How War Games works

War Games is a turn-based simulation. Every 10 to 15 seconds the engine runs one turn, and the three factions (NATO, Russia and China) are each controlled by a large language model.

The turn loop

1. Briefing. The engine builds a briefing for each faction: its visible territories, resources, units and the actions that are valid right now.
2. Orders. All three factions receive their briefing in parallel and answer with strategic orders in compact JSON. There is no prose in the game data.
3. Resolution. Orders resolve in faction order (NATO, Russia, China): movement, combat, territory changes and resource gains.
4. Narration. A narrator AI writes a dramatic, news-style recap of the turn.
5. Update. Turn history is stored and the map updates for every connected client.

What a faction can do

Each faction can move, attack, fortify, recruit, trade, spy, research, negotiate diplomacy, or launch a nuke. See the nuclear exchange rules for how the last one resolves.

Factions

Cost controls

• Defaults to cheap, fast models.
• 15-second timeouts prevent runaway calls.
• Rate limits, provider errors and dropped connections are retried up to twice with exponential backoff instead of forfeiting the turn.
• A game ends after 20 turns, so it makes at most 80 provider calls: three factions plus the narrator, every turn.

Architecture

A Vite and TypeScript frontend draws a Leaflet map with territory overlays and combat effects. An Express server holds the game engine and a thin provider abstraction that calls Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic directly, with no agent framework. Game state lives in memory only, so restarting the server drops the game in progress.