s the line that settled it for me. In the same piece, the reviewer writes that “no wargame delivers limited intelligence like the original wargame: Kriegsspiel.” He’s right. But Kriegsspiel is umpired. It does not function without a referee sitting outside the game holding what neither side is allowed to know. The example reached for to prove deception works in wargaming is the one game that structurally cannot exist without the institution the hobby player hasn’t got.

So — most important book of 2026?

I’ll do what I always do. State me assessment bluntly.

The book will be relevant for professional wargamers, who problably know most of this anyway. Some folks will rah rah the ideas and say ‘we need more of this in our hobbyist arena.’

I believe all of this is mostly irrelevant to our slice of the universe and can be handled with smart rules per scenario aka mechanics that drive planning, and provide obscurity. But the solo player, he knows what he knows and knows what he does not know. These ‘types’ of mechanic fail to enhance the models.

So ask a different question. Not whether it’s the most important book, but what it would have to do to be important here. It would have to work for a man playing both sides at his own table who already knows how the battle ended which means constraining what he can do, not what he knows. Fog that shortens your reach. Orders that cost you turns to change. The rest is theatre.

.

Sources