Wargaming Weekly #036: Would you like to play a wargame about a tense African election season?

Introducing my debut business wargame titled “African Election” – now ready for solitaire players!

Okay, first of all, I have to make a big confession… I lied. African Election is technically not a wargame since it’s a solitaire game with no conflict from an opponent (human, solo-bot, or AI).

However, I still strongly feel that it can nominally be classified as a business wargame.

Business wargaming has been an ambition of mine for a while because it sits perfectly at the intersection of my amateur passion for wargaming (as a researcher and player) and my professional background in business (as a B2B marketing writer and fintech startup founder).

With the latest resurgence of military wargaming now spilling over into business wargaming, I knew that for my second wargame design effort, I had to dip my feet into designing a business wargame.

So, what the heck is African Election all about?

African Election is a print-and-play solitaire business wargame designed to be played in 20 – 30 minutes.

You are the country head of a multinational bank operating in an African nation during a tense election season. Your job is to navigate the complex challenges of internet shutdowns, ethnic tensions, security threats, campaign funding pressures, and relentless board oversight from headquarters.

The game is 12 turns long, with each turn representing one week of the election cycle. You need to survive all 12 turns without the Risk Level reaching 10, while maintaining at least 4 points in each of your three resources (Operations, Relationships, Reputation) to achieve maximum victory.

What else do you need to know about African Election?

There are 15 Pre-Election Event Cards that you will cut out and shuffle into one deck. You will draw from this deck in Turns 1-6.

There are 15 Post-Election Event Cards that you will also cut out and shuffle into another deck. You will draw from this deck in Turns 7-12.

In each turn, after drawing an Event Card and applying its effects, you can choose any one of the 9 actions in the Action Card menu (no need to cut these out). You can choose and use an Action Card more than once.

Download and print the full game PDF here to play African Election. Let me know what you think about the cards and their effects in the comments below!

[UPDATE on 2nd December, 2025: African Election v2.0 is now available to download and print. In this version, you roll a six-sided die for success after selecting your desired action as per the slightly updated rules. If you fail, you apply the Failed Action Effects instead of the regular Action Card Menu effects. This version also has a set of 9 post-game reflection questions at the end to help you get more value out of playing]

What inspired me to design African Election?

The following five sources of inspiration came together in a perfect blend:

1. Real life (the current lead-up to the 2026 Ugandan elections)

My African country, Uganda, is currently in the early stages of a fairly tense election season (though not quite as tense as some of the previous ones, to be honest). The incumbent political party has just concluded its primaries and many of the opposition parties are now conducting theirs too.

Some of the Event Cards that I have included are inspired by real events from previous election seasons. However, I also have to highlight that most of them are purely hypothetical, albeit still plausible enough for the country lead of a multinational bank to seriously consider for rigorous scenario planning.

2. Strategia Worldwide’s recent whitepaper about African elections

This June 2025 whitepaper by Strategia Worldwide is about election-related disruptions to businesses in Africa. I came across Strategia while using Gemini to research about the top business wargaming firms in the world. I was immediately intrigued when I saw that the default case study on their website is literally about our capital city, Kampala!

After downloading and reading the whitepaper, I felt I had to design a business wargame around this theme. I decided to focus on banking in particular because I’m building a fintech startup that will hopefully grow into a large multinational bank. Plus, it’s naturally one of the most influential industries in any country.

3. The Home Front by Tom Walker from Vedette Consulting

The Home Front is a business wargame concept recently shared on LinkedIn by Tom Walker from Vedette Consulting, another one of the top business wargaming firms in the world. Vedette has a strong foundation in military wargaming as the home of the Battlegroup Wargaming System (BGWS) that’s now being adopted by the British Army.

Inspired by the new Pegasus Drills, Tom has designed a wargame concept to explore how governments and organisations respond under compound pressure. Designed for national crisis planning but fully transferable to sectors like retail, transport, energy, and media. After seeing Tom’s effort focusing on the UK, I was inspired to design a business wargame design focusing on my own country, Uganda.

4. Mr. President (by Exia Labs and GMT Games)

Last month, Exia Labs released the Steam demo of their upcoming digital adaptation of Mr. President: The American Presidency, 2001 - 2020 by GMT Games. You can check out my full play-through and review of this demo here. Like I said earlier, African Election is technically not a wargame since it’s a solitaire game with no conflict from an opponent… and so is Mr. President. Technically, I think they fall best in the bucket of serious games.

I initially thought of making African Election a COIN wargame with four factions (the bank, the incumbent, the opposition and the public) but I quickly realized that would be too complex, especially given that I haven’t yet even played a COIN game! My memory of playing the Mr. President demo made me settle for a solitaire game centered around balancing multiple trackers (though of course nowhere near the dozens of trackers in Mr. President)

5. Twilight Struggle (by Playdek and GMT Games)

Anyone who has been following Wargaming Weekly for a while knows how obsessed I am with this hall-of-fame Cold War masterpiece by Jason Matthews and Ananda Gupta. Twilight Struggle is the very first wargame I ever played and still my favorite! I’m still on a mission to beat the AI opponent in the Playdek app using both the U.S. and the USSR at all 10 levels of handicap.

My experience with playing Twilight Struggle came in handy with splitting the Event Cards into Pre-Election and Post-Election decks (inspired by its Early War, Mid War and Late War splitting of event cards). I realized that it wouldn’t make sense for someone playing African Election to, for example, draw an Internet Blackout card early in the game and a Campaign Funding card later.

How have I used AI to design African Election?

Designing my first wargame Ugandan Chess took me 3 years of working on and off. This one has taken me less than a week! I literally started working on it last Thursday. I initially thought I would need at least three months of consistent work to get it done.

Claude was very helpful in the design process: I had roughly 90% of the design down pat within a couple of hours, using about a dozen prompts! You can check out my full chat with Claude here.

The rest of the time that I have spent working on it has been on tweaking card effects while play-testing, copy-editing and designing graphics. One of the key edits that I made was on the “Workplace Ethnic Argument” Pre-Election Event Card. Claude had made it a Kikuyu versus Luo affair! I edited that to “the two largest ethnic groups” to make it generic enough to apply to other African countries.

I found that very interesting because nowhere in my prompting had I mentioned Kenya in particular. I think it’s because Kenya had one of the most well-documented post-election violence seasons back in 2007. Both the current and the former Kenyan president ended up in the International Criminal Court (ICC). I also wonder if it has something to do with Kenya’s prominent role in AI training.

Am I hallucinating or is Claude lying to me???

Kenyan stereotyping aside, my wargame co-designing process with Claude has had an even more serious hiccup.

At some point, I noticed that most Event Cards have an Operations penalty so in order to prevent the game from simply becoming about keeping the Operations track alive, I decided to introduce the “Monthly Revenue” mechanic i.e. at the start of Turn 5 and Turn 9, gain +3 Operations (representing regular business income despite election disruptions).

I vividly remember the following:

· me suggesting a +2 Operations boost for turns 5 and 9 along with my high penalty observation

· Claude agreeing and further justifying my suggestion with the “regular business income” logic

· me following up by asking if we should actually use a +3 or +4 Operations boost instead

· Claude responding that +3 would be better as +2 would be too little and +4 too much

I know I discussed this Operations boost somewhere in the chat but when I looked for it, I couldn’t find it and Claude swears we never talked about it!

Has anyone else experienced this phenomenon of having parts of your conversation with an AI chat bot go missing? Let me know in the comments!

Lastly… what’s that over there in the Business Corner?

This recent discussion about the future of payments in Africa hosted by Afridigest’s Emeka Ajene, featuring:

· Wiza Jalakasi (Director of Africa Market Development at Barazilian unicorn EBANX)

· Mathias Léopoldie (CEO & Co-founder of Ivorian B2B payments platform Julaya)

· Francis Ogbuka (VP of Sales & Business Development at Nigerian blockchain-powered payments platform Zone)

So many insights but I especially loved when they highlighted this fact: African banks are the most profitable in the world!

Yours in hex,

Rwizi.

PS: I’m currently available for content writing and/or game co-designing roles for both military and business wargaming projects as a part-time freelancer i.e. 10 – 20 hours per week. If you think your project could use the brain of a millennial B2B marketer/startup founder who reads way too many PDFs and watches way too many YouTube videos on wargaming, military theory and product management, then please feel free to reach out to me via X or LinkedIn to book a call. Like the Gen-Z kids like to say nowadays… lemme cook!

HOW ELSE CAN YOU SUPPORT WARGAMING WEEKLY?

Beyond hiring (or recommending) me for a wargaming gig as described above, you can also support me in any one of the following three super-specific ways:

1. Leave a comment below!

Punching a good hole in any of the facts or arguments shared above.

2. Play-test my debut micro wargame!

Ugandan Chess is a hex-and-counter remix of regular chess designed to familiarize players with the 13 individuals who have served as head-of-state in this East African country so far, some for just one day! Download the print-and-play files for Ugandan Chess here and let me know what you think! You can leave me your feedback in the comments on this post.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Wargaming Weekly is curated, written and published by Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha, a freelance writer, game designer and startup entrepreneur. Rwizi currently serves as Co-Founder, Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Lupiiya Books - the social finance app that is gamifying the fundraising process for young African entrepreneurs. Wargaming Weekly is a curiosity chronicle of Rwizi’s exploration of the wargaming world… for the love of games in general, for the desire to contribute to the growth of wargaming in particular as a discipline, and lastly, for the hope of finding cutting-edge game design innovations to bring back with him to the startup world.