I recommend Peter Perla’s book “The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists”. As the title indicates, it covers both hobby wargaming and professional wargaming (the latter meaning wargaming as a military training tool). He looks at the history of wargaming and at the theoretical considerations that go into designing wargames.
For your purposes, you’ll find particularly valuable his discussion of wargaming levels. These range from the higher-level strategic games (in which the players represent the national command authorities of the opposing sides) to the lower-level tactical games which operate down to the level of individual squads. Obviously, the instructional purpose of professional games will vary greatly depending on the level of the game and the level of the players. A related point is that the higher you go in game levels, the more the processes involved are abstracted because the forces being represented are larger and larger. A tactical game might resolve combat by simulating the process of individual weapons being fired at individual targets. A strategic-level game, depicting whole army groups, might resolve combat by simply comparing overall force ratios in a very abstract way – so the modeling involved is very different.
For your students, by the way, intermediate-level operational games (which tend to depict even in a theatre of war) might be a good choice for some of what you describe in your list (for instance logistics).
Keep in mind that hobby wargames, even though they can be very big and complex from a mechanical point of view, still tend to be very simplistic (from the point of view of a professional soldier) at simulating warfare. I’ve heard the argument, for example, that the comparison which can be made between Axis and Allies and professional wargames is the same comparison which can be made between the classic board game Monopoly and the kind of university-level business simulation games which are sometimes played as exercises in Masters of Business Administration programs. Hobby wargames are primarily designed to be fun to play, with any lessons learned about warfare being treated as a bonus; professional wargames are intended to be teaching tools (or in some cases planning tools to test new concepts and strategies), with no aim of being fun. This isn’t to say that a hobby wargame can’t be used professionally to teach useful things to military students, but the limitations of these games have to be kept firmly in mind.
Anyway, good luck with your project and, as I said at the beginning, do check out Perla’s book.
