Distant History (including First Generation war games)

• Chess and similar games are often claimed to hold the origins of wargaming. Apart from having two opponents with elements moved on a two-dimensional surface, there is little resemblance to war games of the last two centuries as practiced by military professionals.
• Kriegsspiel. Kriegsspiel, which originated with the elder von Reisswitz, but was much improved by his son, emerged as an excellent means for officers in the Prussian Army of the era (1830s-1870s) to study military issues. However the game became progressively more competitive, and the procedures were developed to deal with the minutiae of movement and interaction. Many players began to use (and abuse) the rules to win, rather than to study military issues. The adverse effect was that tactical reality gave way to the rule book.
• Free Kriegsspiel. Sometime after Kriegsspiel had become established, Free Kriegsspiel was developed (originally by Verdy du Vernois in the 1870s) to simplify what had become a rather meticulous, even tedious, set of rules. In particular, the adjudication procedures of Kriegsspiel had become cumbersome and time-consuming and, in many ways, a distraction from key elements of Kriegsspiel as a means of studying military strategy and tactics. Rigid rules were replaced by an umpire who would use his own experience and judgment to adjudicate outcomes. By then war games had become somewhat unpopular due to the cumbersome, time-consuming rules of adjudication. But with combat-experienced officers providing their military judgment as a replacement for the cumbersome rules, wargaming became much less tedious. The new procedures resulted in games that were faster and thus more popular hence played more often.
• Free Kriegsspiel worked well when the umpires had considerable experience and well-honed judgment to contribute. Their adjudications were plausible to players (who generally had considerably less experience). And the umpires, because of their credibility gained from recent combat, were rarely challenged. However, Germany’s officers who were veterans of the campaigns of the 1860s and 1870s gradually retired from military service and the new generation of umpires could not adjudicate with the same credibility. A second problem is what today may be called “opinion of the senior officer present”. When one of the players outranked the umpire, an umpire might feel obliged to give way to his senior’s opinion for some adjudication. These two factors created problems for Free Kriegsspiel.

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