Kriegsspiel

Overview

Kriegsspiel is simply German for "wargame," but in English the word names something specific: the tabletop battle simulation developed by the Prussian army in the early 19th century and adopted as a serious tool for training officers. It is the first wargame any military took seriously, and it is the deep root of the family tree that runs through Little Wars, Braunstein and Chainmail to Dungeons & Dragons.

What makes it matter to a museum of fantasy games is not the troop blocks but the person standing over them. Kriegsspiel's decisive invention was the umpire: a referee who alone sees the whole board, who moves every piece, who rolls the dice, and who decides what happens when the rules run out. Every Game Master descends from that chair.

Origins

The story has two authors, a father and a son, both catalogued here under Georg von Reisswitz. Earlier German wargames had been dressed-up chess, with pieces hopping square to square across a grid. Georg Leopold von Reisswitz, a Prussian baron, wanted something freer. He first sculpted a battlefield in damp sand; when the Prussian princes asked for a demonstration in 1811, he built something grander. In 1812 he presented King Frederick William III with a wooden cabinet whose drawers held the whole game and whose folding top opened into a surface about six feet square. The terrain was made of modular porcelain tiles painted in relief, at a scale of 1:2,373, and the troops were little porcelain blocks moved freely with rulers and dividers. The royal family loved it. The army ignored it: it was too costly to reproduce, and key rules were left to improvisation.

His son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz, a young artillery officer, took up the project with a circle of fellow lieutenants in Berlin. He moved the game onto the accurate 1:8,000 topographical maps the Prussian army had begun to print, allowing real ground to be fought over. And he added the umpire. In early 1824 Prince Wilhelm arranged a demonstration for the king and his senior generals. General Karl von Müffling, chief of the general staff, famously pronounced it "no ordinary sort of game" but "schooling for war," and the king ordered that the army receive sets. Reisswitz set up a workshop and sold the materials as a boxed set for 30 thalers.

How it plays

Two teams of officers — Reisswitz suggested four to six a side — face each other across the map, with the umpire between them. The players never touch the pieces. They write orders, as a real commander would send them by messenger, and hand them to the umpire, who moves the painted blocks according to how he judges the troops would actually carry them out. Messages between teammates can be delayed, lost or even delivered to the enemy.

Each turn represents two minutes of battle, and tables fix how far each arm can travel in that time: a cavalry squadron might cover 400 paces of open ground, 250 through light woods, 100 uphill. Only units both sides could plausibly see are placed on the map; the rest the umpire tracks in his head. This is the fog of war, simulated by a human being. When units clash, the umpire rolls Reisswitz's special dice — five of them, each face marked with results for different situations — and records the damage. Every unit has a pool of points it can lose before it breaks: a 90-rider cavalry squadron has 60, a 450-man infantry half-battalion 90. It is recognizably the ancestor of Hit points, two centuries early.

There are no fixed victory conditions. The umpire sets objectives drawn from real soldiering — hold this village, clear that ridge — and the point is the experience of command, not winning.

Reception & impact

The inventor did not live to see his success. In 1826 the younger Reisswitz was transferred to the provincial fortress town of Torgau, a posting widely read as banishment, and on 1 September 1827 he shot himself. Clubs in Berlin and Magdeburg kept the game going, often without crediting him. Wilhelm von Tschischwitz's 1862 manual simplified the rules and switched to ordinary dice; in 1876 Julius von Verdy du Vernois argued for free Kriegsspiel, in which an expert umpire dispensed with most rules and simply ruled on events. Verdy's insight — that the only essentials were the umpire and hidden information — is as good a description of a tabletop roleplaying session as anyone has written.

Prussia's victory over France in 1870 made the rest of the world pay attention. An English manual appeared in 1872, Oxford students founded a Kriegspiel club in 1873, and in the United States Charles Adiel Lewis Totten published Strategos in 1880.

Legacy

The line from Berlin to Lake Geneva is not a metaphor. In 1967 David Wesely, a Minnesota wargamer, found Totten's Strategos in a university library and seized on its all-powerful referee and its principle that players could attempt anything the referee would allow. His club absorbed those ideas, and Wesely's Braunstein games — refereed in exactly that spirit — became the proving ground for Dave Arneson. Kriegsspiel's umpire, adjudicating the unscripted, survives at every table where a referee hides a map behind a screen.

The game itself has had a modest revival through English translations by Bill Leeson and through enthusiast societies that play it face to face and online. As Jon Peterson's Playing at the World shows at length, the whole history of the Miniatures & Board Wargames — and of the roleplaying game that grew out of it — begins with a Prussian baron and a table full of sand.