# Georg von Reisswitz - Maker: Wargame inventor - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/georg-von-reisswitz/ > A Prussian father and son whose sand table, porcelain-tile cabinet and 1824 rulebook created Kriegsspiel, the first wargame used to train real officers and the distant ancestor of the Dungeon Master. **Why it matters:** The Reisswitz Kriegsspiel introduced the neutral umpire, dice-driven results and gradual unit attrition. Those ideas passed through Prussian staff colleges, American and British wargamers and Minnesota hobbyists into Dungeons & Dragons. ## Quick answers **Who is Georg von Reisswitz?** A Prussian father and son whose sand table, porcelain-tile cabinet and 1824 rulebook created Kriegsspiel, the first wargame used to train real officers and the distant ancestor of the Dungeon Master. **What is Georg von Reisswitz known for?** Georg von Reisswitz is best known for Kriegsspiel. **Why does Georg von Reisswitz matter to fantasy and games?** The Reisswitz Kriegsspiel introduced the neutral umpire, dice-driven results and gradual unit attrition. Those ideas passed through Prussian staff colleges, American and British wargamers and Minnesota hobbyists into Dungeons & Dragons. ## Life This exhibit belongs to two men with nearly the same name. **Georg Leopold von Reisswitz** (1764–1828) was a Prussian baron and official based in Breslau, the Silesian city now called Wrocław, in Poland. His son, **Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz** (1794–1827), was a professional soldier. The father invented the apparatus; the son turned it into a game an army could use. Historians of play usually treat them together, and the English spelling of the family name varies between Reisswitz and Reiswitz. The son volunteered for the artillery at Neisse in 1810, in the years when Prussia was rebuilding its army after defeat by Napoleon. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant during the siege of Glogau in late 1813 and awarded the Iron Cross, second class. By 1819 he was a first lieutenant in the Guard Artillery Brigade in Berlin, the right place for a young officer with a new idea to be noticed. Success at court did not last. Rivals are said to have misrepresented his remarks as insulting to his superiors, and his 1826 promotion to captain came with a transfer to Torgau, a provincial fortress town, which he took as banishment. He fell into depression and on September 1, 1827, died by his own hand in Breslau. His father died there the following June. ## Work Wargames on grids already existed: in 1780 Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig had built a war game on a colored, enlarged chessboard. The elder Reisswitz wanted troops to move over real ground. He began with a table of damp sand shaped into hills and valleys, with small wooden blocks for formations, and showed it to Prussian princes in 1811. In 1812, the year of Napoleon's march on Moscow, he presented King Frederick William III with a finished version: a handsome wooden cabinet whose drawers held porcelain tiles that could be assembled into landscapes, with pieces for the troops. It was admired as a royal amusement, but it had no complete rules and never became standard military equipment. After 1816 the son and a group of fellow junior officers reworked the idea into something practical. His [Kriegsspiel](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/kriegsspiel/) rules, published in 1824 with the title *Anleitung zur Darstellung militairischer Manöver mit dem Apparat des Kriegs-Spieles* (roughly, *Instructions for the Representation of Military Maneuvers with the Kriegsspiel Apparatus*), replaced the sculpted terrain with detailed topographical maps and the porcelain with metal blocks. Three features made it modern. An **umpire** managed the game, knew where both sides were, and decided what each commander could see, creating a genuine fog of war. **Dice** and results tables made combat uncertain. And units could suffer **partial losses** and fight on, a running tally of damage that is the ancestor of [Hit points](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/hit-points/). That year Prince Wilhelm saw the game played, and the son demonstrated it to General Karl von Müffling, chief of the Prussian general staff. Müffling is reported to have exclaimed that this was no ordinary game but a school for war. With the king's approval, sets were ordered for the army's regiments, and the younger Reisswitz was honored with the Order of St John. ## Legacy The son's death in 1827 left the game without its champion, but it survived in officers' clubs such as the Berlin Kriegsspiel association, and after Prussia's victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870–71, other armies copied it. In 1876 General Julius von Verdy du Vernois published a "free" Kriegsspiel that dropped most of the tables and trusted an experienced umpire's judgment, the first round of an argument between rules and referee that tabletop players still have. An American officer, Charles A. L. Totten, adapted the tradition in *Strategos* (1880), and [David Wesely](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/david-wesely/) later borrowed Totten's referee for his Napoleonic games in Minnesota, one of which became [Braunstein](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/braunstein/). Hobby wargaming came by a separate road, through [H. G. Wells](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/h-g-wells/)'s [Little Wars](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/little-wars/) (1913), but the two currents met in postwar America, as traced in [From Kriegsspiel to Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/from-wargames-to-roleplay/). Every [Game Master](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/game-master/) who adjudicates what a player's character can see, and every table that tracks damage in points, is carrying out the Reisswitz program. The father's porcelain-tiled cabinet is preserved today by the foundation that looks after the former Prussian royal palaces, a quiet artifact from the day when a board game first went to war. ## Facts - The father, Georg Leopold von Reisswitz, was born on February 7, 1764, and died in Breslau (Wrocław) on June 27, 1828. - His first prototype was a table of damp sand sculpted into hills and valleys, with wooden blocks for troops. - In 1812 he presented King Frederick William III with a wooden cabinet holding modular porcelain terrain tiles. - The son, a Guard Artillery officer who won the Iron Cross in 1813, published his rules in 1824, played on real topographical maps. - The king ordered that regiments receive sets of the son's game after the chief of the general staff, Karl von Müffling, endorsed it. - Transferred to the fortress town of Torgau in 1826, which he took as banishment, the son died by suicide in Breslau on September 1, 1827. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_von_Reisswitz) - [Wikipedia: Kriegsspiel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel) - [Wikidata: Georg Leopold von Reisswitz](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106550056) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.