The Original War Game --- The invention of Kriegsspiel, a detailed tabletop simulation of battle, revolutionized 19th-century warfare and laid the groundwork for today's role playing games

"Chess originated in ancient India as an explicit abstraction of war. Its Sanskrit name, chaturanga, means "four-limbed," referring to the military divisions of infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry. In the Arabic world, the pieces evolved from lifelike sculptures of men, horses and elephants to the more abstract forms we know today.

In the late 18th century, the German mathematician Johann Hellwig determined to put military realism back into the game by inventing a new variant, which he called Kriegsspiel. As the first modern "war game," Kriegsspiel helped military theorists make explicit the conditions of battle and gain new perspectives on war. To this day, all major militaries still use some form of Kriegsspiel-style simulation to inform their decisions. U.S. federal agencies run game simulations on scenarios ranging from disaster relief to nuclear war.

While hobby groups play a simplified version of Kriegsspiel in person and online, the game also evolved into more familiar forms. It inspired tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer, and its mechanics were adopted as the bedrock for role-playing and combat-based videogames.

Hellwig's game replaced the traditional chess pieces, representing outmoded military units like knights, with modern pieces such as artillery. Instead of the king, players aimed to capture a fixed fortification. To mimic a real battlefield, Hellwig expanded the board to 1,617 squares, each color-coded to indicate different terrains. Over time, new variations added features that would become standard in war simulations, such as using dice to determine an attack's damage, reintroducing the noisiness of reality into chess's composed strategy.

In the early 19th century, Georg Leopold von Reisswitz, a Prussian nobleman, realized the game's potential for military training and began to create increasingly elaborate versions. He replaced the chessboard with wet sand molded into imaginary landscapes and designed porcelain tiles with bas-relief terrain features, allowing players to experience the difficulties of different terrains. Wooden blocks were used to represent troop formations. Reisswitz's son Georg Heinrich, an army officer, continued to refine Kriegsspiel, introducing a data-driven scoring system based on historical battle losses. The two sides in a game were designated by red and blue, a convention that persists to the present day: Security professionals use "red teaming" to simulate attacks on their systems.

Kriegsspiel systematized contingencies of terrain, weather and enemy power. Each turn simulated two minutes of warfare. The wooden-block troops, which took up map space corresponding to the actual footprint of regimental units, were constrained to move a reasonable distance. Communication between forces was subject to the fog of war, and opposing players used separate boards so that they couldn't see one another's pieces, just as real intelligence is limited by troops' relative positions and sight lines.

Early versions of the game had been tedious to play, each turn burdened with complicated formulas for tallying the exact numbers of casualties. In time, the designers replaced the onerous rulebook with knowledgeable umpires who could quickly estimate and assign damage or assess victory after each move. Kriegsspiel became significantly faster paced and even -- for some -- enjoyable. The game made it possible for military officers to improve their skills even in times of peace. It combined the pure strategy of chess with the chance element of dice, so players had to be both future-oriented and quick to adapt.

In 1824, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, who had loved the game as a child, learned of the improved version through his military tutor. He invited the younger Reisswitz to umpire a demonstration of Kriegsspiel at his home, witnessed by dignitaries and the king. The scenario involved a campaign fought between the Oder and Elbe Rivers, including territory in what is now Poland -- a region of great strategic interest at the time. The game took weeks to play; during that time, all cats had to be banished from the house to prevent them from disrupting the game pieces. General Karl Freiherr von Muffling, who attended the demonstration, quickly realized the potential of Kriegsspiel and exclaimed: "It's not a game at all! It's training for war. I shall recommend it enthusiastically to the whole army." The king was likewise impressed and demanded, by royal decree, that every military regiment learn to play.

General Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of staff of the Prussian army from the 1850s to the 1880s, was a devoted fan of Kriegsspiel. He saw it as an ideal training tool for officers. Anyone, he argued, "can take part immediately in the game as a commander, even if he has no previous knowledge of the game or has never even seen it before." He credited the game's bird's-eye view of the battlefield for offering a novel perspective on outdated tactics. For instance, von Moltke abandoned column and line troop formations, which he realized made for easy targets, in favor of loose formations. The lower density of soldiers translated to fewer casualties in artillery attacks.

Moltke organized the first permanent peacetime general staff and had them play Kriegsspiel to keep sharp. It allowed officers to assess their reports' intelligence and strategic savvy, and generally disrupted the military's hierarchy. Previously, appointments had been nepotistic, but Kriegsspiel made it easier for officers to ascend through the ranks on the merit of their ideas. Trainees could reason through scenarios with their superiors, coordinating on high-level strategy and working out counterfactual outcomes. Officers were afforded more accountability, and game simulations gave them a deeper understanding of the tactics they should carry out.

Prussian general Kraft Karl August zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, whose military strategy won him high honors in the Franco-Prussian War, credited his success to Kriegsspiel: "The ability to quickly arrive at decisions and the cheerful assumption of responsibility which characterized our officers in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was in no small measure due to the war games."

Through the lens of a game, war became a science: testable, rigorous, algorithmic. Before its revival under Kaiser Wilhelm I, Kriegsspiel had been largely forgotten in the long peace that characterized the reign of his elder brother. Scholars had dropped the Reisswitz name from any mention in military histories and Kriegsspiel manuals. In fact, the Reisswitzes had been so effectively scrubbed from history that an 1873 magazine article celebrating Kriegsspiel's role in Prussia's recent military victories failed to mention the family whatsoever. The author instead claimed that the game had no inventor and had been passed down as folk knowledge until the first guide was published in 1846.

A few weeks later, an anonymous letter to the magazine corrected the record, describing how the game had been painstakingly perfected over decades of experimentation by the Reisswitzes and how it had come to the attention of the royal household. Though the letter was unsigned, most historians believe that it could only have been written by the Kaiser himself, given that it contained details known solely to him. It was an act of patient tribute to the father and son whose technology had forged a national identity for Germany and changed the face of Europe -- and, soon, the world.

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Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist and physicist. This essay is adapted from her new book, "Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World," which will be published on June 18 by Riverhead Books." [1]

1. REVIEW --- The Original War Game --- The invention of Kriegsspiel, a detailed tabletop simulation of battle, revolutionized 19th-century warfare and laid the groundwork for today's role playing games. Clancy, Kelly.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 15 June 2024: C.5.