Australian Defence Force

History

Background and History of War Games

Distant History (including First Generation war games)

Chess and similar games are often claimed to hold the origins of war gaming. Apart from having two opponents with elements moved on a two-dimensional surface, there is little resemblance to war games of the recent two centuries as practiced by military professionals.

The Development of Kriegsspiel

Modern wargaming developed largely in what is now Germany. In 1780, Dr. Helwig, a subject of the Duke of Brunswick, invented the "King's Game" or Koenigspiel. This game was played on a modified chessboard. There were nearly 2000 squares that were color-coded to represent terrain feature, e.g., open ground, rough ground, marshes, rivers, lakes, or built-up areas. While terrain was represented more realistically than on a conventional two-colour chess board, Helwig's game still represented an extreme abstraction of warfare.

Various advances came over the next few decades. Then, in 1811 Georg Leopold von Reiswitz transferred the gaming venue to a sand table. This was the genesis of Kriegsspiel. It was subsequently improved further by the elder von Reisswitz and his son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz. Kriegsspiel emerged as an excellent means of studying military issues for officers in the Prussian Army of the era (1830s-1870s). However the game became progressively more competitive, and the procedures were developed to deal with the minutiae of movement and interaction. Many players began to use (and abuse) the rules to win, rather than to study military issues. The adverse effect was that tactical reality gave way to the rule book.

Freie Kriegsspiel or Free Kriegsspiel.

Some time after Kriegsspiel had become established, Free Kriegsspiel was developed (originally by Jakob von Meckel and Julius von Verdy du Vernois in the 1870s) to simplify what had become a rather meticulous, even tedious, set of rules. In particular, the adjudication procedures of Kriegsspiel had become cumbersome and time consuming and, in many ways, a distraction from key elements of the games that were meant for studying military strategy and tactics. Rigid rules were replaced by umpires who would use their own experience and judgement to adjudicate outcomes. By then war games had become somewhat unpopular due to the distracting rules of adjudication. But with combat-experienced officers providing their military judgment as a replacement for the cumbersome rules, war gaming became much less tedious. The new procedures resulted in games that were faster and thus more popular, hence played more often.

Free Kriegsspiel worked well when the umpires had considerable experience and well-honed judgement to contribute. Their adjudications were plausible to players (who generally had considerably less experience). And the umpires, because of their credibility gained from recent combat, were rarely challenged. However, Germany’s officers who were veterans of the campaigns of the 1860s and 1870s gradually retired from military service and the new generation of umpires could not adjudicate with the same credibility. A second problem is what today may be called "opinion of the senior officer present". When one of the players outranked the umpire, an umpire might feel obliged to give way to his senior's opinion for some adjudication. These two factors created problems for Free Kriegsspiel.

The Twentieth Century (Second and Third Generation)

US Naval War College in the Early Days

Captain William McCarty Little and his Naval Game had a dramatic effect on the Naval War College, where McCarty Little Hall (opened in 1999) is the state-of-the-art home of the College's war gaming activities.

US Naval War College in 1919-1942

An article by Michael Vlahos (pp. 7-22) provides an extensive review of this period.

British and Canadian War Games of 1950s and Later

The British Army developed manual war games at the division level after World War II. In the 1950s the Canadian Army Operational Research Establishment reviewed gaming activities in allied armies and developed a gaming capacity based largely on the British model. One feature of the Canadian Army gaming was to gather players at regular intervals to collect what were called "Judgements and Insights". This practice has continued to the present. It amounts to conducting a seminar with the participants to gain their insights on the operations just conducted in the war game.

Commercial Board Gaming

Avalon Hill is the name of a now-defunct game publisher that was the centre of the hobby gaming industry in the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Many of the old Avalon Hill games remain available.

Simulations Publications, Inc or SPI and Strategy and Tactics magazine succeeded Avalon Hill as the leader in the hobby war game market. James F Dunnigan started SPI partly to take over a failing magazine called Strategy and Tactics.

SPI and S&T were dominant forces in hobby gaming through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Dunnigan has widely published on military topics. His Wargames Handbook, now in its third edition provides a good description of hobby gaming during the period of SPI's dominance. Dunnigan has gone on from his start in hobby gaming to become a widely known commentator on military issues and on the professional use of war game methods.