[1] In 1812, Reisswitz's father developed a wargaming apparatus which he presented as a gift to the Prussian king, which the royal family embraced and regularly played.

The father hoped that wargaming would eventually become a regular tool of instruction and training for army officers, but he never perfected the system, probably because of the upheavals caused by the Napoleonic Wars.

By 1816, Reisswitz's father seemed to have lost interest in wargaming altogether, and his son decided to continue the development of the game.

In 1824, the prince invited Reisswitz to demonstrate his wargame to the king and his chief of staff, General von Müffling.

In 1874, his old friend and fellow officer Heinrich Ernst Dannhauer, now a general, rehabilitated Reisswitz's name in an article published in Militär-Wochenblatt #56.

Reisswitz took advantage of new advances in cartography and probability theory to create a battle simulator that was sufficiently realistic for instructional use.

[5] Reisswitz's wargame was designed to simulate battles at the tactical level (it did not concern itself with operational matters such as training and logistics).

When the two armies engaged each other, the umpire would use dice rolls and simple arithmetic to compute how many casualties they inflicted upon each other, and when a troop formation was defeated he would remove its block from the game map.