war game

• wargame, war-game

war game (plural war games)

1. (military) A simulation, by whatever means, of a military operation involving two or more opposing forces using rules, data, and procedures designed to depict an actual or assumed real-life situation.

   Synonyms: military exercise, training exercise

   • 1983, Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, WarGames, spoken by Paul Richter:

     Well, the WOPR [War Operations Planning Response] spends all it's time thinking about World War III. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, it plays an endless series of war games using all available information on the state of the world. The WOPR has already fought World War III as a game time and time again.

   • 2012, Philipp Von Hilgers, War Games: A History of War on Paper, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 65:

     On the other hand, war games in the Weimar era did not first develop into a political instrument when they began to incorporate political entities. Rather, only war games were able to approximate exactly the situation that was to be avoided at all costs.

   • 2018 October 17, Drachinifel, 29:29 from the start, in Last Ride of the High Seas Fleet - Battle of Texel 1918‎, archived from the original on 4 August 2022:

     In a sort of blooper reel, I will go over some of the things that occurred in a few of the wargames but we left out when collating the overall timeline.

2. A game that simulates or represents a military operation.

war game (third-person singular simple present war games, present participle war gaming, simple past and past participle war gamed)

1. To run a military simulation of this kind.
   • 2022 September 13, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, “The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     Together Britain, the United States and Ukraine conducted an assessment of the new plan, trying to war game it once more.