Wargame

[1] Wargaming may be played for recreation, to train military officers in the art of strategic thinking, or to study the nature of potential conflicts.

There is ambiguity as to whether or not activities where participants physically perform mock combat actions (e.g. friendly warships firing dummy rounds at each other) are considered wargames.

[5] Commercial wargames are under more pressure to deliver an enjoyable experience for the players, who expect a user-friendly interface, a reasonable learning curve, exciting gameplay, and so forth.

A second reason is that the technical data required to design an accurate and precise model, such as the performance characteristics of a fighter jet, is often classified.

A wargame must have a setting that is based on some historical era of warfare so as to establish what armaments, unit types, and doctrines the combatants may wield and the environment they fight in.

For instance, Warhammer Age of Sigmar has wizards and dragons, but the combat is mostly based on medieval warfare (spearmen, archers, knights, etc.).

A wargame's scenario describes the circumstances of the specific conflict being simulated, from the layout of the terrain to the exact composition of the fighting forces to the victory conditions of the players.

Some games simply concede that the scenario is imbalanced and urge players to switch sides and play again to compare their performance.

An example of a tactical-level games is Flames of War, in which players use miniature figurines to represent individual soldiers, and move them around on a scale model of the battlefield.

[13] For example, Warhammer Fantasy Battle has wizards and dragons, but the bulk of the armaments are taken from medieval warfare (spearmen, knights, archers, etc.).

[15] For example, chess pieces only have a few rules determining their behaviour, such as how and when they are allowed to move or capture based on their type and board location, providing a highly abstracted model of warfare which represents troop positioning and composition.

), with detailed interior state (stat blocks and tables of troop numbers, equipment, operational readiness, artillery charts, etc.

In miniature wargaming, scale is more often expressed as the height of a model of a human measured from the base of its feet up to the eyes or top of the head (e.g. 28mm).

Military wargames typically aim to model time and space as realistically as is feasible, so everything in the simulation conforms to a single scale.

The fog of war is easy to simulate in a computer wargame, as a virtual environment is free of the physical constraints of a tabletop game.

Likewise, the battlefield itself is represented by model terrain, as opposed to a flat board or map; naval wargames are often played on a floor because they tend to require more space than a tabletop.

In the late 1970s Battleline Publications (a board wargame company) produced two card games, Naval War and Armor Supremacy.

The first was fairly popular in wargaming circles, and is a light system of naval combat, though again not depicting any 'real' situation (players may operate ships from opposing navies side-by-side).

Remote computer assisted wargames can be considered as extensions to the concept of play-by-email gaming, however the presentation and actual capabilities are completely different.

Vassal is in turn an outgrowth of the VASL (Virtual ASL) project, and uses Java, making it accessible to any computer that can run a modern JVM, while the other three are Microsoft Windows programs.

Since email is faster than the standard postal service, the rise of the Internet saw a shift of people playing board wargames from play-by-mail (PBM) to play-by-email (PBEM) or play-by-web (PBW).

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

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

Reisswitz's manual provided tables that listed how far each unit type could move in a round according to the terrain it was crossing and whether it was marching, running, galloping, etc.

The Prussian king and the General Staff officially endorsed Reisswitz's wargame, and by the end of the decade every German regiment had bought materials for it.

[36] The first Kriegsspiel manual in English, based on the system of Wilhelm von Tschischwitz, was published in 1872 for the British army and received a royal endorsement.

[38] The English writer H. G. Wells developed 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.

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.

These rules were a major inspiration for Gary Gygax's Chainmail (1971), which in turn became the basis for the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.