The Long Game Project · How it works · The wargame · TLDR
A room full of organisations, under pressure
Put your persona in a room with up to seven others. Add pressure. Watch what each one does, round by round.
Pick the players
Your persona, a competitor built from public signals, or a starter Flavour.
Set the pressure
A market shock, a hostile bid, a regulatory change, a recall.
Read the record
Every move in each organisation’s own voice. An authenticity score per move. The round where someone stopped acting in character.
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The Long Game Project · How it works · The wargame
How the wargame works
Put your organisation in a room with others and add pressure. Then read what every one of them does. This page explains how.
What it does
The wargame puts your persona and up to seven others into a scenario that runs over several rounds. Every organisation sees what the others do and reacts in character. You watch it unfold and read the transcript.
Each player is a persona. It can be the one your diagnostic produced, one built for a competitor from public signals, or a starter archetype from the library. The scenario is whatever you want to pressure-test against.
It runs in four steps
- 01
Pick the organisations.
Your persona, competitor personas built from public signals, or starter archetypes. Up to eight in the room.
- 02
Set the scenario.
A market shock, a regulatory change, a hostile bid, a product recall. Anything you want to test your strategy against.
- 03
Run the rounds.
Each round, every organisation makes a move and reacts to what the others did. An observer, a separate model that plays no seat, scores each move for how true to character it was.
- 04
Read the output.
A full transcript, an authenticity score per move, a map of how relationships shifted, and a report on patterns and surprises.
What one round looks like
Same scenario, three Flavours. Each makes a different move. An observer scores how true to character each one is and leaves a note. Tap a name to switch.
Scenario
"A new competitor drops prices 30% across your core category. What do you do in the next week?"
The move
“Hold pricing. Issue a service-quality statement. Double spend on customer-retention.”
Authenticity score
92
Textbook
Observer note
Textbook Fortress. Refusing to match a price drop and leaning on the existing relationship is exactly what the persona would predict.
Five moments to use it
Five moments when a wargame earns its place.
- Before a real market event. Test the strategy before reality does. See which rounds your persona holds and which rounds it breaks in.
- Modelling a specific competitor. Build them a persona from public signals and put it under the same pressure. What comes back is an argument to test. It says nothing about what the real competitor will do.
- Pressure-testing an acquisition. Run both profiles through a shared crisis. See where the cultures grind and where they align.
- Training leadership intuition. Watch how organisations like yours tend to behave under pressure. The patterns that surface are usually ones the room already half knew.
- Finding the break point. In which round does the organisation stop acting in character? That round is where the strategy is most fragile.
Four things come out
Four outputs.
01
A transcript of every move.
Every decision and every reaction, in each organisation’s own voice. The whole record, line by line, with no summary in between.
02
An authenticity score per move.
Did the organisation act in character, or did it have to stretch? Stretching is the signal. The score measures how well a move fits the persona. It says nothing about what the real organisation would do.
03
A relationship map.
Who aligned. Who clashed. Who switched sides across the rounds.
04
A report on patterns.
Named patterns, named blind spots, named surprises. The places where the game showed you something you did not already know.
Related
How we read your organisation explains the persona the wargame uses. The published reports run on a related but stricter setup. The engine page explains that machinery, and the evidence page says how much of all this we can back.
Run a wargame
Open the simulationIf you have no saved persona yet, take the diagnostic first. The wargame needs at least one.
The annex · Deep
How this differs from the engine behind the published reports, and what the authenticity score is.
The wargame on this site and the engine behind the published reports are two different machines. This one runs several personas through rounds and scores each move for fit with its persona. The engine adds an arbiter, private briefs, stated odds and seeded dice. It also writes an event log a report can cite. The engine explainer covers the engine. This page covers the wargame.
The authenticity score is an observer model’s call on whether a move fits the persona that made it. It measures consistency. It makes no claim about what the real organisation would do.