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Fight Club Monthly (August 2026 newsletter)
The latest updates from the leading global wargaming community
“This is not a game! This is training for war! I must recommend it to the whole army.” - General Karl von Müffling, Chief of the Prussian General Staff (1824)
Welcome to the August 2026 edition of Fight Club Monthly!
HERE’S THE QUICK SUMMARY
· Come earn more Fight Club badges and climb the Hall of Honour leaderboard!
· Fight Club Deutschland exhibits at the German Command and Staff College again
· Fight Club Poland continues co-organizing the upcoming AWL wargaming conference
· Fight Club Türkiye prepares for the SHINE event at NATO's Innovation Continuum 2026
· The latest update from LTCOL Mark Gibson on what Fight Club is doing with Steel Beasts
· 4 new Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat. episodes & an article on 'vibecoding' Take That Bridge!
· The Cove (the Australian Army's PME platform) has reviewed Fight Club's Supply and Steel
· Ruddy Nice is hosting an Open Day at The Studio in Salisbury for Fight Club's Take That Hill!
…and now, here’s the full newsletter in detail!
SPOTLIGHT: Come earn your place in Fight Club's Hall of Honour
Do you have a Fight Club badge?
If not, what are you waiting for?!
If yes, why not earn some more!
From teaching a seminar to building a digital scenario, from competing in tournaments to analyzing game data, each badge marks a real contribution you have made to making Fight Club the leading global wargaming community…
…and now, we have a whole Hall of Honour dedicated to recognizing your efforts.
You can search your name on the Hall of Honour leaderboad to see how many badges you have (or even search another member’s name if you’re nosy and competitive like me!)
Mark Gibson is currently in the lead with 6 badges. Who's ready to earn more badges this month and dethrone him?
WHAT HAS FIGHT CLUB BEEN UP TO IN AUGUST 2026?
Take That Bridge! continues to evolve even further – Ed Farren can’t stop vibecoding!
The mission is still to command a company of troops and seize a defended bridge before the enemy can destroy it. The previous version had obstacle belts, mortars, stacking, two shot machine guns, red morale system and a revised VP score.
The latest build includes UGV machine guns, ISR, FPV attack drones; night attacks; mortars firing illumination, smoke and HE. 5 maps with 3 difficulty settings... now in 5 languages complete with an exportable AAR feature. It has never been more exciting to take that bridge!
PS: You can read about Ed’s vibecoding’ journey with Take That Bridge! here and you can still check out my Wargaming Weekly review here.
Fight Club Deutschland joined the German Command and Staff College for a joint booth and wargaming exhibition at this year's Training and Education Congress of Bundeswehr again.
The event, running from September 1-3, has an overall theme of “Societal resilience in peace, crisis and war”. Thus, some of the games we have on display focus on communal, democratic, climatic and organizational resilience. Additionally, we have some classic educational wargames on display, ranging from geopolitics, operational, to small tactical systems.
At the joint booth, as well as in the demo area, we had plenty of discussions about Fight Club and the potential of wargaming for training and educational purposes with representatives from the military, civic crisis organizations, enterprises, medical personnel and academics, matching Fight Club's spirit. It's always great to see growing interest in wargaming in all branches of government and society.
PS: Check out this interview with Jan Heinemann from Fight Club Deutschland where he walks you through the various games that were available at the exhibition (It's in German but you can turn on English captions).
Fight Club Poland (the newest Fight Club country chapter) continues to co-organize the second edition of the International Scientific Wargaming Conference AWL.
The upcoming conference, which will be held under the theme “Comprehensive Security: Advancing Wargaming in Military and Non-Military Domains”, at the Military University of Land Forces in Wrocław on September 15-17, is intended to be the major catalyst for developing Fight Club Poland’s core wargaming competencies, expanding the base, and boosting overall engagement.
AWL has been revealing the speakers you can look forward to at the conference on their X and LinkedIn pages, so far including:
· Brigadier General Sławomir Wojciechowski
· James Buckley
· Macieja Dojlitko
· Wojciech Zalewski
· Major Christopher Lowe
· Julianna Petrovánszki
· Tess Butler
· Thomas Danger
· Andrew Hodkinson MBE
· Piotr Wodtke
· Errico De Gaetano
· Jorit Wintjes
· Dr Iain Farquharson
· Andrzej Kruczyński
· Tim Barrick
· Brigadier General Matthew Tracy
· Paul Ellis
On a related note, I’d like to highlight Joint Commander Poland, a large scale adaptation of Sebastian Bae’s Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific by Konrad Idzik and Piotr Bambot, which was recently presented to a wider audience for the first time at Wargameron, a wargaming convention held near Warsaw.
The next test will happen at the AWL wargaming conference where the designers will present Joint Commander Poland.
Photo by Militarna Photo https://www.facebook.com/militarnaphoto
Fight Club Türkiye is currently preparing for the SHINE event with Radius Defence, part of NATO's Innovation Continuum 2026.
Our focus is a wargame called Arctic Fracture, a multi-domain game set in a contested Arctic/High North scenario. It places players in cross-domain command roles and tests their decision-making when using an AI-supported C4I platform across the land, air, cyber, and information domains under crisis conditions.
UPDATE: Steel Beasts SITREP for August
By LTCOL Mark Gibson, RAAC, ADF *
* Disclaimer: Whilst a serving Officer, any views or opinions expressed below are my views only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Australian Army, The Department of Defence, or The Commonwealth of Australia.
July/August seems to be when most in the Northern Hemisphere go on holidays. That and some unplanned hospital visits means that attendance has been a little lower than previously. We have conducted a couple of runs through our Reserve Demolition Guyard scenario:
Where people do some planning, take command, execute and then we conduct an AAR. When attendance has been below the critical mass for that we have worked our way down a list of “commonly asked questions” that cover points that more recent attendees missed during the initial training sessions.
These topics have included:
· The amount of real estate that a unit occupies in the real world (as opposed to the icon on the map).
· Navmesh vs Non Navmesh routes and when to choose which.
· Feedback provided if vehicle(s) in your unit get "hung up" on something and aren't keeping up with the group.
· Use of the "LOS Bubble" to control movement.
· Using the white space either side of the map to store commonly used routes (create and copy route chain).
· "Ghost routes" (routes that persist if you manually take over the movement).
· Managing "section movement" (i.e. you break up a single platoon).
· Default Infantry behaviours in buildings.
· Creating vehicle "task forces".
· Creating Infantry "task forces" to reduce the management burden (when 4 IFVs turn into 4 IFVs and 10 dismounted units).
· Suggested way to conduct a breach (create and share waypoints so other players can more easily follow).
· Breaching Roller vs Plough.
· Breaching wire using vehicles.
· Breaching wire using dismounted Engineers.
· Breaching minefields using vehicles.
· Breaching minefields using dismounted Engineers.
· Breaching dragoon's teeth vs steel beams vs abatis.
· Digging vehicle fighting positions.
· Controls available in the 3D world (lower right corner) that may speed up responses.
· Infantry weapons that can be "directly controlled".
· Laying and raising AVLBs (mobile bridges) T-55 based MTLB and Leopard 1 based Biber.
· Route and waypoint behaviours - explaining/expanding on the wiki entry.
· Flying helicopters (general principles).
· Setting up and using on board indirect like mortars etc.
· The use of smoke in the attack.
· Principles for conducting an attack by Mechanised Infantry.
WHAT’S NEW TO LISTEN TO/READ?
Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat. Episode 15: Systems Theory and The Taiwan Contingency with Dan Rice - Part 2.
In this second half of his conversation, Dan Rice (Co-Director of the US Marine Corps War College's China Warfighting Initiative) goes deeper with host Lex Luciak into the doctrinal weeds and the stakes get higher.
From the structural similarities between MDO and China's Systems Warfare approach, to the terrifying escalation ladder of striking dual-use targets on the Chinese mainland, this episode focuses on a difficult question - are we prepared for a moment where operational assumptions may prove false?
Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat. Episode 16: After Ukraine: Russia and the Baltics with Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges
The war in Ukraine will end sometime, but what happens next? In this episode, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, joins us to break down the next flashpoint on NATO's map: the Baltics.
We discuss why he believes Crimea will decide the outcome of the War in Ukraine, why he calls Russia's nuclear threats a "myth" designed to freeze Western decision making, and whether that logic changes once you're talking about a NATO member state. We get into the hard geography of the Baltics and what Russia's Eastern Flank pressure campaign of drones, sabotage, and gray zone warfare really mean to NATO.
Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat. Episode 17: AI, Command, and the Character of War with Dr. Anthony King
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Anthony King to discuss his new book, AI, Automation, and War, and what the rise of artificial intelligence actually means for the future of military command and conflict.
Moving beyond the familiar “killer robots” narrative, Dr. King argues that AI is more likely to augment military decision making than replace human judgment. We explore how AI is being absorbed into the increasingly collective nature of modern command, whether algorithms could transform the relationship between commanders and staff, and whether human oversight risks becoming a rubber stamp.
Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat. Episode 18: John Boyd: A YouTube Personality in an Analog Age with Ian Brown
Everyone knows John Boyd as "the OODA loop guy," but he was much more than that. In this episode, host Lex Luciak sits down with Ian Brown, a Boyd historian who spent nearly a decade inside the archives poring over decades of briefings, transcripts, and slides to separate the man from the meme.
We dig into why Boyd refused to publish a formal book, why he wouldn't let anyone walk away with his slides without sitting through the briefing, and why his 1976 essay, Destruction and Creation, and not the OODA loop, is the framework behind his thoughts and presentations.
Drawing on Ian's two books, A New Conception of War and the newly released Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals, he makes the case that Boyd was never really finished thinking and that reducing him to four boxes and an arrow loses almost everything that made him worth listening to in the first place.
Fight Club International co-founder Ed Farren has ended up in a bit of a 'vibe coding' rabbit hole... If you are an aspiring game designer and interested in the journey he took to evolve a perfectly sufficient fire and movement game into a modern tactical trainer, this article on the Fight Club website is for you!
In this recent article for The Cove, the Australian Army’s professional military education (PME) platform, David Hill reviews Supply and Steel, a two-to-three-player micro wargame by Fight Club International that recreates the logistical challenges of the Allied breakout from Normandy in 1944.
By making supply a finite resource that constrains movement and combat, the game provides an accessible way to explore sustainment, operational reach, culmination and interdiction. Hill proposes its use as a short unit PME activity, with particular relevance to an Australian Army preparing for dispersed littoral operations across the Indo-Pacific. The article concludes that simple print-and-play games can help commanders embed continuous PME into unit battle rhythms.
PS: Here’s a shameless plug to my own Wargaming Weekly review of Supply and Steel.
In this recent article for War on the Rocks, Brig. Gen. Matthew Tracy and Benjamin Jensen explored the significant structural and academic changes that the Marine Corps University has implemented so far (and what they have in the pipeline) in the face of wars waged by AI-enabled drones and fought across multiple domains in Europe, the Middle East, and looming over the Indo-Pacific.
As shown in the screenshot above, they were kind enough to link to Fight Club’s tactical decision games (TDGs) page, which you should absolutely check out if you still haven’t!
WHAT CAN YOU LOOK FORWARD TO IN SEPTEMBER 2026?
We have a couple of exciting guests in the pipeline for the Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat. podcast:
· Max Brooks (author of bestselling novel World War Z)
· Sebastian Bae (designer of bestselling wargame Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific)
We’re also still hoping to get Antoine Bourgilleau from the wargaming division of France’s Future Combat Command to talk about Duel Tactique for our PME game design series.
Lastly, on Wednesday, 9th September 2026, 10:00 – 16:00 BST, Ruddy Nice is hosting an Open Day at The Studio in Salisbury to dive into Take That Hill, the official digital adaptation of the tabletop primer from Fight Club International. Prizes and bragging rights up for grabs!
Until next time, you can catch the latest updates from Fight Club International on X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, YouTube, and Discord. Also make sure to play one of our analogue games!
Remember to think, fight, learn, repeat!
Yours in hex,
Rwizi.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha is a freelance wargame researcher, analyst and designer at Wargaming Weekly, one of the top publications in the world of professional wargaming. Rwizi is also a Guild Member at Mission Grey, a leading provider of external intelligence for corporate decision-making.
