At first towards the end of the 18th Century the military writer and tactician George Venturini published details of the game played on a board or a chart, making it capable of tactical development. The Prussian military and State official von Reisswitz in Breslau followed Venturini, who in union with several officers, experimented with tactical manoeuvres between two parties with troop symbols on the plans at a scale of 1:25713 (nearly 25 inches equals one mile). This ingenious invention bore fruit, as the son of Reisswitz, a Garde Artillerie officer and a member of the Artillery Trial Commission eagerly promoted the idea of the father, using a plan of the more practical scale of 1:3000 (about 8 inches to a mile) and practised the conduct of Kriegspiel exercises. In 1824 he published an "Instruction of the representation of military maneuvres with the apparatus of "Kriegspiel", and was doubtless the main agent in the universal propagation of the Kriegspiel, to begin with of course only in the Prussian Army. Prinz iilhelm, the subsequent king and Kaiser Wilhelm I, who had heard of the exercises, in 1824 persuaded his father to introduce the game to the Army, and in the same year ordered an A.K.O. and the furnishing of apparatus to each regiment. At first the game remained limited in scope in consequence of the lack of full understanding outside the initiators of the methods of direction. In 1848, under the direction of the then Oberstleutnant Vogel v. Falkenstein, the later General, for the first time, a strategical wargame was accomplished, which took the form of a war between Prussia and Austria. The novelty of this game made an extraordinary impression. Yet the numerous regulations necessary to determine the results of action and loss computation hindered the game. Tactics and troop leadership could not be expressed sufficiently and the decision was gained not through the positions achieved in the actions but through the restricting game regulations. For the first time in the 1860s the stricture of the over stiff regulations was broken through. From the game as existing was developed a tactical exercise. Particularly at that time Oberst v. Verdy, the deservedly famous great teacher of the Prussian Army opened in 1876 a new form of Kriegspiel, in which a flexible and less narrowly confined system of rules was applied to the game enabling use of the newest strategical and tactical principles, and therewith Kriegspiel was elevated to become the principal means of education for troop guidance. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 112 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1971 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com