Commission a report, or a tabletop

What the fee buys

Most of it is a person’s time. The engine plays the game, and that is the fast part. Everything else on this list is Dr Dan Epstein’s own work, and none of it is handed to a junior or a bench, because there is no junior and no bench.

1. The call. Thirty minutes with Dr Dan Epstein on the decision. If a report is the wrong shape for it, he says so, and says what the right shape is.
2. The brief. Dan turns the question into a game: the actors, the moves each one can make, what counts as a win, and the kill criteria, the results that would stop the run before a report is written. You sign it before anything runs.
3. The evidence pack. Your documents and the public record, read and turned into a table of checked claims. Every sourced number in the report cites one, and a number Dan wrote is marked as his.
4. The runs. The engine plays the game with AI players under an AI referee. Dan sets what that referee may and may not rule, reads every transcript, and overrules the moves he does not believe. An overruled move stays on the record beside the ruling that replaced it.
5. The report. Dan writes the argument at three depths: a ninety-second read, a full read, and the working. Where Claude drafted from the record, the front page says so. Dan decides every finding and signs it.
6. The readout. One session with your board or leadership team to work through the findings, and the assumptions that failed first.

For the money you get the four things a published report cannot give you: your question rather than ours, your evidence rather than the public record, a person who has read all of it sitting across the table, and a report nobody else will ever see.

What it costs

From A$15,000. It is priced in the same band as the Long Game Project’s Decision War Room, A$15,000 to 25,000. Where yours lands depends on how many actors the game needs and how much of your evidence has to be read. It is scoped and priced in writing before design begins, and nothing starts until you sign the brief.

Nothing is published. Client material never appears in a public report. The engine keeps client evidence packs in a separate store from the public ones, and a report that reaches across is a build error.

The tabletop

The same engine, with your own people in the seats. Your leadership team argues its moves out loud, the engine referees with written reasons, and the dice decide. The difference from a report is the difference between reading a fire drill and running one.

Dan has run business wargames with leadership teams for years. The engine at the referee’s elbow is the new part, so the tabletop is the newer of the two products. The first clients get the first-run price below and a longer scoping conversation.

From A$12,000. On the Long Game Project site this is the Workshop.

The next step

1. Send the question in a sentence or two. The button below opens the Long Game Project contact page.
2. Thirty minutes on a call with Dr Dan Epstein. He says which format fits the question, or that neither does.
3. A scope and a price in writing. You decide. Nothing starts until you say so.

Send the question

Prices are in Australian dollars and exclude GST. Every engagement is led by Dr Dan Epstein in person.

What it is not

A forecast. A commissioned report is a structured argument with the working shown. If it sharpens the questions your team is asking, it has done its job. If it tells you what to do, we have written it badly. The engine page says what the machine can and cannot do, and the evidence page says how much to believe of it.