This post is from Trevor Bender. Trevor is the designer of four published games or game expansions, including the Labyrinth: The Awakening and Labyrinth: The Forever War expansions for GMT Games’ Labyrinth: The Global War on Terror. He is also the author of more than 20 articles for industry and gaming magazines.
As wargamers, we naturally like to try out variants to our favorite games, as these frequently allow us to extend our enjoyment of that topic in a new way or engage in a thought experiment on “what might have been.” This sort of “what if” thinking and playing is called counterfactual history, which is the switching of one or more variables in a historical situation, such as a battle or campaign, then conducing a thought experiment on what likely would have occurred. Our conclusions could then be written as a novel or a scholarly article, and then these results could be tested through simulation gaming to see if we got it right.
The brief video below (also available here if it doesn’t load) was filmed by my son Jared, who did a great job of editing it too. In this nine-minute video, I give an introduction to counterfactual history, describe how it differs from alternative history and historical fiction, and then give examples of military situations in the past where it could be applied. I hope you enjoy this foray into a new way of looking at the intersection of history and gaming!
Trevor Bender is the Chief Growth Officer at Cypher Analytics and a hobby game designer. He has published over 20 articles in industry and gaming magazines, and has designed four games or game expansions, including Labyrinth: The Awakening (see his COI “My Favorite Card” article on that game here) and Labyrinth: The Forever War expansions for GMT Games’ Labyrinth: The Global War on Terror. He also designed the C3i Magazine games of Kursk (C3iNr34) and Desert Victory (C3iNr36) and the upcoming Korea to be published in C3iNr38 later this year. His Battle for Kursk, published in C3iNr34, won the Charles S. Roberts Award for the best magazine game of 2020. (Stay tuned for opportunities to check out some of those C3i games at our June 7 Second Front online convention.)
Trevor enjoys writing about counterfactual history and has designed a half-dozen scenarios that change a variable in history allowing for the testing of the consequences of that change through multiple plays of military simulation games on that topic. His Disaster at D-Day, a counterfactual on Normandy ’44 by GMT published in C3iNr31, is one of the more popular. He recently completed an alternative Campaign scenario for The Russian Campaign 5th Edition (TRC) that was published in C3iNr37, which tests how the Russian Front (and by extension the war) could have gone differently if the Germans had not fought the Battle of Britain nor sent forces to North Africa but instead employed those assets in the East.
In addition to gaming, Trevor actively serves in the Boy Scouts of America, where he just completed a three-year term of service as the Council Commissioner in San Diego. He is also a Regional Vice President for the Armed Forces Communication and Electronic Association (AFCEA). He enjoys swimming, camping and reading military history. Trevor is married to Sally Bender and has four children and four grandchildren. You can find him on X at @GameChangerII.