Real war game full#

4 This trade-off problem is typical of models in general and it was also very relevant for the early wargames designed between 17. Ideally, models are both realistic and simple, but since realism is generally bought at the price of simplicity, a good model should give, in the words of the modern author Beat Schwendimann, ‘a judicious trade-off between realism and simplicity’. Models can be more or less realistic, and they can also be more or less simple. 3 We will see how wargame designers between 17 used similar concepts if not quite the same terminology.

In this way, the term ‘model’ is used in a relatively passive sense and the term ‘simulation’ in a relatively active sense models are used to run a simulation, not the other way round. If a wargame amounts to a model, then playing such a game amounts to a simulation. Since models are less complicated than the system that they represent, they can be understood and manipulated more easily than the real system itself. 2 These wargames were what we now call ‘models’.

As they experimented within and beyond the simple format of chess, designers created more or less refined wargames, consisting of rules, units and a game board, that represented a real-world system consisting of warfare.

Real war game full#

For a brief survey of these games, including their full and abbreviated titles, see Table 1. In the present article, I discuss 12 wargames published between 17. Units were supported by complex logistical systems, while players were kept in suspense by the fog of war and the friction of random events. In the most sophisticated early games, the abstract chess board was substituted by a huge game board that contained detailed three-dimensional topographic features on which infantry fought melee battles, cavalry charged, and artillery delivered volleys. In this age of revolution, a whole range of completely new game concepts was introduced that have remained at the core of subsequent military board games and video games. These military chess variants would continue to appear between 17 but this period, so revolutionary in so many other regards, would also see the first realistic wargames – realistic in the sense that they tried to offer a model of a real military conflict. In the Early Modern period, we see the development of games that maintained to all intents and purposes the mechanics of chess, while merely adding a few specifically military pieces to a slightly enlarged game board. 1 Hence it is not surprising that wargame designers first turned to chess. However abstract its character, chess was originally a battle-game and had always been associated with warfare. In the beginning of the history of military board games or ‘wargames’, there was chess. Moreover, a direct offshoot of this conceptual experimentation between 17 was the ‘free’ German wargame ( Kriegsspiel), which became an integral part of German operational planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus adding another chapter to the story of the influence of ideas on human history. I try to show how different game concepts were developed as an answer to this problem, and how these seemingly arcane concepts form a relevant topic of investigation in the history of ideas. The designers of early wargames were confronted with a problem that affects all models: the trade-off between realism and simplicity, which in the case of wargames amounts to the trade-off between realism and playability. Designers of these early games experimented fruitfully with different concepts that were formulated in interaction with the external dynamics of the military systems that they tried to represent and the internal dynamics of the design process itself. The first sophisticated wargames (military board games) were developed between 17 and are models of military conflict.