Episode 172 Sebastian Bae on Littoral Commander
Sebastian Bae on Littoral Commander
Episode Summary:
This episode of Experience Points features Sebastian Bae, a senior game designer at the Center for Naval Analyses and designer of Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific, an educational wargame exploring future tactical conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Sebastian shares his meandering path from the Marine Corps infantry to professional wargame design, and how his enlisted background shaped his drive to push games down to the lowest tactical level. He explains the core tension of educational game design: keeping a game accurate and realistic enough that players trust the model, while still making it approachable, teachable, and usable. Sebastian describes how a scalable card-driven system and terrain research conducted in ArcGIS made a complex subject playable, why the game deliberately avoids prescribing “right answers,” and how commands and classrooms have adapted the game for their own needs. He closes with two lessons for educators using games to teach serious topics: have a clear, defined vision of what you are teaching and to whom and build the back-end infrastructure - especially the discussion after the game - where learning synthesizes and crystallizes for players.
Sebastian Bae
he/him/his
Senior Game Designer & Adjunct Professor
Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) & Georgetown University
Sebastian J. Bae, a Senior Game Designer at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), works in wargaming, allies & partners, emerging technologies, and the future of warfare. He also serves as an adjunct assistant professor and teaches a graduate course on game design at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. He is also the faculty advisor to the Georgetown University Wargaming Society, the co-chair of the Military Operations Research Society Wargaming Community of Practice, and a former Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity. Previously, he served six years in the Marine Corps infantry, leaving as a sergeant. He deployed to Iraq in 2009. He has also designed Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific, an educational wargame exploring future tactical warfare in the Indo-Pacific region, commercially published by the Dietz Foundation.
(Bluesky): https://bsky.app/profile/sebastianbae.bsky.social
(Twitter): https://x.com/SebastianBae
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-bae/
(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw0nVuQu5KoHv0kFiC9yX4Q
[Dave Eng] (0:00 - 1:02)
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I’m your host, Dave Eng, from Games Based Learning by University XP.
Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com. On today’s episode, we’ll learn from Sebastian Bae. Sebastian is a senior game designer at the Center for Naval Analyses, where he works at the intersection of wargaming, emerging technology, allies and partners, and the future of warfare.
Sebastian also teaches game design at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, advises the Georgetown Wargaming Society, and helps lead the Military Operations Research Society’s Wargaming Community of Practice. Before all that, he served six years in the Marine Corps infantry, deploying to Iraq in 2009. He’s also the designer of Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific, an educational wargame examining future tactical conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
Sebastian, welcome to the show!
[Sebastian Bae] (1:03 - 1:06)
Hey, Dave, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be on here.
[Dave Eng] (1:07 - 1:35)
Great, I’m glad to have you, Sebastian. I know we’ve collaborated in the past, I’m glad to have you on the show this time. I know about you a lot because I follow you on LinkedIn, but I want to introduce the audience, the listeners, to more about your background.
I know that you’ve had a really interesting path as a Marine, researcher, educator, and game designer. How did you first get into wargaming and wargame design? How has your military and academic background shaped the way that you think about games as learning tools?
[Sebastian Bae] (1:36 - 7:19)
Yeah, that’s a fascinating question, sort of a little convoluted, honestly, to be frank. To be honest, in grad school or even undergrad, I didn’t know that you can be a professional game designer in the defense space where I exist or any space, really. I didn’t think that was a viable career option to be had as the immigrant first child of two Korean parents. I thought lawyer, doctor, your typical immigrant story of what jobs are acceptable or are out there.
After I left the Marine Corps, I went to Berkeley out in California to do my undergrad in political science. And then I went to grad school where I teach in the security studies program in Georgetown to do international security. And then I got sort of into wargaming sort of by accident.
I was actually in Iraq as a war correspondent, sort of doing some freelance journalism work for Foreign Policy Magazine at the time, covering the push by ISIL in Mosul and sort of the Erbil area in Kurdistan. And I got definitely ill on that trip. And then I was like, literally, I mean, real sick in the bathroom and just like throwing up in the toilet.
I was like, there must be easier career paths, right? To get health insurance and like decent pay, right? And then I applied to this job at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, MCWL, down at Quantico, which is near where I lived in DC at the time.
And I went and it said, do you want to be a wargame designer and analyst? And it said it had three requirements, like, do you know the Marine Corps? Do you know how to do analysis?
And do you know games? And I was like, yeah, I play games. I was a Marine, I was an enlisted sergeant.
And I know analysis, that’s why I went to the really expensive Georgetown to do. So I was like, yeah, I hit all three boxes, so I applied. And then very rapidly, I went through that process.
And then very shortly after, started my career at MCWL’s Wargaming Division. And I had never designed a professional game at that time. And that was not atypical for our field at the time back in the early 2000s, ’10s, and so forth, because there was no real career path, right?
There was no like, you go to engineering school and then you become an engineer, right? It was very sort of laterally moving from different fields, like even the composition of our team here at CNA. We have PhDs in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, physics.
We have humanities, security studies like myself. We have a pretty wide background of people in that first and second generation of wargame designers for professional development and so forth. So I remember my first week at MCWL, my boss dropped like three books on my table.
And he’s like, hey, read these three books. You start designing your first game in a few weeks. And I was like, okay, boss.
And I start reading and started doing a lot of learning by osmosis and observing others who had been there longer than I. And then I left MCWL to join RAND to do wargame design there and sort of analysis for the Army and Air Force, where I spent about five to six years doing that. And then I finally came over to CNA to do very similar work just for the Navy and the Marine Corps, where I lead two portfolios right now, looking at Indo-Pacific warfighting, and then allies and partners games currently.
So that’s sort of our focus right now, at least for me here at CNA. But it was a meandering path. And a lot of it was done through self-study and learning by doing, which is very different now.
Our professional field has slightly shifted, where there are courses like the ones I teach at Georgetown, the ones at King’s in London, UCL, also in London, MIT, Stanford, all slowly developing wargaming-related PhDs, or even graduate programs, or at least graduate-like courses. So there is more of a pipeline now. It’s still not really firm, but there is more of a path where you get more exposure in undergrad or in grad school to wargaming and it being a possible career path.
So that was my path to wargaming. But in terms of how my military and academic background sort of shaped my thinking of games as learning tools, I would say a lot of my bias, or at least coming from, as an enlisted sergeant, has been like, how do I think of games as tools that can push down to the lowest level, right? At least in our defense and military sector, games are predominantly played by officers, senior officers in many regards, sort of majors and above, looking at analytical problems.
I mean, the vast majority of our work here at CNA is analytical wargaming, games to look at research questions and to support a wider campaign or cycle of analysis and research, which is not a bad thing. It just means a lot of it’s here in DC and there’s an ecosystem that supports that type of gaming. But there has been a shift, or at least a renaissance, of educational gaming in the military and defense circles of how do we get games down to the tactical level?
How do we get them down into the commands? How do we get them down to our units, to different levels below the units and commands that exist here in the DC area that support that wider research for the department? So that’s really sort of been one of the things that I’ve held from my enlisted years of how to push games down to be tools and democratize them and have them be more accessible and useful and look at different topics, right?
So that’s been a big focus. That was a big chunk of why I designed Littoral Commander the way I did.
[Dave Eng] (7:19 - 7:50)
I see. Great. Thank you, Sebastian, for sharing that. That’s a really fascinating background.
And I think that while we don’t share the same background, I also realize that when you first got into this field, you’re pulling from a lot of different experiences and disciplines. The question I have for you, and this is kind of for the audience and for myself is, say you’re speaking to a civilian, someone that has no, I would even say no gaming background specifically. What would you say is like the most common misconception you would get from civilians when you tell them that I’m a wargame designer?
[Sebastian Bae] (7:51 - 8:30)
Oh, that I play games all the time. I mean, I think that’s the biggest misconception is like, as wargame designers, you don’t get to play many games as well or like as part of your day job. You do play as a hobby, and a lot of professional game designers are hobby gamers as well.
But most of our day job is like designing games for other people, right? So a lot of times you’re like a facilitator, you’re running games, you’re preparing games, you’re doing analysis for games, or you’re trying to set up the educational sort of ecosystem to support educational games. So a lot of it’s like delivering games, not often playing them during the day job, as much as I would like to play more games during my day job.
[Dave Eng] (8:30 - 9:02)
I see. Great. Thanks for sharing.
I appreciate that. That was kind of a tee up to my next question, because I want to talk about your game, Littoral Commander. And I know that Littoral Commander takes a very complex subject, which is a future conflict in the Indo-Pacific, and makes it playable, teachable, and approachable.
So, when you were designing the game, how did you decide what to simplify, what to keep realistic, and what kinds of learning moments you wanted players to experience? And I guess leading up to this, if you could take a moment to just define what you mean by littoral, because I know what it means, but the listeners may not, that would be appreciated.
[Sebastian Bae] (9:02 - 14:41)
Yeah. So, for those who are unfamiliar with the term littoral, it just sort of means adjacent to water or ocean. It represents coastlines or areas related to that.
So Littoral Commander was originally called Fleet Marine Force, which is what the Marine Corps is called within the wider Navy. And we had to change the name as we went to commercial publication, because Fleet Marine Force as a term is trademarked by the Marine Corps and they wouldn’t let us use it. So, we had to change the name to Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific.
But to answer your question of, when we were designing, how to decide what to simplify and what to include and how to keep it still realistic was a real challenge, because with any educational game, there is this core tension in any game design of how do I keep it accurate enough, realistic enough, engaging enough that the players don’t rebel against the schema, the mental model within the game that the game is representing, while still making it approachable, teachable, and usable, right?
Who wants to look at a 200-page rule book, right? And to be like, often I see players look at it and they’re like, no way I’m reading this, right? So, there’s always that challenge, right?
So, when we were designing the game, and I say we because although I was the principal designer, I say we a lot because the game design process is supported by a myriad of people, from graphic designers to your publisher, to developers, to play testers and so forth. So, when we were designing the game, I had to go through a lot of iterations on the rules and what to include and what not to include. And it was at times contentious because there are things as a designer, you’re like, oh, I thought of this great mechanic, I want to keep it.
But then you realize it just adds a lot of rules overhead and burden on the players. And we always had to ask ourselves in the process, what could be simplified? What can be excluded?
And we left a lot of things on the design room cutting floor. We were pretty ruthless in the simplification of things. And there are design choices that we made, how to simplify things. So if you ever play Littoral Commander, the core mechanical flow of how we do combat in the game is relatively simple.
I taught 10-year-olds at conventions about it in less than 20 minutes. The real difficulty of the game comes in a design choice that we made where we wanted the complexity and difficulty of the game to be scalable. And we use cards.
If you ever play any Euro-style games, games that are card-driven like Magic: The Gathering or any sort of games like that, which is very popular, you’ll see a lot of the similar mechanics. You play cards for effects, but instead of a magic spell that does fireball, you have F-35s doing a bombing raid or something like that, or a cyber effect to affect your opponent. So, we use that to have it more scalable.
So instead of your first scenario having to deal with 100 cards, you can play with 20. And we allow that to be the simplification. A lot of air warfare is simplified that way.
A lot of information operations and cyber effects are simplified that way. We try to focus very heavily on the naval and ground unit combination of effects on the map itself, which you will see as a traditional hex and counter in a wargame. So that’s how we really decided.
But fundamentally, one of the key questions that we wanted to do is that, are we teaching our players negative lessons? Are there things in this game in terms of how the mechanics incentivize behavior, or the schema that we’re trying to represent that we did a lot of open source research on, is it teaching the right lessons? Are we having the players ask the right questions, engage with the right decisions?
And that was really sort of our compass of navigating what to include and what not to include, because we did a tremendous amount of research in designing Littoral Commander, from even the map itself. When we were designing it, we wanted to include terrain, for example, and its effects in modern warfare, but we didn’t want it to have all these complex terrain tables that a lot of traditional hex and counter wargames have. So, the way we did it is that we used ArcGIS, which is a mapping program, and we essentially mapped and analyzed the terrain of the areas that we wanted to make maps of for the game.
And we classified them in low-mobility or high-mobility corridors and color-coded them, one through five, of saying, hey, these colors represent you’re allowed to move this much space and so forth. But there was a lot of research that we did. We looked at bathymetry, which is the depth of water for ships.
We looked at terrain slope of the ground. We looked at... I forget the term for it.
I always forget. Which is how firm the ground is. So, if it’s swamp, sand, or dirt road, or rock. We looked at level of infrastructure, if there were highways or major primary roads or secondary dirt roads and so forth.
And then we looked at what we call land cover raster, which is the density of vegetation in the areas, all to produce what we call mobility or movement point score and say, hey, your unit has a movement point score of three. Each of these green hexes is one, so you can move three hexes, right? Or one yellow is two, so you can move one yellow, one green.
So, we wanted to make it as intuitive, but still have a lot of that research undercutting all that sort of game design choices that we made.
[Dave Eng] (14:41 - 15:16)
I see. Great. Thank you, Sebastian.
I appreciate that you were able to reduce down a lot of the action to having it be card based, because I feel like for a lot of players, particularly if you’ve not played a lot of games or wargames in the past, having cards that have those options is a really nicely transparent way, I think, of identifying what you can do in the game. I want to know, though, based on, I think you said that the core audience for this would be field grade officers, so majors to colonels. What was the specific learning outcome?
What did you want them to get out of this experience by playing Littoral Commander?
[Sebastian Bae] (15:17 - 17:25)
Yeah, so the people I wanted to focus on were majors and below, really. So, I wanted them to really focus on, if you’re a company or battalion or regimental command, I wanted young sergeants to be able to play with the young corporals and junior Marines. I wanted staff sergeants to play with their sergeants and it be a venue for education and knowledge transfer and discussion.
Many of the scenarios pose very specific tactical challenges or dilemmas where there is no right choice. And I think that is one of the tensions of sitting at the intersection of a commercial game that’s available for hobbyists and an educational game. There are design choices I specifically made to make it more educational that the professional crowd was much more willing to accept because they understood that purpose and they sort of have exposure to it.
Meanwhile, the other side of the hobby world was like, why don’t you give us answers? A very specific core tension in the game is hobbyists always want to be like, hey, you should give us recommended cards for each scenario. I was like, that defeats the whole purpose, right?
I was like, we want you to look at the cards and we want you to make different choices, because there are times, even I have run Littoral Commander hundreds of times. And there are several times where players would pick a novel combination of cards or strategy or tactic in a scenario that I’ve run hundreds of times, and they will surprise me by how they thought about the problem and so forth. And I really want to avoid giving this notion that there was a solution, right?
To be had in a particular scenario or a particular game session. So that was a big question of like, hey, how do I get this to be useful for people and still adaptable, right? Because commands and units have adjusted the game, have produced their own variants of the game using the core system and so forth, right?
And one of the things I guess I’ve learned in doing that is that the game needed to be modifiable and sort of like malleable, right? To be used in different contexts.
[Dave Eng] (17:26 - 18:23)
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that application of the game to teaching and learning. I know that I think any great game or like decision framework is going to have some, I guess it’s not fun or really applicable to have like a clearly right decision and clearly wrong one, but to have many shades of gray.
And I think that for games used for educational purposes and teaching purposes, it helps to have that. And I think when you’re talking about people being able to combine cards in really new and novel ways, that is interesting. That’s really interesting.
And it’s really cool to see as a designer. And that leads into my third and last question here, Sebastian, which is lessons for educators. So, speaking to other educators who want to use games to teach serious or complex topics, what lessons from designing Littoral Commander would you share with them?
Like what would they, what should they keep in mind when trying to balance like accuracy, accessibility, engagement, and overall meaningful learning?
[Sebastian Bae]
So, I would say I would have two major lessons for educators, right? If they’re trying to design another educational game, one is have a very clear, defined vision on what you’re trying to teach and to whom, right? There are lots of educational military games, a lot more in recent years, and they all look at different things about different problem sets.
So, for me, I wanted it to be accessible to enlisted Marines and sailors and soldiers. I wanted it to be fun and engaging, but still accessible for them, right? In the same way, I want it to be adaptable to different commands.
And if you’re amphibious, you’re in a unit aboard a ship, is different than let’s say you’re a rocket unit, or if you were a logistics unit, and still have something that is there for you, your command to use. So, I had a very clear vision of whom I was designing for and what I wanted them to learn, because the game fundamentally is about what we call the kill chain in colloquialism. In the military, we call it F2T2EA, or find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess, which is the process of like, how do I find a target across the different domains, right?
Whether in the air, on the water, or underneath the water, or on land, and how do I maintain custody of understanding where it is so I can have some kind of effect on it, whether it’s a missile striking a ship, or if it’s a cyber-attack hitting a command node. And that’s what fundamentally the game is centered on. It has a very clear focus, a very clear defined space of decisions, right?
And there are things that it leaves off, like you said, in the abstraction and simplification, but it has a real hard focus on that, and everything stems from that, right? And that was really helpful for us to navigate what to include and what not to include, as mentioned before, but also to emphasize what decisions we wanted our players to focus on, right? What conversations do we want the players and or students to have when playing the game, right?
So that was a big portion of it. The second portion of it is that there’s a lot of focus when we’re talking about designing educational games like the game itself, and it’s, you know what I mean, research, and how defensible it is, and how playable it is, and so forth. I think that is all very important.
But there’s a second step, which I’ve learned in running Littoral Commander for units and classrooms, which is there is this whole infrastructure you had to build on the back end, right? Which is the learning. If you look at the educational literature for game and gamified learning, it is the after action, the discussion after the game, where all that learning synthesizes, it crystallizes for the players and the participants.
And you’re able to have collective learning happen there in a more dynamic way. The game is that shared reality that all of you have played. And then on the back end, you’re able to discuss it.
And that’s what I learned was really, really important. And as an in-the-box educational game, I had to build like all this sort of back-end infrastructure to help people, like whether that was building maps so that people can like draw on them and they can print on them. So, I have this whole Google Drive, where it’s accessible by anyone who has a link, which is on BGG, which is like maps, questions, translated rule books, cards, so people can print them out and like sort of like do planning ahead of time for classrooms and so forth.
And we built all these like facilitated questions where we said, hey, you can start here if you don’t know how to facilitate an after action report or that discussion after the game. And building all that back-end support for people made it much easier for people to play. Putting it on Vassal and Tabletop Simulator also helped.
And I think that was a big portion of preparing how to help educators run the lessons learned and that discussion after the game. So, you just don’t play the game and like, oh, learning has happened. Magic high fives all around, right?
But it’s like, how do I get them to synthesize or quickly think or even challenge the game? Or like one of the questions we have in our facilitated like questions that you can use is like, what would you change about the game? What do you think is lacking in the game and why and so forth?
And that spurs different conversations as well, which I think are useful. And one of the other questions that we always have, that I always ask, is like, what would you have done differently, right? Because that introspection, that decision of like, hey, how could have things gone differently, implies not only that the game itself doesn’t tell you the future, but it’s just one iteration of thousands of possibilities, but also makes you have that introspective conversation amongst your players of like, what could I have done differently if I knew the game better, or if I knew the scenario better, or if I just made a different decision, right? And I think that is really important. It’s a big portion of educational gaming, is that discussion after the play, right?
[Dave Eng] (23:14 - 23:47)
Yeah, I am a huge proponent of having that debrief afterwards, because I tell a lot of other educators, like, like you said before, you just can’t have them play the game and hope that, okay, well, learning happened. No, that debrief, that synthesization component is incredibly important. I think that is probably one of the most forgotten roles for, you know, like applied games, serious games, simulations, etc.
And I really urge educators not to forget about that. But unfortunately, Sebastian, we’ve run out of time. Thank you again for joining us.
We really appreciate it. Where can people go to find out more about you? And where can I also pick up a copy of Littoral Commander?
[Sebastian Bae] (23:47 - 24:12)
You can find Littoral Commander at the Dietz Foundation, which is our publisher. You can Google them. You can also find them on Amazon if you’re in the States.
There are a couple overseas distributors in like Germany and the UK, and so forth. To find me, you can find me on Bluesky and Twitter using my name, Sebastian Bae. I wasn’t super creative when I set up the username, and same thing on LinkedIn.
You can find me there as well.
[Dave Eng] (24:13 - 24:17)
Great, thank you. And I will also post those links in the show notes. So, thank you, Sebastian.
[Sebastian Bae] (24:18 - 24:20)
Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Dave.
[Dave Eng] (24:21 - 25:14)
I hope you found this episode useful. If you’d like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references, in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I’m your host Dave Eng from Games Based Learning by University XP.
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Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2026, September 6). Sebastian Bae on Littoral Commander. (No. 172) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/172
Internal Ref: UXPF2W4L80LI
References
Bae, S. (2022). Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific [Board game]. The Dietz Foundation. BoardGameGeek. Retrieved July 17, 2026, from https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/355516/littoral-commander-indo-pacific
Eng, D. (2021, September 28). Playing serious games. University XP. Retrieved July 17, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2021/9/28/playing-serious-games
Eng, D. (2022, February 1). Debriefing games-based learning. University XP. Retrieved July 17, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2022/2/1/debriefing-games-based-learning
Eng, D. (2024, July 9). Outcomes focused games-based learning. University XP. Retrieved July 17, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2024/7/9/outcomes-focused-games-based-learning
Eng, D. (2025, September 9). What are military simulations? University XP. Retrieved July 17, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2025/9/4/what-are-military-simulations