Gamification of Strategic Thinking: Using a Digital Board Game on Steam

Thorsten Kodalle's report examines a three-iteration seminar, "Gamification of Strategic Thinking," that used the commercial board game Scythe to teach strategic planning and 21st-century skills. The seminar moved from an on-premise workshop in 2020 to a fully distributed format and then to a wholly digital version played on Steam as Digital Scythe between 2021 and 2022. The work positions the seminar as an extension of earlier research by Kodalle and colleagues on game-based approaches to strategic thinking, scrum, and strategy implementation, and it situates the design within a NATO-related framework for distributed wargaming organised around communications, environment, control, and engagement.

Across the iterations, the facilitator relinquished progressively more control over game execution, transferring it entirely to the Steam platform in the final version. This shift is reported to have roughly tripled participant output and engagement, though at the cost of adaptability and facilitator control. Engagement was generally high and the third iteration drew strong demand, but the author identifies recurring challenges: Zoom fatigue, account setup for participants unfamiliar with Steam, the need for participants to own licences, dependence on reliable connectivity, and difficulty capturing game state without a physical board. Occasional disengagement among team members is attributed to the need for deliberate mitigation strategies in distributed learning.

The report concludes that a digital game variant, complementing the physical commercial title, would complete a spectrum of game-based learning tools, and that such a game can serve distributed learning environments when the identified risks are addressed. The evidence base is qualitative and reflective, drawn from facilitator observation rather than systematic empirical measurement, and the excerpt presents no new data beyond the reported output and engagement gains.