Kriegsspiel

Kriegsspiel is a genre of umpire-moderated wargaming developed by the Prussian Army in the 19th century to teach battlefield tactics to officers, and was the first wargaming system adopted by a military organisation as a serious tool for training and research.¹²¹⁶ The word translates literally from German as “wargame”, but in English usage it refers specifically to the Prussian systems devised by Georg von Reisswitz and adopted by the Prussian Army, and to the later games built on their principles.¹¹² It is frequently described as “the mother of all wargames”, with later wargaming traditions held to descend from it.²¹² The first modern wargame is generally considered to be Kriegsspiel, published in Prussia in 1824 by First Lieutenant Georg Heinrich Leopold Freiherr von Reisswitz.¹⁶

The game was invented in the first years of the 19th century by Baron von Reisswitz, a civil administrator with an interest in military matters.²⁰²¹ His son, First Lieutenant Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz, refined the system into a training tool, and the rules he developed in 1824 are the most famous of the early versions.³¹⁶ These 1824 rules, formally an instruction for representing military manoeuvres with the apparatus of the wargame, were recommended from the highest level to all Prussian officers for their training.⁴¹⁰ The roughly sixty-page manual went beyond the text of its rules, including instructions for making playing pieces and a playing surface from enclosed sheets of paper and maps, whose configuration opened up the tactical space of the Napoleonic era.⁴ Aimed at the detachment level with two-minute turns, the system was detailed and slowed by minutiae.³

What distinguishes Kriegsspiel from most later wargames is its method of play.¹² The game is played double-blind: the players on each side do not see what their opponents are doing unless they are in direct contact, while an umpire reports what each player can observe, enforces the rules, and resolves movement, combat and other events.¹² The umpire keeps a master map on which the positions of both sides are tracked, and at the end of the battle the umpire’s table is revealed to the players and a critique is offered.¹²¹³ Additional devices that heighten realism include limiting a commander’s view-range, order delays and dispatch delays, all of which reproduce the friction and fog of war experienced by commanders in the field.¹³ Players need not know the rules; all processing is handled by the umpire, and players are in fact advised not to read the rules so as to avoid a “gamey” approach of exploiting the system.²³

Games are typically structured around a chain of command, so that low-level players control a handful of unit pieces—infantry, artillery or cavalry depending on the setting—while intermediate and overall commanders direct them, allowing players to experience both giving and receiving orders amid incomplete and outdated intelligence.¹³ Combat in the rigid systems was resolved using dice and tables, with specially made Kriegsspiel dice intended to abstract combat effects.³¹⁷

Rigid and free Kriegsspiel

Historically the rulesets divided into two broad approaches: the heavily detailed “rigid” Kriegsspiel and the minimal “free” Kriegsspiel.³ The rigid line ran from Reisswitz’s 1824 rules through later refinements.³ New iterations for military use were much discussed in the 1870s, and in 1871 von Tschischwitz published his “Guide to Kriegsspiel”, a slightly more streamlined version of Reisswitz’s system.³ In 1873 Jakob Meckel published his “Studies on Kriegsspiel” together with fictional maps designed for the game, arguing that many elements of rigid Kriegsspiel hindered its use.³

The radical counterpart was free Kriegsspiel, whose most prominent advocate was the German general Verdy du Vernois.³ In his 1876 book Verdy argued that, to speed up play, umpires should simply judge the outcome of a given combat situation and assign odds—rolling a common six-sided die, or no dice at all.³ Verdy’s 1876 free Kriegsspiel is credited with launching a new generation of wargames using minimal rules and tables, aiming for realism as decided by the umpire; the system was later taken up in adapted form, including the Victorian Army’s 1896 war game.⁸

Modern practice and legacy

Kriegsspiel remains in use by the world’s militaries and has a substantial hobbyist following.¹² The International Kriegsspiel Society, described as the largest online association dedicated to the game, unites over 4,100 members from around the world and plays largely through Tabletop Simulator over the internet, running both play-by-post games—often requiring only minutes a day—and live games lasting between three and eight hours.²¹²¹³ The society endorses the Derby House Principles for inclusion and diversity in professional wargaming and charges no dues, fees or examinations for entry.²¹²

Society members have developed new rule systems, among them the Napoleonic Ottovski System designed by Otto Salo for Napoleonic pitched battles with battalions, squadrons and batteries as pieces and fifteen-minute turns, a Second World War Ottovski System portraying company-level combat in which each block is a platoon, the K22 system designed by Marshall Neal and heavily inspired by Reisswitz’s 1824 rules at detachment level with five-minute turns, and the Citizen Soldiers system for division-level battles of the American Civil War by master umpire Carter McNish.³ Many of these systems remain unwritten or under constant development, since their design is treated as bound up with the study of military history.³

The historical rules continue to be reprinted and sold: the publisher Too Fat Lardies offers English editions of the 1824 and 1862 (Tschischwitz) rules along with reproduction maps such as the Meckel, Königgrätz and Metz maps, while Command Post Games produces Kriegsspiel blocks, dice, a measuring apparatus and scenario sets for battles including Waterloo, Brandy Station, Brandywine and Bunker Hill.⁵¹⁷ Computer descendants include realtime titles such as Kriegsspiel ~ 7 Years’ War by La Forge du Code, in which the player commands armies but depends on couriers to send orders and to learn the situation on the battlefield.¹⁴ A community of enthusiasts also maintains forums and Discord servers dedicated to traditional Reisswitz games, free and email Kriegsspiels, and computer-moderated play.¹

The game is widely held to be the ancestor of all modern wargames, which according to enthusiasts are descended from it, though most lack its central fog-of-war element.¹² Dungeons & Dragons is described as directly modelled from Kriegsspiel.¹² The lineage runs deeper still: scholarship traces the marriage of the printed book to a playing surface back to 17th-century works such as Duke August the Younger’s treatise on chess and Christoph Weickhmann’s mid-17th-century “King’s Game”, which sought to derive political and military maxims from play and to lay out a “Staats- und Kriegsrath” from the systematic application of the game.⁴