wargaming could hypothetically be cool in some alternate anti-imperialist timeline where almost any educated person in the west with enough time and resources for it wasn’t irrecoverably indoctrinated with fascist neoliberal NATO-ism

it might have issues as the basis of an improvised storytelling-focused enterprise, but Cooler More Complicated Chess is a great idea for an activity, and hypothetically Cooler But Equally Or Less Complicated Chess could be a pretty good improv exercise anyway. I do appreciate rules lite stuff tho, and my favorite system (despite the fact that i have no one irl to play it with) is LANCER which has what i might call ‘rules-mid’ mecha combat and rules-light options for pilot combat or other dramatic roleplaying moments. it also has mostly ‘fluff-neutral’ rules and character option descriptions, so your mech (or even your player character) can have whatever limb configuration (if it even has limbs) or whatever weapon mounting style for its equipment as long as it fits within the relatively simple rules.

basically i think the problem is more the west’s history of white supremacy, racism, xenophobia, and imperialism, rather than wargaming as a concept