It can be argued that the face of modern Europe was changed by Kriegsspiel or “war game”. In the 18th-century German military strategists meddled with chess, itself an abstraction of war, to create a more realistic military planning tool. Inspired by the success of the scientific method in so many other fields, they hoped to recast war as a science. The game they devised was Kriegsspiel, with which they aimed to test and workshop new strategies. The chess board was first expanded to thousands of squares, colour-coded to represent different terrains. As map-making technology improved, the game was played on scaled maps of actual battlefields that allowed officers to plan their real campaigns in detail.
Each turn of play represented two minutes of warfare, and wooden block troops were constrained to move a realistic distance in that time. Casualty tables derived from actual battle data were used by umpires to predict each simulated action’s effects. As in modern tabletop wargaming, dice throws randomised and determined the damage inflicted by each attack. Kriegsspiel resulted in a remarkably accurate prediction engine allowing German officers to cohere the first German empire in the late 19th-century. Most modern militaries use some form of game simulation in their training and planning.
In 1913 author HG Wells published a simple tabletop war game he called “Little Wars”. As an acknowledged pacifist this seems a little odd, but he hoped that playing at war and witnessing its horrors in miniature would encourage people to avoid it for real. In due course Wells’ Little Wars gave rise to a plethora of new tabletop war games that culminated in Dungeons and Dragons and countless role-playing video games. The impact of playing war games has been far reaching even influencing modern policy. The nuclear war simulation game “Proud Prophet” was played by top US officials in 1983. Every outcome was so harrowing that the exercise convinced President Ronald Reagan’s administration to open arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union.
Bon appétit!
Reference:
Clancy, K., (2024), “War and pieces”, BBC History Magazine (July edition), pp. 27-31.
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