How to play

Goal. Move the four tracks on the crisis board the way your actor wants over six turns. The debrief scores the final board against your actor's aims and compares it with random play in the same seat. If escalation reaches 10, the exercise stops early.

Pick an actor. Play Estonia, Russia, NATO, the EU or the Narva community. Each is an institution with its own aims, listed in the panel. The other four are run by the computer.

Argue. Each turn opens with an inject, a short invented event that sets the scene. Choose one action and up to three reasons for it. The adjudicator, the game's umpire, scores every reason: strong (+1) if it shares a tag (border, law, information and so on) with the action you chose and the board backs it right now, weak (0) if it is off-topic or the situation does not support it. Ambitious actions start at −1, because the adjudicator judges them a stretch. Opposing AI actors raise up to two counter-arguments (−1 each if strong), and one friendly actor may add a supporting point (+1).

Roll. Roll two six-sided dice (2d6) and add the net modifier, the sum of every +1 and −1: 7 or more succeeds, 10 or more is a decisive success, 5 or 6 fails, 4 or less backfires and raises escalation. The panel shows the chance of success and how every dice total would land before you roll.

Counter. Then an AI actor argues its own move. Pick a counter-argument from your list, or none, and roll for it. After six turns, the debrief lists which of your reasons carried weight, which counters hurt and how each actor fared on the final board. The turn log can be printed or downloaded, and the page link replays the same game.

Method

Matrix games were invented by Chris Engle in 1988 as a way to run a game with words rather than numbers. Players state an action, its expected result and reasons it should succeed; other players argue against it; an umpire weighs the arguments and settles the outcome, often with dice. The UK Ministry of Defence's Wargaming Handbook (2017) describes the matrix game this way, and the NATO Wargaming Handbook (2023) lists it among the less rigid wargame types. The adjudication here follows the "weighted probabilities" option in the Matrix Game Construction Kit, as described by Tom Mouat: 2d6, 7 or more succeeds (58.3% with no modifier), each strong argument for +1 and each strong argument against −1, with very high or low totals giving stronger results.

A live matrix game relies on a human facilitator who judges each argument on its merits. This page replaces that judgment with a transparent rule: each reason and counter carries tags for what it is about and a condition on the board or inject that must hold. That makes the adjudication explainable and repeatable, but much cruder than a skilled umpire, and the menu of actions is fixed. Players in a real game can propose anything.

Notional values. The starting board, the base difficulty of each action, every board effect, the outcome bands above 9 and below 5, the AI actors' stances and choices, the order in which AI actors move, and the goal weights used in the debrief are all notional design choices for teaching. They are not estimates of any real behaviour. The seats are not balanced: Russia is the hardest to play, because most other actors argue against its moves, and the debrief compares your score with random play in the same seat rather than across seats. The dice use a seeded generator, so a saved link replays exactly.

What is left out: military operations, named officials, domestic politics inside each actor, negotiation between turns, and any real intelligence. Local Russian-speaking residents appear as a political actor through civic institutions, not as a proxy for any state.

The real background

These facts are real. The game's events are not.

Sources