The idea of using a recreative game to teach military tactics is said by military historians to have been put forth in 1780 by Helwig, a master of pages at the Court of the Duke of Brunswick. Brunswick, who later became the head of the Prussian armies, was looked on with favor by the Emperor Frederick the Great. Because of this, many young nobles from various German provinces were sent to the Duke’s court to learn military tactics. Like any school teacher, Helwig faced a rather impossible task and looked for a way to make it easier. His choice was a game, a modification of the game of chess.

The use of chess was not a radical idea, as chess had been popular among the upper classes in Germany for centuries before Helwig, and it was a common belief that chess offered training in mental and moral discipline. Earlier, during the reign of Louis XV, two card games with military symbols were also invented to help teach military students. It is not clear whether Helwig knew about these games, but nevertheless he settled on chess.

Helwig made a board of 1666 squares, each square being a little over an inch long and tinted various colors to represent different terrains, with lines representing fortifications and frontiers. Although he used pieces similar to chess pieces, they were valued in relation to the army of the time, representing infantry battalions, cavalry squadrons, artillery batteries, etc.

Many people during this period tried to improve on Helwig’s game. Venturini, a tactician, published a sixty-page monograph, Rules of a New War Game for the Use of Military Schools. The Prussian General Van der Goltz had this to say: “The whole resembles very closely the game of poste et de voyage in vogue a few years ago, where upon making an unlucky throw of the dice, one tumbles into a swamp, or breaks an axletree, or experiences some other such mishap. ...

Venturini hopes thus to render clear his confused and perplexed ideas. ... This war game is a bad product of the refined military education of the period, which had piled up so many difficulties that it was incapable of taking a step in advance.”

1824

In 1824, Lieutenant von Reisswitz from Breslau published a new type of war game which served as a prototype until 1875. His game differed from Helwig’s in a number of ways. He used maps and sand tables; the scale was approximately four miles; troops were represented by red and blue lead pieces, painted with symbols to depict the various branches of the service. Situations based on actual battles were given in writing to the players. Orders, reports and information were put in writing and transmitted through the umpire. Time intervals for certain movements were taken into account, and the outcome of battles was determined by the throw of the dice.

In 1876, du Vernois, an officer in the Prussian Army, separated war games into two major types, free Kriegspiel and rigid Kriegspiel. Rigid Kriegspiel was Helwig’s game and its many variations: systematized, standardized and based on battles of the Franco-Prussian War. Free Kriegspiel drew its inspiration from the work of a professor at the Hanover War School, Lieutenant Meckel, who used games that allowed for free play, devoid of cumbersome procedures and rules, requiring umpires to use military experience to determine who won.

During this period, rigid Kriegspiel was played in England, Austria, Italy, France, Russia, Turkey and the USA. The British and Russians had also developed some naval war games, which were similar. On the other hand, because it was Meckel who introduced war games in Japan, the Japanese war college used only free Kriegspiel, to which some attributed their success in the Russo-Japanese War. War games in the USA during most of the 19th Century were rigid Kriegspiel, differing only from the European games in the use of Civil War battles as models.

Shortly after the turn of the century, the USA was also using a naval war game and a coast artillery war game. Meanwhile the Germans continued to improve their war games, and many of their battles in World War I were gamed and rehearsed. The restrictions placed on the German military after World War I forced Germany to continue development and use of war games in all their military training. Certain battles of World War II were said to have been gamed ahead of time by Germany.

But certainly the most infamous use of war games was the 1941 Japanese simulation of their attack on Pearl Harbor, combined with the lessons learned from the successful British attack on Taranto in 1940.

In the last half of the 20th Century, the development of computers has done much to improve war games used by the military. But the jury is still out with respect to the hobby of wargaming.

This article was exerpted from The Study of Games: A Source Book by Elliott M. Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith, published by Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, New York, 1979 (ISBN 0-89874-045-2).