Then there's another way of thinking about it ...
A bunch of years ago (2002) I came up with a software simulation of Zone Zeal. It essentially was a multiplayer game, written in Visual Basic 6, and we used it to come up with game strategies after ship-day.
(Unfortunately, right after that we started using Visual Basic .NET, which changed many of the rules for inter-program communications, and I haven't been able to easily recreate the simulation for newer games
)