Competitive strategy · 14 min read · Updated 2 Aug 2026
Business Wargaming Template (Free Business Wargame Plan)
A blank business wargaming plan you can fill in today, plus the guidance for what belongs in each field. A war game is a structured role-play where colleagues play your competitors against a real plan, and it exists to find out how rivals would respond before you commit rather than afterwards.
Copy pastes straight into Google Sheets or Excel with the columns intact. Downloads are free with a work email.
The business wargame template
This is exactly what you get when you copy or download. Blank fields are yours to fill in; each table ships with one example row to show the pattern, which you delete.
Wargame details
Fill this in first. A war game with no decision waiting on it is an expensive workshop, however well it is run.
- The decision this informsA real pending choice, e.g. whether to launch at this price
- Who makes that decision, and whenNamed, with the date it gets made
- Date and durationTypically one day, sometimes a day and a half
- Participants and teamsUsually 12 to 30 people, in teams of three to eight
- FacilitatorNamed, and ideally not the person whose plan is being tested
- What we will do with the outputWhere the decisions go, and who receives them
1. The question the game must answer
First row is an example, delete it. One primary question, two at most. Everything in the day is built backwards from it.
| Question | Why we cannot answer it from analysis alone | What a useful answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| ExampleHow would our two main rivals respond if we launched a free viewer tier? | It depends on their reasoning, not on published facts | A ranked set of likely responses, with what would trigger each |
2. Teams and who they play
First row is an example, delete it. Three to five teams. Put your most senior sceptics on the competitor teams, not on the home team.
| Team | Who they play | Members | What they must produce |
|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleRed 1 | Our largest competitor, playing to win | 5, including two from sales who meet them often | Their response to our move, with the reasoning behind it |
3. Intelligence pack per team
First row is an example, delete it. Each team gets only what that player would plausibly know. Asymmetry is the point, not an oversight.
| Team | What they receive | Source | What they deliberately do not get |
|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleRed 1 | Public pricing, positioning, hiring signals, review themes, our public materials | Competitor profile and monitoring, dated | Our internal roadmap, margins or unreleased plans |
4. Rounds and timing
First row is an example, delete it. Two or three rounds. Keep the clock tight, because teams that are given longer produce more slides rather than better moves.
| Round | What happens | Time | What each team hands in |
|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleRound 1 | Home team presents the plan; competitor teams prepare their response | 75 minutes | Three moves, ranked by likelihood, with triggers |
5. Rules of the game
First row is an example, delete it. Read this table aloud before round one begins, and keep it visible in the room all day.
| Rule | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| ExampleCompetitor teams must act in their own interest, not in ours | Teams that go easy on the home plan produce a comfortable and useless result |
6. Move and counter-move log
First row is an example, delete it. Filled in live during the game by the facilitator. The reasoning column is worth more than the move itself.
| Round | Team | Move | Their reasoning | Our response | Plausibility |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Example1 | Red 1 | Match the free tier within one quarter, capped at 10 seats | Cheaper than losing the segment, and a cap limits the revenue exposure | We would still be undifferentiated on the criterion we led with | High, it costs them little |
7. Debrief: what surprised us
First row is an example, delete it. Run this while everyone is still in the room. A debrief scheduled for the following week does not happen.
| What surprised us | Which assumption it challenged | Confidence now | What we should verify |
|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleBoth competitor teams matched within a quarter, independently | That the move would buy us two to three quarters of advantage | Low confidence in the original timing assumption | Whether either has done something similar before, and how fast |
8. Decisions, owners and dates
First row is an example, delete it. Complete this table while people are still seated, not afterwards from the move log.
| Finding | What we will do | Owner | By when | How we will know it worked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleThe advantage window is one quarter, not three | Re-run the business case on a one-quarter window before approving | Elena V., CEO | 31 Oct | The decision is taken against a tested assumption rather than an assumed one |
How to fill in your business wargame
How to scope a business wargame
A war game is a structured role-play in which colleagues play your competitors against a real plan, and its purpose is to find out how rivals would respond before you commit rather than afterwards. The format was adapted from military planning and brought into corporate strategy work over several decades, most systematically by Benjamin Gilad, whose book Business War Games sets out the analytical and behavioural approach most practitioners now use. The prerequisite is a genuine pending decision.
The decision this informs
A real pending choice with a date: whether to launch at this price, whether to enter this segment, whether to match a competitor's packaging. Without one, the day produces interesting discussion and no change, which is the most common way this exercise disappoints.
Who makes that decision, and when
Named, and ideally present. A war game whose output goes to somebody who was not in the room loses most of its force, because the valuable part is watching a smart colleague argue the competitor's case convincingly.
Date and duration
One day is the standard, occasionally a day and a half. Gilad's practice runs in that range and it holds up: shorter than half a day and teams cannot get into role, longer than two days and the cost stops being justifiable for most decisions.
Participants and teams
Typically twelve to thirty people in teams of three to eight. Fewer than about twelve and you cannot staff enough competitor teams; many more and the plenary sessions stop functioning as discussions.
Facilitator
Named, and preferably not the person whose plan is being tested. An author facilitating a critique of their own plan will unconsciously steer it, and everyone in the room can feel it happening.
What we will do with the output
Decide before the day where the decisions go. War games generate energy that dissipates within about a week, and output with no destination is the reason people describe them as fun but pointless.
How to write the question a business wargame must answer
One primary question, two at most, and everything in the day is built backwards from it. The question must be one that analysis genuinely cannot settle, which is a narrower set than it first appears. Anything answerable from published sources should be researched rather than role-played, because a war game is an expensive way to discover something that was on a pricing page. What war games are uniquely good at is anticipating reasoning under competitive pressure.
Question
Framed around competitor response: "how would our two main rivals respond if we launched a free viewer tier?". Not "what is our strategy?", which is a planning workshop, and not "what does their pricing look like?", which is research.
Why we cannot answer it from analysis alone
Force yourself to justify the format. If the honest answer is that nobody has looked, run the research first. War games work best when the participants already have good intelligence and the uncertainty is genuinely about judgement.
What a useful answer looks like
Describe the output shape: "a ranked set of likely responses, with what would trigger each". This is what tells the facilitator how to structure the rounds, and it prevents the day ending in a general discussion nobody can act on.
Two questions is the practical ceiling
Each additional question either extends the day or thins the rounds. Three questions in one day produces three shallow answers, and the thing you needed most will be one of them.
How to set up teams in a business wargame
Three to five teams, and the counter-intuitive rule that most determines quality: put your most senior and most sceptical people on the competitor teams rather than the home team. Home teams defend, which requires less of them. Competitor teams have to construct a genuinely threatening response, which is harder and is where the value of the day is produced. Staffing this the other way round is the single most common structural mistake.
Team
A home team presenting the plan, two or three competitor teams, and frequently a customer or market team. The customer team is under-used and often the most illuminating, since it is the only one representing the people whose behaviour actually decides the outcome.
Who they play
A named competitor, playing to win on their own terms. Vague assignments such as a disruptive new entrant produce vague moves. If you cannot name the company, you probably do not know enough about it to role-play it usefully.
Members
Three to eight per team, mixed by function. Include people who meet that competitor regularly, usually from sales, since they have heard the actual arguments and will notice when a move is implausible.
What they must produce
A concrete deliverable per round: three moves ranked by likelihood, each with the trigger that would prompt it. Teams asked to discuss produce discussion; teams asked to hand something in produce moves.
Put the sceptics on the red teams
Gilad's framing is that competitor teams play devil's advocate against the home plan, and that only works if the people doing it have both the standing and the inclination to be genuinely difficult. A red team of junior volunteers will be polite, and politeness ruins the exercise.
How to build the intelligence pack for each team
Each team gets only what that player would plausibly know, and the asymmetry is the point rather than an oversight. A competitor team handed your internal roadmap will construct responses no real competitor could construct, which feels rigorous and produces a fantasy. Giving them exactly what a well-run competitor intelligence function at that company would have is what makes their moves predictive rather than imaginative.
What they receive
For a competitor team: your public materials, their own public positioning and pricing, hiring signals, review themes, and any public information about the segment. This is genuinely what they would know about you, which is more than teams expect and less than they want.
Source
Dated, from your existing competitor profiles and monitoring. A war game is a good test of whether your standing intelligence is adequate, and discovering that you cannot assemble a credible pack for a major rival is itself a finding worth having.
What they deliberately do not get
Your internal roadmap, margins, unreleased plans and internal debates. Write the exclusions down, because well-meaning organisers hand over too much in the interest of fairness and thereby remove the constraint that makes the exercise work.
Give the home team no advantage either
The home team should work from what it actually knows, including the gaps. A home team briefed with perfect information about competitor intentions is not testing a plan, it is rehearsing one.
Circulate packs in advance where possible
Half a day of reading time before the game raises the quality of the first round substantially. Teams that meet their material at nine in the morning spend round one learning it rather than playing.
How to structure the rounds of a business wargame
Two or three rounds, with a tight clock. The standard shape is: the home team presents the plan, competitor teams respond, the home team counters, and then a final round considers the second-order effects. Keeping time short is deliberate and worth defending against complaints, because teams given longer produce more slides rather than better moves, and the compression is what forces them to commit to a position instead of hedging.
Round 1
The home plan is presented, then competitor teams prepare their response. Roughly 60 to 90 minutes of team time. This is the round that produces the most surprise, and it is worth protecting from over-running earlier sessions.
Round 2
Competitor teams present, the home team responds. The value here is watching whether the home plan has an answer at all, and the silence when it does not is more persuasive than any analysis document.
Round 3, optional
Second-order effects: what happens after the responses land, how the market looks in a year. Worth running only if the first two rounds finished cleanly, and worth dropping without regret if they did not.
What each team hands in
A specific artifact per round, ranked and with triggers. Handing something in changes team behaviour: it converts an open discussion into a decision the team has to commit to and defend in plenary.
Protect the debrief slot
Timetable it and defend it absolutely. Rounds always over-run, the debrief is always the thing compressed, and the debrief is where the day's findings actually get captured.
How to set the rules of a business wargame
Write them down and read them out at the start. Unstated rules get argued about mid-round, and those arguments cost more time than agreeing the rules would have. The most important rule is that competitor teams act in their own interest rather than in yours, because the failure mode of every corporate war game is teams being gentle with a plan their colleagues wrote and their executives are visibly attached to.
Competitor teams play to win, on their own terms
Their objective is their company's success, not a balanced assessment of yours. Teams that go easy produce a comfortable result, which is worse than not running the game because it confers false confidence.
Moves must be plausible for that competitor
Constrained by their actual capabilities, cost base and history. A rival with no engineering capacity in an area cannot ship there in a quarter, and unconstrained moves make the output unusable.
Every move needs a stated trigger and reasoning
A move without reasoning cannot be evaluated or watched for. The reasoning is what turns the output into an early-warning indicator you can actually monitor afterwards.
No appeals to information the team would not have
The facilitator should stop this in the moment. It is the most common way a war game drifts from prediction into imagination, and it happens gradually enough that nobody notices without a referee.
Seniority does not settle disagreements inside a team
Worth stating explicitly, because the most senior person in a red team will otherwise decide its moves and the exercise becomes their opinion with extra steps.
The home team may not change the plan mid-game
They respond to moves; they do not retro-fit the plan to survive them. Rewriting under pressure produces a plan that beats the specific moves played and no others.
How to log moves and counter-moves during a business wargame
Filled in live by the facilitator, and the reasoning column is worth more than the move itself. Six months later nobody remembers what Red 1 proposed, but the reasoning behind it becomes a lens for reading real competitor behaviour: when you later see a rival do something adjacent, the logged reasoning tells you whether it fits a pattern somebody already anticipated. This log is the artifact that outlives the day.
Move
Concrete and specific: "match the free tier within one quarter, capped at 10 seats". Vague moves such as respond aggressively on price cannot be planned against and cannot be recognised if they happen.
Their reasoning
In the team's own words, captured while they are still in role. This is the column that makes the log useful later, and it is the one facilitators skip when the clock is tight.
Our response
The home team's answer, including when there is not a good one. Recording an unanswered move honestly is the most valuable single entry a war game can produce.
Plausibility
Assessed by the room rather than by the team that proposed it. High-plausibility moves become watch items; low-plausibility ones stay in the log for completeness and are not planned against.
Convert high-plausibility moves into monitoring
Each one should leave the room with a trigger to watch for. This is where a war game connects to standing competitive intelligence, and it is the step that turns a one-day event into something with a tail.
How to run the debrief of a business wargame
Run it while everyone is still in the room, because a debrief scheduled for the following week does not happen. The question that matters is not what did we learn, which produces generalities, but what surprised us, which produces the specific assumption failures the day existed to surface. Surprise is the signal: it marks precisely the places where the organisation's shared model of its competitors was wrong.
What surprised us
Ask each team, not just the home team. Competitor teams are frequently surprised by how easy their own response was to construct, which is a finding about your plan rather than about them.
Which assumption it challenged
Name the specific assumption, ideally one written in the plan being tested. "That the move would buy us two to three quarters of advantage" is challengeable; "we were too optimistic" is a mood.
Confidence now
How the room's confidence in that assumption has moved. Recording the direction is enough, and it gives the decision-maker something more useful than a summary of the day.
What we should verify
War games generate hypotheses rather than facts. Several will be checkable afterwards through ordinary research, and routing them into the intelligence queue is what stops the day's conclusions hardening into beliefs on the strength of a role-play.
Ask what would have to be true for the plan to work
A good closing question. It reframes the day from criticism into conditions, and the resulting list is frequently the most actionable output the exercise produces.
How to capture decisions from a business wargame
Three to five rows, written before the room empties. This is the only part of the day that changes anything, and it is routinely lost because the game runs long and everyone leaves energised rather than committed. The energy fades within a week; the written decisions do not. If the game produced no decision at all, record that honestly, because it is a finding about whether the format was the right choice.
Finding
Drawn from the debrief with specificity: "the advantage window is one quarter, not three". Findings phrased as impressions do not survive the first challenge from someone who was not in the room.
What we will do
Frequently one of three things: re-run the business case on a tested assumption, delay or change the plan, or proceed and monitor a named trigger. All three are legitimate outcomes, including proceeding unchanged with eyes open.
Owner
Named, present in the room, and accepting it out loud. War game outputs assigned to absent people have an unusually low completion rate, because nobody else in the room witnessed the reasoning.
By when
Tied to the original decision date. Findings arriving after the decision they were meant to inform are the reason people conclude war games are theatre.
How we will know it worked
Observable, and for monitoring decisions this is a specific competitor trigger. Watching for a move you anticipated, and seeing it arrive, is the strongest possible argument for running the exercise again.
Sourcing and upkeep: making a business wargame worth the day
These rules apply to every section above. A war game consumes twenty people for a day, which makes it one of the most expensive things a competitive intelligence function will ever organise. That cost is justified only when the format is genuinely the right tool: a real decision, genuine uncertainty about competitor reasoning, and enough standing intelligence for the teams to play plausibly. Missing any of the three and the day will be enjoyable and inconsequential.
No pending decision, no war game
The prerequisite. Without a real choice waiting on the output, the day produces energy and no change, which is how the format acquired its reputation for being fun and pointless.
Research first, role-play second
Anything answerable from published sources should be researched beforehand. War games are for questions about competitor reasoning under pressure, which is a genuinely narrow class of question and the only one they answer better than analysis.
Asymmetric intelligence packs, enforced
Each team knows only what that player would know. Handing competitor teams your internal roadmap produces responses no real competitor could produce, which feels rigorous and is fiction.
Senior sceptics on the competitor teams
The structural choice that most determines quality. Red teams staffed by polite juniors will not threaten the home plan, and an unthreatened plan learns nothing.
Log the reasoning, not just the moves
The reasoning is what remains useful six months later, when a real competitor does something adjacent and you need to know whether anyone anticipated it.
Debrief in the room, decisions before it empties
Both are always compressed by over-running rounds, and both are where the entire value is captured. Protect them in the timetable and defend them on the day.
Route the hypotheses into research
A war game produces plausible reasoning, not verified fact. Several outputs will be checkable afterwards, and checking them is what stops role-play conclusions hardening into organisational belief.
A business wargame example
You are at Pipedrive, weighing whether to introduce a free read-only seat tier before renewals season. Analysis cannot tell you how HubSpot would respond, so you run a one-day war game. This is that plan, filled in.
Published pricing and packaging verified 2 August 2026, from the companies’ own pages rather than third-party round-ups, which frequently conflate annual and monthly prices. Pricing changes without notice, so re-check before quoting any of it.
Sections marked illustrative are invented for this example. Win rates, deal counts, discounting behaviour, customer quotes, owners and internal dates are not published by HubSpot, Pipedrive or anyone else, so those rows are a plausible fictional scenario rather than reported fact, and should not be read as claims about how either company performs or negotiates. Everything else comes from the two pricing pages linked below, read on the date shown.
Wargame detailsIllustrative
| Field | Example entry |
|---|---|
| The decision this informs | Whether to introduce a free read-only seat tier, and if so with what cap |
| Who makes that decision, and when | Elena V., CEO, on 31 Oct 2026 |
| Date and duration | 17 Oct 2026, one day, 09:00 to 17:00 |
| Participants and teams | 18 people in four teams of four to five |
| Facilitator | Tom A., Competitive Intelligence. Not the plan's author |
| What we will do with the output | Decisions go into the 31 Oct pricing review; triggers go into the tracker |
1. The question the game must answerIllustrative
| Question | Why we cannot answer it from analysis alone | What a useful answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| How would HubSpot respond if we introduced free read-only seats, and how fast? | Their response depends on internal reasoning about segment defence, which no published source reveals | A ranked set of likely responses, each with a trigger we could watch for |
| Does the move actually win us the deals we are losing, or only neutralise one objection? | It depends on how buyers re-weight once the objection is gone, which we can only reason about | A view from the customer team on what they would do next |
2. Teams and who they playIllustrative
| Team | Who they play | Members | What they must produce |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Us, presenting the free read-only tier plan | 4, led by Maya R., Product Marketing | The plan, the business case and the assumed advantage window |
| Red 1 | HubSpot Sales Hub, playing to win | 5, including two from sales who meet them weekly | Three ranked responses with triggers and reasoning |
| Red 2 | A smaller regional rival, playing to win | 4, including one solutions consultant | Three ranked responses, plus whether they would react at all |
| Customer | A 40-seat mid-market buyer currently evaluating both | 5, including two from customer success | How they would actually re-decide once the objection disappears |
3. Intelligence pack per teamIllustrative
| Team | What they receive | Source | What they deliberately do not get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red 1 | Their own published pricing and packaging, our public pricing page, our public positioning, hiring signals, review themes | Competitor profile and monitoring, verified 2 Aug 2026 | Our internal roadmap, our margins, and the business case behind the plan |
| Red 2 | The same public set, plus their regional presence and support model | Competitor profile, verified 2 Aug 2026 | Our internal roadmap and margins |
| Customer | Both vendors' public pricing pages, review themes for both, and nothing internal from either | Both published pricing pages, read 2 Aug 2026 | Any vendor-internal information at all |
| Home | Everything we actually know today, including the gaps | Internal | Any information about competitor intentions we do not genuinely have |
4. Rounds and timingIllustrative
| Round | What happens | Time | What each team hands in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | Home team presents the plan; competitor and customer teams prepare responses | 75 minutes team time, 20 minutes presentation | Three ranked moves with triggers, per team |
| Round 2 | Competitor teams present; home team responds live | 60 minutes | Home team's counter to each high-plausibility move |
| Round 3 | Second-order effects: where the segment sits a year out | 45 minutes | One paragraph per team on the end state |
| Debrief | What surprised each team, and which assumption it challenged | 50 minutes, protected | The debrief table, completed in the room |
5. Rules of the gameIllustrative
| Rule | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Competitor teams act in their own interest, not in ours | Teams that go easy on the home plan produce a comfortable and useless result |
| Moves must be plausible given that competitor's real capabilities and cost base | Unconstrained moves cannot be planned against or watched for |
| Every move needs a stated trigger and the reasoning behind it | The reasoning is what becomes a monitoring indicator afterwards |
| No team may use information it would not plausibly have | This is how a war game drifts from prediction into imagination |
| Seniority does not settle disagreements inside a team | Otherwise the exercise becomes the most senior person's opinion with extra steps |
| The home team may not rewrite the plan mid-game | A plan retro-fitted to survive these moves will not survive different ones |
6. Move and counter-move logIllustrative
| Round | Team | Move | Their reasoning | Our response | Plausibility |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Red 1 | Match with a capped free viewer tier within one quarter | Cheaper than losing the segment, and their packaging already separates viewing from editing | We would be undifferentiated again on the criterion we led with | High, it costs them little and fits their existing model |
| 1 | Red 1 | Do nothing, and compete on suite breadth instead | Our move only neutralises one objection; their breadth advantage is untouched | We win the seat argument and still lose consolidation deals | Medium, and uncomfortable because it is cheap for them |
| 1 | Red 2 | No response at all | They do not compete in the segment where read-only seats matter | None needed | High, and a useful reminder that not every rival reacts |
| 1 | Customer | Shortlist both, then decide on time to first value | Once the seat cost objection is gone, the next criterion decides | This is the criterion we already win and rarely lead with | High, and the most actionable finding of the day |
| 2 | Red 1 | Bundle onboarding free above 50 seats rather than matching seats | Attacks our total-cost argument without touching their seat model | We had no prepared answer to this | Medium to high, and it was not in our plan at all |
7. Debrief: what surprised usIllustrative
| What surprised us | Which assumption it challenged | Confidence now | What we should verify |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red 1 matched within a quarter and found it easy to justify | That the move would buy us two to three quarters of advantage | Low confidence in the original timing assumption | Whether they have matched a competitor's packaging quickly before, and how fast |
| The customer team ignored the seat change once it was no longer an objection | That removing the objection would win the deal on its own | The move neutralises rather than wins, which is a different business case | Whether recent losses cite a second reason behind the seat cost |
| Nobody had considered an onboarding-fee response | That the competitive response would come through seat pricing | Low. We were planning against one axis only | Both vendors' published onboarding fees, and any recent change to them |
| Red 2 declined to respond at all, and was right to | That all named rivals would react | Higher confidence that this is a two-player question | Nothing, this one resolved in the room |
8. Decisions, owners and datesIllustrative
| Finding | What we will do | Owner | By when | How we will know it worked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The advantage window is roughly one quarter, not three | Re-run the business case on a one-quarter window before the pricing decision | Maya R., Product Marketing | 28 Oct 2026 | The 31 Oct decision is taken against a tested assumption |
| The move neutralises an objection rather than winning deals outright | Pair it with leading on time to first value in every demo, not as a separate initiative | Dana K., Sales | 31 Oct 2026 | Both changes ship together or neither does |
| An onboarding-fee response was unanticipated and plausible | Add competitor onboarding fees to the monitoring tracker as a trigger | Tom A., Competitive Intelligence | 24 Oct 2026 | A change in either vendor's onboarding fee raises an alert |
| Three war game hypotheses are checkable from public sources | Route them into the request queue rather than treating them as findings | Tom A., Competitive Intelligence | 28 Oct 2026 | Each is confirmed, refuted or recorded as undetermined before 31 Oct |
How to roll out your business wargame
- 1Copy or download the blank plan. Use Copy to paste it straight into Google Sheets or Excel with the columns intact, or download the CSV, Notion or PDF version.
- 2Confirm there is a real decision waiting on it. A war game with no pending choice behind it is an expensive workshop. Name the decision, the decider and the date first.
- 3Delete the example rows. Each table ships with one example row so the pattern is obvious. Remove it before you circulate the plan.
- 4Research anything that published sources could answer. War games are for questions about competitor reasoning under pressure. Everything else is cheaper and better answered by analysis.
- 5Put your senior sceptics on the competitor teams. Home teams defend, which is easier. Competitor teams have to construct a genuine threat, and that is where the value is produced.
- 6Build asymmetric intelligence packs and enforce them. Each team gets only what that player would plausibly know. Write down what they deliberately do not get.
- 7Run two or three tight rounds and log the reasoning. Each team hands in ranked moves with triggers. The reasoning column outlives the day; the moves alone do not.
- 8Debrief in the room and write decisions before it empties. Ask what surprised you rather than what you learned, then convert high-plausibility moves into monitoring triggers.
Business wargame FAQ
What is a business wargame?
A business wargame is a structured role-play in which colleagues take the part of your competitors, and sometimes your customers, and respond to a real plan of yours. It runs typically for a day, with three to five small teams working through two or three timed rounds of moves and counter-moves. Its purpose is to discover how rivals would react before you commit, rather than afterwards. The format was adapted from military planning and brought into corporate strategy work over several decades.
What is business wargaming used for?
For decisions where the uncertainty is about competitor reasoning rather than about facts. Typical cases: whether to launch at a given price, whether to enter a segment a rival dominates, how to sequence a launch, or whether a packaging change will be matched and how quickly. What it is not for is anything a published source could settle. If the question is what a competitor currently charges, research it. If the question is what they would do next, and why, that is what a war game answers better than analysis.
How do you run a business war game?
Confirm there is a real pending decision. Write one primary question. Build three to five teams, putting your senior sceptics on the competitor teams. Give each team only the intelligence that player would plausibly have, and write down what they deliberately do not get. Run two or three tight rounds where each team hands in ranked moves with triggers and reasoning. Log the moves live. Then debrief in the room, asking what surprised people rather than what they learned, and write the decisions before anyone leaves.
How long does a business wargame take?
One day is the standard, occasionally a day and a half for a larger or more consequential decision. Benjamin Gilad, who has run these for large firms for decades and wrote Business War Games, works in that range and it holds up in practice. Shorter than half a day and teams never get properly into role. Longer than two days and the cost stops being defensible for most decisions, since a war game consumes twenty people simultaneously and that is its real price rather than the facilitation.
How many people do you need for a business wargame?
Usually twelve to thirty, in teams of three to eight. Below about twelve you cannot staff enough competitor teams to generate genuine competitive pressure, and one thin red team produces one line of attack rather than several. Above thirty the plenary sessions stop working as discussions and become presentations, which removes the argument that makes the format valuable. If you have fewer than twelve people available, a smaller structured exercise with two teams is more honest than calling it a war game.
What teams should a business wargame have?
A home team presenting the plan, two or three competitor teams each playing a named rival, and ideally a customer or market team. The customer team is the most under-used and frequently the most illuminating, because it is the only one representing the people whose behaviour actually determines the outcome, and it regularly reveals that a move competitors would match is one customers would not even notice. Assign named companies rather than archetypes, since a disruptive new entrant produces vague moves.
Who should be on the competitor teams?
Your most senior and most sceptical people, which is counter-intuitive and is the structural choice that most determines quality. Home teams defend a plan, which requires less of them. Competitor teams have to construct a genuinely threatening response, which is harder and is where the day's value is produced. Include people who meet that competitor regularly, usually from sales, since they have heard the real arguments and will spot an implausible move. A red team of polite juniors will not threaten anything.
What is the difference between business wargaming and tabletop wargaming?
They share a name and almost nothing else. Tabletop or miniature wargaming is a hobby involving model figures, dice and rulesets, with its own large community and terminology, and it dominates general searches for wargaming. Business wargaming is a corporate strategy method in which colleagues role-play competitors against a real plan to anticipate their responses. Both trace back loosely to military planning exercises, and that shared ancestry is the entire connection. Searching for wargaming templates without the word business will return the hobby.
What is the difference between wargaming and scenario planning?
Scenario planning explores possible futures shaped by forces largely outside anyone's control: regulation, technology shifts, economic conditions. It asks what the world might look like and how robust your strategy is across those worlds. Wargaming is narrower and more adversarial, focusing on how identified competitors would actively respond to something you do. Scenario planning is about the environment; wargaming is about opponents. Organisations often need both, and they answer genuinely different questions, so substituting one for the other disappoints.
Is business wargaming the same as red teaming?
They overlap but are not the same. Red teaming is a broad practice of assigning someone to attack a plan, assumption or system, and it appears in security, intelligence and strategy work. It can be one person and it can take an hour. A business wargame is a specific format: multiple teams playing named competitors and customers, asymmetric intelligence packs, timed rounds of moves and counter-moves. The red teams inside a war game are doing red teaming, so it is fair to describe wargaming as a structured, multi-party version of it.
What intelligence should each team receive?
Only what that player would plausibly know, and the asymmetry is the point rather than an oversight. A competitor team gets their own public positioning and pricing, your public materials, hiring signals, review themes and public segment information. They do not get your internal roadmap, margins or unreleased plans. Handing them your internal material feels fair and produces responses no real competitor could construct, which is a fantasy dressed as rigour. Write the exclusions down, because organisers over-share in the interest of fairness.
How many rounds should a business wargame have?
Two or three. Round one is the home team presenting and competitor teams preparing a response, which is where most of the surprise happens. Round two is competitor teams presenting and the home team responding live, where the silence when there is no good answer is more persuasive than any document. An optional round three covers second-order effects a year out. Keep the clock tight, because teams given longer produce more slides rather than better moves, and compression forces them to commit rather than hedge.
Who should facilitate a business wargame?
Someone who is not the author of the plan being tested. An author facilitating a critique of their own work steers it unconsciously, and everyone in the room senses it, which suppresses exactly the criticism the day exists to generate. Competitive intelligence is a natural home for the role since they build the intelligence packs anyway. The facilitator's main jobs during the day are enforcing the information rules, keeping the clock, and logging the reasoning behind each move rather than only the move.
Do you need competitive intelligence before running a wargame?
Yes, and a war game is a good test of whether you have enough. Teams can only play a competitor plausibly if they have a credible picture of that company's positioning, pricing, capabilities and constraints. Discovering during preparation that you cannot assemble a usable pack for a major rival is a genuine finding, and it is a reason to postpone the game and do the research first. War games amplify the quality of your existing intelligence; they do not substitute for it.
When is a business wargame the wrong tool?
Four cases. When there is no pending decision, in which case it is an expensive workshop. When the question is answerable from published sources, which research settles faster and more reliably. When you lack the intelligence for teams to play plausibly, which produces imaginative rather than predictive moves. And when the decision has already been taken and the game is being used to build consensus around it, which participants detect quickly and resent, and which damages the credibility of the format for the next time you genuinely need it.
How do you capture the output of a business wargame?
Three artifacts. A move log written live, capturing each move, the team's reasoning and its assessed plausibility, where the reasoning matters more than the move. A debrief table completed in the room, recording what surprised each team and which assumption it challenged. And three to five written decisions with named owners and dates before anyone leaves. War games generate energy that dissipates within about a week, so anything not written down on the day is generally lost.
What happens after a business wargame?
Two things, and both are routinely skipped. High-plausibility competitor moves become monitoring triggers, so your standing intelligence watches for the specific signals that would indicate a predicted move is happening. And the hypotheses the game generated get routed into ordinary research, since a war game produces plausible reasoning rather than verified fact. Without the second step, role-play conclusions harden into organisational belief, which is a worse outcome than not having run the game.
How often should you run a business wargame?
Tied to decisions rather than to a calendar, which usually means once or twice a year for most companies. Running them on a schedule guarantees that some will happen with no decision waiting on them, which is how the format acquires a reputation for being enjoyable and inconsequential. The right trigger is a consequential, reversible-at-cost decision where the main uncertainty is competitor response: a pricing or packaging change, a segment entry, or a launch into contested ground.
What is an example of a business wargame?
Decision: whether to introduce a free read-only seat tier before renewals season, taken by the CEO on 31 October. Setup: one day, 18 people, four teams. A home team presenting the plan, two competitor teams playing named rivals, and a customer team playing a 40-seat buyer evaluating both. Each competitor team received only public material about us and about themselves, and explicitly not our roadmap, margins or business case. Round one produced the day's most useful findings: the larger rival matched the move within a quarter and found it easy to justify, which collapsed the assumed three-quarter advantage window to one; and the customer team ignored the change entirely once it stopped being an objection, deciding instead on time to first value, which is a criterion we already win and rarely lead with. Round two produced a move nobody had anticipated, an onboarding-fee response that attacks the total-cost argument without touching seat pricing, for which the home team had no prepared answer. Decisions: re-run the business case on a one-quarter window, pair the packaging change with a demo change rather than shipping it alone, add competitor onboarding fees to the monitoring tracker as a trigger, and route three checkable hypotheses into the research queue.
What are the most common mistakes in business wargaming?
Six recur. Running one with no decision waiting on it, which produces energy and no change. Giving competitor teams information no real competitor would have, which turns prediction into imagination. Staffing red teams with polite juniors, so nobody genuinely threatens the plan. Letting the home team rewrite the plan mid-game to survive the moves played. Allowing rounds to over-run so the debrief gets compressed, which is where all the findings are captured. And treating the output as fact rather than hypothesis, so a day of role-play hardens into organisational belief without anyone verifying it.
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