Recreational wargaming

Wargames were invented for the purpose of training military officers, but they eventually caught on in civilian circles, played recreationally.

The first wargame was invented in Prussia in 1780 by Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, who was a college professor in Brunswick.

[4] In 1796, another Prussian named Johann Georg Julius Venturini invented his own wargame, inspired by Hellwig's game.

[5] Venturini's game also added rules governing logistics, such as supply convoys and mobile bakeries, and the effects of weather and seasons, making it perhaps the first operational-level wargame.

[6][7] In 1806, an Austrian named Johann Ferdinand Opiz developed a wargame aimed at both civilian and military markets.

[8] Hellwig, who designed his wargame for both leisure as well as instruction, felt that introducing chance would spoil the fun.

The chess-like grid forced the terrain into unnatural forms, such as rivers that flowed in straight lines and turned at right angles.

Instead of a chess-like grid, the game was played on accurate topographical maps of the kind the Prussian army used in the field.

The umpire only placed a piece on the map when he judged that the unit in question had entered the enemy's line of sight; this was the first wargame to properly simulate the fog of war.

In 1881, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson became the first documented person to use toy soldiers in a wargame, although he never published his rules.

[14] In his game, each toy soldier was used to represent an entire unit rather than an individual, and his playing field was just a chalk map drawn on the floor.

The English writer H. G. Wells developed his own codified rules for playing with toy soldiers, which he published in a book titled Little Wars (1913).

For artillery attacks, players used spring-loaded toy cannons which fired little wooden cylinders to physically knock over enemy models.

Wells was also the first wargamer to use scale models of buildings, trees, and other terrain features to create a three-dimensional battlefield.

Scruby's major contribution to the miniature wargaming hobby was to network players across America and the UK.

This output of published wargaming titles from British authors coupled with the emergence at the same time of several manufacturers providing suitable wargame miniatures (e.g. Miniature Figurines, Hinchliffe, Peter Laing, Garrisson, Skytrex, Davco, Heroic & Ros) was responsible for the huge upsurge of popularity of the hobby in the late 1960s and into the 1970s.

From 1983 to 2010, Games Workshop produced the first miniature wargame designed to be used with proprietary models: Warhammer Fantasy.

Roberts later founded the Avalon Hill Game Company, the first firm that specialized in commercial wargames.

One reason was that assembling a playset for miniature wargaming was expensive, time-consuming, and required artisanal skill.

One factor was competition from role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons: the sort of person who would have gone into wargaming instead went into RPGs.

Increased hobby time for baby boomers reaching retirement provided a ready market for highly detailed 28mm figures such as those produced by Warlord Games.

New Zealand's Battlefront Miniatures, founded in 2002, also followed a GW marketing strategy, linking rules and figure manufacturing.