Capt. Nicholas Royer describes himself and many of his fellow Marines as "nerds with a drive for violence." It's an apt description for disciples of a booming craft in the Corps: war-gaming.
In 2023, about six months into his tenure as II Marine Expeditionary Force's modeling and simulation officer -- or as he puts it, the unit's "pet little mad scientist," Royer was responsible for coordinating training and war-gaming needs for units across Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, at its Battle Simulation Center, the Marine Corps' first purpose-built facility of its kind.
Amid the fancy simulation systems and high demand for laptops, Royer saw that there was not only a frequent "technical burden" to offering Marines a chance to test out battle scenarios, but an accessibility gap. War-gaming was a staple at higher echelons, and other available simulations -- which can be loaned out to or scheduled by troops on a limited basis -- catered to small-unit tactics for motivated junior noncommissioned officers or officers amid their busy schedules.
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Royer said "we had a bit of a gap in something that we could do in between those two extremes" and identified a need for a war game that units could easily check out from the center that would still fulfill the immersive quality of the technical simulators, but without the barrier to entry or logistical support.
Using his personal experience playing and designing board games, Royer began 3D printing miniature prototypes of Marine figurines and equipment in his own home for a concept called "Down Range," a now high-demand, turn-based game that has been embraced by II MEF and can be played by any group of Marines in any clime, from the smoke pits to the Arctic Circle.
"If there's one thing I've come to believe about Marines from my time at the sim center is there are a lot of Marines who are, to put it bluntly, nerds," Royer said in an interview with Military.com on Tuesday. "They're still Marines, and Marines have a drive for violence."
The marriage of those two "passions" resulted in "Down Range," and it works like this: Marine units can check out "kits" with dice, rules sheets and 3D-printed pieces that resemble different formations, from Marines' own units to enemy equipment.
At face value, the sets might resemble "terrain model kits" that have been used by tactical leaders for years to demonstrate battle plans, but the nuance of "Down Range" comes with the addition of a competitive, easily replicable, interactive game at a low cost, which runs about $4 to $5 per kit, Royer said.
Royer said that the game has driven healthy competition among Marines, adding that "when you're playing it, you want to beat your buddy. You've got two lance corporals going at it over the sand table, and guy A really wants to beat guy B, and the rules push him into a set of practices that reflect Marine Corps doctrine and reflect effective ways to use some of these new technologies like electronic warfare and drones."
High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS; Soviet-era BMP-1s; and even tiny Marine replicas holding shoulder-fired rocket launchers dot a two-dimensional board, which could be a piece of paper with terrain features drawn onto it with marker or a handmade "sand table" out in the field.
Each token can be easily 3D printed at the simulation center to match any type of Marine unit and is assigned a difficulty number during play. When a Marine rolls the dice, the resulting number determines how effective his or her move is against the simulated enemy.
"We're taking the rules down to toddler level, so the training audience can have adult-level discussions about what are the tactics, the techniques and the procedures of prosecuting violence on the enemy," Royer said. And because the miniatures are made to model real equipment, Marines are beginning to easily identify enemy vehicles and equipment "in a way that translates to real life," he added.
'If I Can Be Shot'
Royer explained that some of the features of "Down Range" were inspired by commercial games, but it was also important to him that unique Marine Corps characteristics were part of the game's DNA and that it was free from the often cumbersome spreadsheets or databases associated with popular civilian games like "Dungeons & Dragons."
Turns can be used to set up accurate fields of fire, detect or deploy drones, employ mortar systems or contend with enemy electronic warfare targeting, among pretty much any other scenario a Marine can think of.
"When playing this, we start having Marines who may have been in the Marine Corps for less than six months start talking among each other and coming to the conclusion -- without being told from the top down -- if I transmit, I can be detected," Royer said. "If I can be detected, I can be shot, and if I can be shot, I can definitely be killed."
Each move has a consequence, and it is with the accessibility of the pieces, hands-on features and immersion that those consequences become clear to the user.
"When you're playing the game, the consequences of whatever you try to do or whatever you would like to do are very apparent," said Cpl. Elijah Woodard, a heavy equipment mechanic with II MEF who has played the game. "You can tell very easily the flaws that come in your own planning, and it allows you to be a better planner and just overall tactical decision-maker in the future."
The game fits into the Marine Corps' official decision-making process, specifically between planning and execution of a mission. War-gaming is the third step of a six-step system that is used by Marines at all levels -- and when it comes time to brief a plan, common understanding is one of the most important and difficult elements to achieve before execution.
"I know there's been plenty of times where I've had terrain models or other things built to me, and it's a little hard to kind of focus without having real, very viable visual aids to use to kind of give me a better picture of what's going on," Woodard said. "So, I think with this, the way it's being played, is very versatile."
Gunnery Sgt. Joshua Long, the staff NCO in charge of II MEF's simulation center, said that they sent a kit to the School of Infantry at Camp Lejeune for young leaders to use during the orders process, and it helped junior Marines in understanding those plans.
"They could walk out their plan with their team leaders and say, 'Hey, does everybody understand this individual aspect of X, Y or Z?" Long said of the game's use at the school. "There's a common understanding between the squad leader, the team leaders, all the way down to the individual riflemen. And it builds not only a sense of confidence in that squad leader, but it's a great team-building exercise as well for the squad where the team leaders get involved."
The Art and History of War(-Gaming)
War-gaming is a critical feature for any military and has been for centuries.
It allows troops to fight against simulated enemy combatants without the stresses of actual combat or logistical burdens of training exercises. And in the last five-plus years, the Marine Corps has invested significant effort into its war-gaming repertoire: tournaments; state-of-the art, multimillion-dollar centers dedicated to the craft; and a "War-Gaming Cloud" at the Marine Corps University that provides a digital library of countless war games and resources, for example.
War-gaming for the Marine Corps has been happening in various forms for over a century, according to retired Marine Maj. Ian Brown, who, along with Sebastian Bae, a former Marine sergeant, current war-game designer and professor, penned a history of Marine Corps war-gaming over the last 100-plus years in an article for Marine Corps University in 2021.
In that history, the service experimented with different war games, like the "Tactical Game" used at the Naval War College, they wrote, but "too often, the Corps' institutional embrace slackened or vanished entirely, leaving the promise unfulfilled."
It wasn't until 2019, Brown said in an interview Wednesday with Military.com, that the Marine Corps experienced a true "watershed" moment when it came to war-gaming. The then-commandant, Gen. David Berger, emphasized the craft in his planning guidance to the entire force and, according to Brown, the direction marked a "definite before-and-after environment" for the Corps' war-gaming.
"After that point is where all the effort to build the cloud environment for the games, to hire a war-gaming director, to look at how those games could formally integrate with all of the preexisting curricula to become an enhancement to each of those courses in the way that was appropriate for the operational level they were looking at. That did not exist before," Brown said.
That watershed came at a fortuitous time in the digital age. During the 1990s -- part of what Brown and Bae characterized as a 20-year "golden age" starting in the '70s for military war-gaming -- the craft existed in "different little islands of excellence," Brown said, but did not have the technological connectivity to make it viable for the broader institution like it does today.
And as the internet became commonplace for Americans in the early 2000s, "immediate operational concerns in Afghanistan and Iraq absorbed institutional bandwidth" throughout the mid-2010s, and the Marine Corps "had no time for games," they wrote.
In the last five years, however, commercial games like "Dungeons & Dragons" have boomed in popularity, and the rapid proliferation of 3D printing has made it easier for home-brew game designers to make their own games. Designers can quickly share prototypes digitally with one another and turn to cheap filament to materialize them in their own homes via 3D printers.
So while the Marine Corps built and emphasized formal war-gaming practices, an informal, contemporary grassroots culture began to emerge in which Marines, according to Brown, felt that they could take the guidance they had received from higher up and experiment on their own initiative in this new, accessible environment.
"There's institutional, formal and informal threads, but also things outside the institution that have converged in a very convenient time right about now, where Marines are printing their own game pieces on their own 3D printers, and now it's having an impact on the formal training that they're doing," Brown said.
And that has trickled down to all ranks, so that when junior leaders on the battlefield are faced with difficult decisions, they've already strengthened that "mental muscle" through war-gaming, he added.
'All over the World'
According to the II MEF Marines Military.com spoke to on Tuesday, it seemed to help that the Marine Corps -- or at least their unit -- was tapping into their personal interests in a way that made experimentation with new ideas possible, or at least acceptable.
Royer, the "mad scientist" of II MEF, is a communication strategy officer by trade, but a self-described game nerd. Long, the staff NCO in charge of the Battle Simulation Center, is a career infantryman, with experience in training young leaders how to violently close with and destroy the enemy.
"When I showed up to II MEF, I sat down and had a good conversation with the II MEF [operations] chief before placing me where I needed to go," Long said. "And he said, 'OK, so you're an infantryman by trade. You've taught at SOI from everything from privates to squad leaders. You understand operations, because you were a current operations chief out in Okinawa, and you're a self-proclaimed nerd. Boy, do I have the spot for you.'"
The group's war games have been used to simulate disaster relief stateside, and law enforcement and other government agencies have "bought into" their concept. Other services, the Center for Naval Analysis, and international allies have been involved in the refinement of their war-gaming process, they said.
As of Tuesday, Royer's biggest problem was demand for "Down Range." He said he's sent it to Quantico, Virginia, and the Basic School, where new officers are trained; Long said that Marines are playing it on the decks of ships while deployed with Marine expeditionary units.
"At this point, 'Down Range' is kind of all over the world," Long said.
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