Kriegsspiel

Kriegsspiel[a] is a genre of wargaming developed by the Prussian Army in the 19th century to teach battlefield tactics to officers.

It is characterized by high realism, an emphasis on the experience of decision-making rather than on competition, and the use of an umpire to keep the rules flexible and manage hidden information.

After Prussia's impressive victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War, other countries began designing similar wargames for their own armies.

They were derivatives of chess, but the pieces represented real military units, cavalry, infantry, artillery, etc.

The grid system also forced the terrain to take unnatural forms, such as rivers flowing in straight lines and right angles.

Reisswitz did not want to present the king a table of damp sand, so he set about constructing a more impressive apparatus.

Instead of sculpted sand, the battlefield was made out of porcelain tiles, upon which terrain features were depicted in painted bas-relief.

The development of the wargame was continued by his son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz.

[4] Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz was a junior officer in the Prussian army.

The umpire would then move the blocks across the game map according to how he judged the imaginary troops would interpret and carry out the players' orders.

The game could simulate the fog of war, where the umpire would place on the map blocks only for the troops which were in visual range of both sides.

In early 1824, the prince invited Reisswitz Jr. to present his wargame to the king and his senior generals at Berlin Castle.

[11] Wilhelm von Tschischwitz published a Kriegsspiel manual in 1862[c] that incorporated new technological advances such as railroads, telegraph, and breech-loading cannons; and which used conventional gaming dice.

[15] In 1876, General Julius von Verdy du Vernois proposed dispensing with all the rules and tools completely and allowing the umpire to arbitrate the game entirely as he saw fit.

[16][17] Verdy's insight was that all that was truly essential for Kriegsspiel was the umpire and concealed information, with an emphasis on the fog of war and delayed messaging.

The first Kriegsspiel manual in English, Rules for the Conduct of the War-Game by E. Baring, based on the system of Wilhelm von Tschischwitz, was published in 1872 for the British army and received a royal endorsement.

[9] In the United States, Charles Adiel Lewis Totten published Strategos, the American War Game in 1880.

Kriegsspiel has undergone a minor revival in the English-speaking world thanks to translations of the original rulebooks by a British wargaming enthusiast named Bill Leeson.

[24] Therefore, the original rules are modified to preserve the critical components of Kriegsspiel, specifically, the games are umpired, double-blind, use simultaneous movement, emphasize fog of war, and feature delayed communications and execution of orders.

The society also hosts games that play by post, meaning players submit orders online by message (email or Discord chat) and the turns are processed by an umpire on a regular basis.

This summary is based on an English translation[29] of a wargaming manual written by Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz in 1824.

The objectives of the respective teams are determined by the umpire, and typically resemble the goals that an army might pursue in a real battlefield situation, such as expelling the enemy from a certain defensive position or inflicting a certain number of casualties.

Each piece is painted with markings that denotes what kind of unit it represents, cavalry, infantry, etc., and the team it belongs to.

If there are multiple players in a team, the teammates will divide control of their troops and establish a hierarchy of command in a way that should resemble Prussian military doctrine, subject to the umpire's approval.

The umpire will move the pieces across the map according to how he judges the imaginary troops would interpret and execute the players' orders.

In a turn the troops can perform as many actions as they realistically could in two minutes of time, and Reisswitz's manual provides some guidelines.

If the pin reaches the 60th dot in the column, the cavalry unit has suffered a fatal level of casualties, and the umpire will then remove the corresponding piece from the map.

For instance, by 1862 the Prussian army had transitioned from muskets to breech-loading rifles and hence troops could inflict casualties at up to 900 paces instead of 400.

In his 1876 book, Contribution to Wargaming, Verdy du Vernois illustrated his concept of free Kriegsspiel with a long transcript of a game.

A noted difference between classic Kriegsspiel and Verdy's approach is that the players had conversations with the umpire instead of communicating with written messages.