Back In Episode 1, I mentioned that complex board games have been used as learning games to train strategic thinking going back to ancient times. Chess is a good example of a game like this, though its origins are more recent. Chess is a staggeringly rich and complex game, as attested to by the body of thought that’s developed around it over the centuries. And we know that chess, with its narrative of laying siege to capture the king, was used throughout its history as a military training tool.
Despite their complexity and deep strategic elements, chess and games like it lack many characteristics of real military engagements. For one thing, in a chess game, both players have access to the same information about the game at all times. They know where all the pieces are on the board, whose turn it is, and so on. Game designers call that information the game state, by the way, and while the players of a chess match are entitled to perfect knowledge of it at all times, the same isn’t true of actual war. The expression “the fog of war” refers to this phenomenon: commanders often have to make decisions in the absence of information, like having to decide whether or not to attack without having perfect, chess-like knowledge of your opponent’s position or strength. Similarly, in chess, the complete ruleset is known to both players: things like how the different pieces move, what it means to be “in check,” and so on. This also isn’t true in real war: your opponent can do things that break the rules, or at least defy your expectations.
Around the turn of the 19th Century, a Prussian baron named George Leopold von Reisswitz – who was, among other things, what we would today call a board game geek – noticed differences like these and decided to design a military combat game that realistically represented the warfare of the time: think Napoleonic warfare or the American Civil War if you know your military history: infantry with muskets, massed fire, artillery, cavalry acting as scouts or mobile infantry. The work of this noble miniature wargamer and later, his son, would come to define the wargaming genre, and the innovations they developed have become essential parts of many digital and non-digital game genres enjoyed by tens of millions of players today. It’s also possible that the work of these martially-minded learning game designers indirectly contributed to the formation of a unified German state and, rather more darkly, some of the darkest chapters in 20th Century history, because the Reisswitzes created what Marshall Neal, the founder of the international society dedicated to the game calls “the great-grandfather of wargames.” In fact, its name literally translates as “war game”: the game of Kriegsspiel.
This is the second of two episodes focused on non-digital learning games before we get to the main narrative of digital learning games that’s the real focus of the podcast. As I mentioned in Episode 2 where I talked about Snakes and Ladders, I wanted to start with these two examples – and they really are two examples among many I could have chosen from – because they’re fascinating in their own right, but also because, in my experience, starting any discussion of games and game design with non-digital games makes the key concepts easier to grasp than starting with digital games. Plus, in the case of Kriegsspiel, we’re going to see some of the design challenges, and Kriegsspiel’s solutions to them, more than once in the digital learning games to come. And, frankly, this is just a great story. Let’s get back to it.
Baron Reisswitz starts wrestling with the things he sees as deficiencies in the design of the early, or first-generation, tabletop wargames of his time, which eventually leads him to construct a prototype aimed at creating a more authentic war game. Reisswitz’s prototype included a number of innovations compared to games like chess or existing wargames. Instead of using a two-dimensional grid like most earlier – and later – boardgames, Reisswitz’s game featured realistic, sculpted, 3D terrain: first in the form of wet sand and then using modular tiles that could be rearranged to create different battlefields; the latter development coming after he got himself invited to present the game to King Frederick Willhelm III of Prussia and decided wet sand wasn’t regal enough for his majesty. And instead of moving pieces around the spaces of a game board, Reisswitz’s pieces represented military units that could move about the terrain freely in the way the units they represented did on a real battlefield.
Reisswitz’s game was a hit with the royal family, but it was expensive to produce and never caught on. The fact that its ideal audience – military officers and trainees – were busy fighting in the aforementioned and very real Napoleonic Wars probably had something to do with it. If the Horatio Hornblower novels are to be believed, they all preferred a friendly game of Whist between engagements. At any rate, Reisswitz lost interest around the time Old Boney got what was coming to him at Waterloo and further development of the game stalled until the 1820s when Reisswitz’s son – with the equally fantastically martial name of Georg Heinrick Rudolf Johan von Reisswitz -- picked up where his dad left off, working with a small circle of other junior officers in the Prussian army.
As a game maker, I have to say: I love this story because what Reisswitz Junior and his co-developers do in the 1820s has so many parallels with game development 200 years later. I like to imagine Reisswitz and his buddies sitting around the barracks, eating pizza and chugging energy drinks as they have impassioned arguments about this or that minor design point. But in all seriousness, what Reisswitz and his buddies engage in is what we would call today an iterative development process. They’re trying and testing new ideas, seeing what works, getting rid of what doesn’t and doing it over and over again, all in pursuit of the goal of making the game’s representation of combat as realistic as possible. They’re creating an incredibly rich simulation game, and coming up with one brilliant idea after another, a fair number of which we still use – and take for granted – in games today. The result is Kriegsspiel.
In previous strategy games, including earlier wargames, game pieces represented combatants or whole units, as in Reisswitz Senior’s prototype. But in earlier games, a game piece’s victory or defeat was an all-or-nothing proposition. If your piece is taken in chess, it goes off the board completely. Kriegsspiel introduced the idea that in-game units could be partially defeated but stay on the field, in the way real military units take casualties. It became possible for a unit to survive multiple rounds of enemy attack, taking damage each round, before ultimately being overwhelmed and taken off the map. In other words, Reisswitz Junior and his colleagues invented hit points.
Like the prototype, units in Kriegsspiel move about the game board freely. However instead of using 3D terrain, Kriegsspiel uses real, detailed topographical maps (traditionally at a 1:8,000 scale). This made it possible to simulate any historical or anticipated battlefield. Now, OK, the idea of using a real map seems clever, but also a little obvious. You might ask, well, why didn’t earlier wargame designers like Reisswitz Senior use them? This is another answer I absolutely love, because it again has direct parallels with modern game development. The answer is that topographical maps with the necessary detail and scale didn’t become widely available until the 1820s. So Reisswitz Junior and his buddies were taking advantage of – and probably geeking out at least a little over – the cutting-edge technology of the day, just like modern game devs do when new hardware and software technologies become available.
But Kriegsspiel’s most significant contribution to game design comes in its solution to the problem of simulating the fog of war. Remember, the fog of war concept was absent from earlier war and strategy games: players tended to have a shared and perfect knowledge of the game’s state, which in no way resembles real combat. Reisswitz Junior solved this by introducing – and let’s make use of some of that games-as-a-system terminology we introduced in Episode 2 and call it what is – a new component: the umpire.
In Kriegsspiel, two players control the opposing forces. You can – and people frequently do – play with more than one player on a side to represent the levels in the command structure of the army, like each side having an overall army commander, then division commanders who report to him, brigade commanders who report to them, and so forth. But we’ll stick with talking about just two opposing players to keep it simple. Instead of taking turns moving their units around a shared game board, each player submits his orders for each turn, in secret, to the umpire. And these are authentic, military-sounding orders like “dig in on this hill” or “attack the enemy’s right with this brigade and attempt to turn his flank,” not abstract game moves like “Queen to King’s Rook 5.”
The umpire collects the orders from both players and then interprets them based on a combination of the game’s formal rules and his – the umpire’s – real-world military knowledge: early Kriegsspiel umpires were military officers with extensive experience who knew how things tended to go. If opposing units came into contact, the umpire would roll a set of specialized dice and apply the game’s rules to the result to determine the outcome of the engagement. The umpire pulls all of this together over the course of a turn and then updates the game state.
One of the most powerful things about the game-as-a-system way of thinking is that it helps you appreciate the interconnectedness of a game’s elements. The addition of the umpire component enabled or required changes to other elements of Kriegsspiel, all of which wound up contributing to making the game’s military simulation more realistic and useful as a training tool.
Instead of Kriegspiel’s space being a shared gameboard, the addition of the umpire enabled that space to be reconfigured, which was key to solving the fog of war problem. Kriegsspiel’s space is made up of not one but three copies of the game map (or potentially more if multiple players are on each side). The umpire’s map contains a perfect picture of the entire game state: where every one of both player’s units is and what each unit’s strength is. But each player’s map reflects only the state his own units, plus those of his opponent that he’s come in contact with. The rest of the game state is hidden from him. It's a bit like the position players find themselves in in Battleship: you know the number and types of your opponent’s ships, but only get a sense of where they are when you score a hit. The result is that in Kriegsspiel, as in real war, a commander makes decisions using only the knowledge he has, not from the omniscient and artificial perspective of the umpire.
The addition of the umpire also allowed for simulating other realistic war challenges. Remember, Kriegspiel is a simulation of 19th Century warfare, and in the 19th Century, nothing on the battlefield beyond visual range moved faster than the fastest horse… well, nothing other than a bullet, I suppose. And that includes orders and information. To simulate the challenge this posed, one of the umpire’s jobs is to simulate the speed information moves at. The game includes rules for this so that, for example, an order a commander gives from his simulated position on one side of the map might sit with the umpire for several turns before he carries it out with the unit it has to do with on the other side of the map. By that time, the state of the game may have changed in a way that makes it more or less likely the order will succeed, or even be relevant. It’s even possible for an order to be given and never carried out by the umpire because in real war, sometimes messengers get shot (in spite of us all being told not to do that).
Similarly, as in real warfare, orders themselves can sometimes be unclear or based on false information and assumptions. One of the umpire’s jobs is to interpret the players’ orders, but he’s not supposed to interpret them in the most advantageous light for the player who gave them, nor from his perspective of omniscience. He’s supposed to interpret them fairly, but in a way that would be reasonable for the receiving unit to interpret them on the battlefield, and that includes in ways that are different than the commander meant. And, since he’s human, it’s also possible for the umpire himself to make mistakes, either in implementing orders or even in applying the game’s rules. And while Kriegsspiel allows for do-overs in limited cases, the general rule is that players play through the umpire’s mistakes. That’s kind of the game’s way of representing the whims of the gods of war.
Suffice it to say that the addition of the umpire component – and the changes it brought to other game elements – was a major unlock that allowed the game to fully realize its potential as a realistic and useful training tool. It’s so useful a component that it’s evolved and survived to the present day. It’s a feature of many modern wargames, both tabletop wargames and the kind of wargames that military organizations conduct out in the field with real equipment and personnel. And it’s the progenitor of the gamemaster concept that’s commonly found in tabletop role playing games: like the dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons, who, in addition to serving a rules enforcement and interpretation role, also frames and leads the players in advancing the game’s narrative.
To wrap up the story of Kriegsspiel’s development, by 1824 Reisswitz Junior and his team have a working version of the game and present it to the King and his generals, who immediately recognize its potential as a training tool, ordering a copy for every regiment in the Prussian army. It doesn’t catch on with the military right away, though, and Reisswitz falls out of favor with the military establishment for unrelated reasons and gets himself exiled from Berlin to a remote post, where he commits suicide in 1827.
But the game survives outside the military in private German wargaming clubs, and the rules undergo a series of updates by enthusiasts in the 1840s and 50s. By the 1860s, the revised game is finally used widely as a training tool throughout the Prussian military.
The period following the end of the Napoleonic Wars 1815 is one of relative peace in Europe, and you get several generations of soldiers and military leaders across the continent who lack significant combat and, in particular, largescale field command experience. That includes the Prussians, but they’ve been playing Kriegsspiel. When Prussia finally does go to war in the latter half of the century – first against Austria in 1866 and then against France in 1870 – it absolutely dominates its opponents, defeating Austria in a month and defeating France in six months, the latter resulting in the capture of Paris. There are many factors that led to Prussia’s victory, but on a purely military level, it prevailed both times over evenly matched or maybe even slightly superior foes in certain respects. It would be ridiculous to attribute the Prussian victories solely to Kriegsspiel, but Prussia’s is the only military in the world with a wargaming tradition, and some contemporary commentators see a connection. This is what Matthew Caffrey, a modern scholar of wargaming at the Naval Warfare College in Newport, Rhode Island, has to say about this in his 2019 book:
“Prussian forces were more often than not outnumbered, weapon advantages were mixed, and training methods were similar... At this time, though, the Prussian military had a monopoly on second-generation wargaming and had integrated it into its staff education and its staff planning methods, especially at the higher levels."
In the wake of these Prussian victories, other countries start to take notice, and by the 1880s, most of the world’s major militaries are using wargames, and Kriegssspiel in particular, for training and planning purposes.
I’m not a historian – of wargaming or otherwise – but if you buy that Kriegsspiel played a role in those Prussian victories, it’s probably worth taking a moment to connect a few political and historical dots, because there’s an ominous side to all this. The Prussian conflicts with Austria and France are collectively known as the Wars of German Unification. For all its history up to this point, what we now know as Germany was a collection of independent states, of which Prussia was one. Prussia’s victory over Austria led to its dominance over the other northern German states. And its victory over France led to Prussia becoming the dominant force in unifying all the German-speaking states (with the exception of Austria and Switzerland) into the modern state of Germany, under the emperor – or kaiser – Wilhelm I. Prussia rode to victory, and into the leading position in the new German state, on a wave of militaristic nationalism, which was bolstered by its victories and became a feature of early German national identity as a whole. This nationalism continued to grow during Wilhelm’s reign and ultimately contributed to World War I and Germany’s role in it under his grandson, Wilhelm II. Germany’s subsequent defeat in World War I and its aftermath led directly to the rise of another form of political and economic nationalism: National Socialism, or Nazism, and, ultimately, World War II. So, rather darkly, you can indirectly connect an extremely well-designed educational game with the 20th Century’s most destructive conflicts.
That’s a bit of a downer, so to end the story of Kriegsspiel on a positive note, the game has been continuously played in military contexts and by regular old enthusiasts ever since. It’s enjoyed an uptick in popularity in recent years both through in-person groups and, in particular, online play. The aforementioned International Kriegsspiel Society constantly hosts online games on its Discord, because it turns out that sequestering individual players in their own chat threads is an effective way of achieving the same thing as having players use their own map tables back in the day. Check them out if you want to learn more about the game or think you might have made an excellent 19th Century general.
Today, wargaming is still going strong as an entertainment genre. Miniature wargaming survives as a real-world, tabletop game type with a diverse set of games that run the gamut from historical warfare to modern warfare to science fiction and fantasy in their conceits. The Warhammer franchise is probably the most well known, but there are others, including ones that tie into franchises like Star Wars and Game of Thrones. A significant element of the experience for many tabletop wargamers is decorating the tiny gamepieces that represent their units, a task that I entirely lack the artistic ability and fine motor skills for. And if you play digital games in the tactical wargames or turn-based strategy genres or their little brothers like tower defense – things like the XCOM franchise – you’re familiar with videogames that descend from the same branch of the gaming tree.
In Episode 1, I mentioned that one of the ways in which games are a uniquely effective learning tool is that they let players try and fail in a safe environment: in ways that aren’t possible in the real world. Kriegsspiel is a perfect example of this, not just in the game’s design, but insofar as making a realistic war game that allowed for precisely that was the guiding principle of that design. You can see the legacy of this in the way we use the phrase “war gaming” today. Outside of playing literal war games, we use that phrase to capture the idea of playing something out in a realistic, safe, simulated environment for the express purpose of trying to figure out what to do in the real world. People and organizations war game conversations, negotiations, business strategies, political maneuvers and, of course, literal wars. All that is the legacy of Kriegsspiel.
We’ll see some of these same ideas at play when we pick up the story of digital learning games where it all began in the next episode with another simulation game. We’ll take a look at a game that can claim a number of firsts: first in its genre, first videogame created by a female designer, first research-based game and, yes, the first educational videogame: 1964’s The Sumerian Game.