The conflict simulation group

I. Activities

The Conflict Simulation Group (CoSimG), currently located at the University of Würzburg, Germany, has been using conflict simulations as an educational tool from 2009 onwards. Since then, CoSimG has developed several rule sets addressing a variety of topics ranging from Late Bronze Age warfare to 21st c. peer level conflicts, and conducted research on the history of conflict simulations in military training. One of CoSimG’s main areas of activitiy is researching the Prussian Kriegsspiel, the world’s first educational wargame officially adopted. CoSimG has reconstructed the mid- to late 1860s Kriegsspiel with the purpose of providing 21st c. military decision makers an educational experience unlike most other educational wargames currently offer.

CoSimG has run large scale Kriegsspiel type wargames at various military institutions, including:

German Armed Forces Staff College, Hamburg

German Army Warfighting Simulation Centre, Wildflecken

German Army Infantry School, Hammelburg

German Army School for Military Police and Staff Service, Hanover

CoSimG has also run presentational Kriegsspiel type wargames at various conferences including:

Wargaming Initiative for NATO 2023 (WIN 23), Allied Command Transformation, Rome

International Wargaming Symposium, Peruvian Naval War College, Lima

CoSimG also runs a regular wargaming course at:

Helmut Schmidt Universität der Bundeswehr, Hamburg.

In 2022, CoSimG has launched a series of publications supporting its wargaming activties; the Occasional Papers series covers the educational wargames designes by CoSimG and includes rulesets and supplementary material. For more information see the publications section on this website.

II. The Conflict Simulation Group

Jorit Wintjes studied Ancient and Contemporary History, Latin and ancient Greek at the University of Würzburg. He wrote a PhD thesis on the Antiochene orator Libanius and a Habilitationsschrift on Roman naval operations in north-western Europe. His research interests include ancient and pre-WWI military history, the role of women in warfare and the use of conflict simulations in officer training. He is a professor at the Würzburg Ancient History Department teaching in the history and digital humanities programmes.

Steffen Pielström studied biology at the University of Würzburg. He wrote a PhD thesis on organization processes, information use and decision making in ant societies. His current research interests include computational text analysis, the application of quantitative methodology in humanities research, and the simulation and modelling of conflicts. He currently works as a project coordinator at the Department of Literary Computing and teaches data analysis skills in the digital humanities programme.

Pia Henning studied Digital Humanities and German Literature at the University of Würzburg. For her Master thesis she digitized the available German Kriegsspiel rule sets to machine readable TEI and produced the first linguistic analysis of the rule sets as a texts genre. For her PhD thesis, she is developing an ontology for the annotation of rule sets and prepares a digital edition for diachronic and comparative analysis. She is currently working as a data engineer.