Platoon Command is an independent project combining two lineages of professional military training that rarely get built together: Kriegsspiel's live, umpired, head-to- head wargaming format, and the Marine Corps Gazette's tradition of the single-decision Tactical Decision Game.
Most games about combat reward reflexes or optimization. Both Kriegsspiel and the Gazette's TDGs were built for something different — testing whether a decision made under uncertainty, time pressure, and incomplete information actually holds up.
This project brings that format to a browser, on real terrain, with an instructor who actively runs the match — weather, pacing, adjudication — and an AI umpire whose rulings are grounded in fixed, published data rather than in creative writing. The goal is a game that rewards the same kind of thinking a real small-unit leader has to use, accessible to people with no military background.
Centralia and the Centralian People's Army are entirely invented — no real country, government, or military is being depicted. The convention of using a fictional adversary is the same one real published TDGs and commercial wargames use, for the same reason: to focus the exercise on tactical decision-making rather than on any real-world political situation.
The US Marine Corps side reflects real, publicly available doctrine — ranks, weapon designations, unit organization — because that's the actual subject the game is teaching. Nothing in this project represents classified, sensitive, or non-public information.
This is an independent, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the United States Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the Marine Corps Gazette.