Board design for business and other non-military wargames

The design of a business wargame, or any other game designed as a representation of a real, but not warlike confrontation, is not always easy, knowing that one of the fundamental problems lies in the display of the information to be processed. Traditionally, the practice of business wargaming is more like role-playing than board wargaming. Information circulates mainly orally between participants and referees, or via data dashboards eventually managed with computers. Matrix games have made an important contribution, as a solution, to simulation games, by offering a simple way of transforming and integrating implicit variables for one specific situation. In addition, they have contributed to the mechanics of the game by integrating the argumentative discourse of the participants with successful dice rolls. I have thus evolved from abstract business wargames, but integrating simulation and role attributions, to more classical gameplay, including an element of chance while keeping a multiplicity of possible outcomes. However, the problem of the game board remains. It is this point that I propose to develop in this paper, according to the research I have conducted. I thus distinguish two levels of representation, the tactical level and the strategic level. The tactical level is a function of a single individual profile, while the strategic level integrates a multiplicity of profiles. In this case, at the tactical level, I take up a hypothesis from the writing on marketing warfare that considers the field to be equivalent to the consumer's mind. Based on this hypothesis, I present how to design maps to produce a board according to the distance and spaces that can be assigned to particular elements of the game, depending on the data that I have and on the objective that I assign to the particular game.