Business war games & strategy simulation

Test your strategy before you bet the company on it.

Pit your best moves against thousands of competitor responses in a safe, computer-run war game — and see which strategies actually win, which only got lucky, and which would have been disasters. Before you commit a dollar.

Innovative, powerful, proven techniques.
CyborgStrategy™
“ACS simulators are to competitive strategy what spreadsheets are to finance.”

Strategy isn’t a budget or a forecast. It’s a game — in the game-theory sense — where your moves and your competitors’ moves collide in ways a spreadsheet can’t capture.

CyborgStrategy™ merges human creativity and experience with computer rigor and calculation. You bring the ideas; the simulator runs billions of possible futures, then tells you which strategies are smart, which are merely lucky, and which are dangerous.

Humans have the ideas. Computers do the arithmetic.

What we do

Seven ways to stress-test a strategy before the market does.

Flagship

Business War Games

The strategy equivalent of clinical trials, flight simulators, and sparring partners — all at once. Teams play out moves and counter-moves in a safe environment. 200+ run for Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

Cyborg War Games™

Human imagination, machine scale

Combine the imagination of people with the computational power of machines to run large-scale competitive experiments — surfacing the promising moves and the risky ones you’d never test in the real world.

Top Pricer Tournament™

A war game in a computer

An AI-enabled strategy simulator that has pitted ~2,000 strategists worldwide against each other across 17 billion simulations. Perfect for workshops, classrooms, and conference events.

▶ Play the interactive demo →

Strategy Decision Tests™

Decision Tournaments™

Test your strategy options — by whatever measure of success you choose — across millions of competitor combinations, in difficult, fluid, even discontinuous environments. You define winning; the engine finds it.

Simulations

Competitive Strategy Simulators

A powerful strategy simulator tailored to your business and your market — built for your team to own and run, so you can brainstorm against it in real time, again and again.

Education

Workshops on Strategic Thinking

Highly interactive, thought-provoking programs customized to your industry — from a one-hour session to a three-day in-house seminar, led by ACS and reinforced with software tools.

Keynotes

Strategy Stories

Short, provocative talks that challenge conventional thinking about competition, decisions, and what “a good strategy” really means. Available as keynotes and webinars.

35+
years in competitive strategy
200+
war games for Fortune 500s
~2,000
Top Pricer Tournament players
17B
strategies simulated
13
Harvard Business Review articles
Writing

A contrarian voice on how good strategists actually decide.

How the Very Best Strategists DecideHarvard Business Review
Question What You “Know” About StrategyHarvard Business Review
No One Can Think Outside the BoxHarvard Business Review
Why Being Unpredictable Is a Bad StrategyHarvard Business Review
A Tournament Pits Strategists Against Each Other to See What WorksHarvard Business Review

Read all 13 articles on HBR →

Mark Chussil
Founder & CEO, Advanced Competitive Strategies
  • BA, Yale
  • MBA, Harvard
  • Council of Competitive Intelligence Fellows
  • Patent-winning simulation work

A 35-year veteran of competitive strategy and a pioneer of business war-gaming, Mark Chussil has helped Fortune 500 companies around the world add and save billions of dollars by testing their strategies before committing to them.

In 1986 he co-created ValueWar™ with Wharton’s Professor David Reibstein, fusing state-of-the-art strategic thinking with computer simulation — work that has since won a patent and a best-in-class industry award. He is a prolific essayist in the Harvard Business Review (13 articles) and the author of three books, including Nice Start and The New Employee Manual. He teaches and runs war games across industries from airlines to vaccines.

Curious what a war game would reveal about your strategy?

Let’s talk about your toughest competitive question.

mchussil@competing.com