Editing Wargame (section)

==History==
===Early Prussian wargames (1780–1806)===
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The first wargame was invented in [[Prussia]] in 1780 by [[Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig]]. Hellwig's wargame was the first true wargame because it attempted to be realistic enough to teach useful lessons in military strategy to future army officers. Hellwig was a college professor and many of his students were aristocrats destined for military service. But Hellwig also wanted to sell his wargame commercially as a recreational item. Hellwig chose to base his game on chess so as to make it attractive and accessible to chess players.<ref>In a letter from Hellwig, dated 26 September 1801, quoted in {{harvp|Heistand|1898}}:<br />"The first thought which presented itself to my mind was that the learning of my game ought not to be burdened with too many details if it was to fulfill its mission.  I judged from the first that I should achieve my object in the quickest way if I took for its basis the game of chess, in favor with so many distinguished persons of all ranks. My idea was to adapt, as far as possible, the game of chess to my own game, in order so to interest amateurs that they would at least give mine a trial. [...] experience confirmed the wisdom of my expectations, for chess players were the first to welcome my invention [...]"</ref> Hellwig published a second edition of his rulebook in 1803.

As in chess, Hellwig's game was played on a grid of squares, but it was a much larger grid, and the squares were color-coded to represent different types of terrain: mountains, swamp, water, trenches, etc. The layout of the terrain was not fixed, which allowed players to create their own custom battlefields. The pieces in the game represented real military units: cavalry, infantry, artillery, and various support units. As in chess, only a single piece could occupy a square, and the pieces moved square by square, either laterally or diagonally. Over normal terrain, infantry could move a maximum distance of eight squares, dragoons could move twelve squares, and light cavalry could move sixteen squares&mdash;intuitively mirroring the speed at which these units move in the real world. But terrain could impede movement: mountains were impassable, swamps slowed units down, rivers could only be crossed with the help of a special pontoon unit, etc. A player could only move one piece per turn, or one group of pieces if they were arranged in a rectangle. A piece could capture an enemy piece by moving into its square, just like in chess, but infantry and artillery pieces could also shoot enemy pieces, at a maximum ranges of two to three squares. Unlike chess, the pieces had orientation: for instance, an infantry piece could only shoot an enemy piece if they were facing it and flanking it.<ref>{{harvp|Peterson|2012}}:<br />"Infantry and artillery units may discharge their firearms instead of advancing on an enemy; if an infantry unit destroys an enemy with gunfire, that enemy is removed from the board but the infantry unit does not advance to occupy the vacated position. The efficacy of rifles rests largely on the orientation of the opposing unit: infantry units facing one another enjoy effectively immunity to one another’s gunfire, so only flanking fire had an effect."</ref><ref>{{harvp|Nohr|Böhme|2009|p=50-58}}</ref> Hellwig's wargame could also simulate the fog of war to limited degree: while the players were arranging their pieces in their starting positions, they had the option of placing a screen across the board so that they could not observe their opponent's arrangement until the game started. Once the game was in progress, however, there was no hiding anything.

Hellwig's wargame was a commercial success, and inspired other inventors to develop their own chess-like wargames.<ref>{{harvp|Heistand|1898|p=240}}</ref> In 1796, another Prussian named Johann Georg Julius Venturini invented his own wargame, inspired by Hellwig's game. Venturini's game was played on an even larger grid.<ref>{{harvp|Peterson|2012}}:<br />"Although Venturini replaced the wargame board with a map, he still imposed a one-inch square grid over that map, and he imagined each square of the grid to be two thousand paces (Schritte) across, which if we assume a German military pace of rough thirty inches, means his game employs a scale around 1:60,000, or a bit shy of one mile per square."</ref> Venturini's game also added rules governing logistics, such as supply convoys and mobile bakeries, and the effects of weather and seasons, making this perhaps the first operational-level wargame.<ref>{{harvp|Peterson|2012}}: "Venturini increases the variety of terrain, takes into account seasons and weather, vastly increases the sorts of entrenchments and fortifications that combatants might construct, and adds significant, but not necessarily exciting, detail to the feeding, equipping and support of forces in the field."</ref><ref>{{harvp|Creveld|2013|p=146}}</ref> In 1806, an Austrian named Johann Ferdinand Opiz developed a wargame aimed at both civilian and military markets. Like Hellwig's game, it used a modular grid-based board. But unlike Hellwig's game, Opiz's game used dice rolls to simulate the unpredictability of real warfare. This innovation was controversial at the time.<ref name=Schuurman2017>{{harvp|Schuurman|2017}}</ref> Hellwig, who designed his wargame for both leisure as well as instruction, felt that introducing chance would spoil the fun.<ref>{{harvp|Hellwig|1803|p=iii}}:<br />'''trans.''':"A secondary intention was to give a pleasant entertainment to a person who did not need such instruction through a game in which nothing depends on chance but on the direction of the player."</ref>

A criticism of the chess-like wargames of Hellwig, Venturini, and Opiz was that the pieces were constrained to move across a grid in chess-like fashion. Only a single piece could occupy a square, even if that square represented a square mile; and the pieces had to move square by square, their exact location within a square being immaterial. The grid also forced the terrain into unnatural forms, such as rivers that flowed in straight lines and bent at right angles.<ref>{{harvp|Peterson|2012}}:<br />"...the grid imposed on the wargames of Hellwig and Venturini significantly limited the capacity of these systems to represent the position of troops realistically. Effectively, in a board wargame divided into squares of a scale mile across, there is only one position that troops within a mile’s range could hold."</ref><ref>{{harvp|Reisswitz|1824}}: "In these early attempts the landscape had been forced into squares and triangles, with rivers, seas, villages, mountains, valleys and so on pushed out of their natural shapes and into straight lines. In the same way movements of troops, the representation of troop types, the effect of firepower, were also severely modified in such a way that a realistic picture of events failed to be produced."</ref> This lack of realism meant that no army took these wargames seriously.

===''Kriegsspiel'' (1824)===
{{Main|Kriegsspiel}}
[[File:Kriegsspiel 1824.jpg|thumb|right|A reconstruction of the wargame developed in 1824 by Reisswitz]]
In 1824, a [[Prussia]]n army officer named [[Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz]] presented to the Prussian General Staff a highly realistic wargame that he and his father had developed over the years. Instead of a chess-like grid, this game was played on accurate paper maps of the kind the Prussian army used. This allowed the game to model terrain naturally and better simulate battles in real locations. The pieces could be moved across the map in a free-form manner, subject to terrain obstacles. The pieces, each of which represented some kind of army unit (an infantry battalion, a cavalry squadron, etc.), were little rectangular blocks made of lead. The pieces were painted either red or blue to indicate the faction it belonged to. The blue pieces were used to represent the Prussian army and red was used to represent some foreign enemy&mdash;since then it has been the convention in military wargaming to use blue to represent the faction to which the players actually belong to. The game used dice to add a degree of randomness to combat. The scale of the map was 1:8000 and the pieces were made to the same proportions as the units they represented, such that each piece occupied the same relative space on the map as the corresponding unit did on the battlefield.

The game modeled the capabilities of the units realistically using data gathered by the Prussian army during the [[Napoleonic Wars]]. Reisswitz's manual provided tables that listed how far each unit type could move in a round according to the terrain it was crossing and whether it was marching, running, galloping, etc.; and accordingly the umpire used a ruler to move the pieces across the map. The game used dice to determine combat results and inflicted casualties, and the casualties inflicted by firearms and artillery decreased over distance. Unlike chess pieces, units in Reisswitz's game could suffer partial losses before being defeated, which were tracked on a sheet of paper (recreational gamers might call this "[[hitpoint]] tracking"). The game also had some rules that modeled morale and exhaustion.

Reisswitz's game also used an umpire. The players did not directly control the pieces on the game map. Rather, they wrote orders for their virtual troops on pieces of paper, which they submitted to the umpire. The umpire then moved the pieces across the game map according to how he judged the virtual troops would interpret and carry out their orders.<ref>{{harvp|Peterson|2012}}:<br />"In addition to establishing the general idea and the composition of the opposing forces, the umpire serves as an intermediary for virtually all actions in the game: all movements, all communications and all attacks channel through the umpire, in writing. The players transmit written orders, authored to their units in the persona of a commander, and for the most part the umpire enjoys significant leeway in deciding how these orders will be interpreted."</ref> When the troops engaged the enemy on the map, the umpire rolled the dice, computed the effects, and removed defeated units from the map. The umpire also managed secret information so as to simulate the fog of war. The umpire placed pieces on the map only for those units which he judged both sides could see. He kept a mental track of where the hidden units were, and only placed their pieces on the map when he judged they came into view of the enemy.

Earlier wargames had fixed victory conditions, such as occupying the enemy's fortress. By contrast, Reisswitz's wargame was open-ended. The umpire decided what the victory conditions were, if there were to be any, and they typically resembled the goals an actual army in battle might aim for. The emphasis was on the experience of decision-making and strategic thinking, not on competition. As Reisswitz himself wrote: "The winning or losing, in the sense of a card or board game, does not come into it."<ref>{{harvp|Reisswitz|1824}}</ref>

In the English-speaking world, Reisswitz's wargame and its variants are called ''Kriegsspiel'', which is the German word for "wargame".

The Prussian king and the General Staff officially endorsed Reisswitz's wargame, and by the end of the decade every German regiment had bought materials for it.<ref>{{harvp|Vego|2012|p=110}}: "General Karl von Mueffling (1775–1851), chief of the general staff (1821–29) in Prussia, exclaimed, "It's not a game at all! It’s training for war. I shall recommend it enthusiastically to the whole army." He fulfilled that promise: a royal decree directed every regiment in the Prussian army to play the game regularly. By the end of the 1820s each Prussian regiment was purchasing with state funds materials for war gaming."</ref> This was thus the first wargame to be widely adopted by a military as a serious tool for training and research. Over the years, the Prussians developed new variations of Reisswitz's system to incorporate new technologies and doctrine.

===Worldwide spread===
Prussian wargaming attracted little attention outside Prussia until 1870, when Prussia defeated France in the [[Franco-Prussian War]]. Many credited Prussia's victory to its wargaming tradition.<ref>{{harvp|Perla|1990}}:<br />"In the aftermath of the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, European and world military opinion suddenly became enamored of things German, including Kriegsspiel, to the use of which many experts attributed the German victories."</ref> The Prussian army did not have any significant advantage in weaponry, numbers, or troop training, but it was the only army in the world that practiced wargaming.<ref>{{harvp|Caffrey|2019|p=278}}: "During the wars of German unification, Prussian wargaming appears to have provided a significant advantage. How else can Prussia’s lopsided victories be explained? Prussian forces were more often than not outnumbered, weapon advantages were mixed, and training methods were similar, though some think Prussia had an advantage in the education of staff officers. 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."</ref> Civilians and military forces around the world now took a keen interest in the German military wargames, which foreigners referred to as ''Kriegsspiel'' (the German word for "wargame").<ref>{{harvp|Tresca|2011}}</ref> The first ''Kriegsspiel'' manual in English, based on the system of Wilhelm von Tschischwitz, was published in 1872 for the British army and received a royal endorsement.<ref name=Peterson2012/> The world's first recreational wargaming club was the University Kriegspiel [''sic''] Club, founded in 1873 at [[Oxford University]] in England. In the United States, Charles Adiel Lewis Totten published ''Strategos, the American War Game'' in 1880, and William R. Livermore published ''The American Kriegsspiel'' in 1882, both heavily inspired by Prussian wargames. In 1894, the US Naval War College made wargaming a regular tool of instruction.<ref>{{harvp|Perla|1990}}:<br />"It seems that neither the British nor the Americans ever quite accepted the full range of wargaming's potential value prior to the end of World War II. [...] The single, and stellar, exception to this assessment is the development and application of wargaming at the U.S. Naval War College. [...] In 1894, under newly appointed President Captain Henry Taylor, gaming became an integral and permanent part of the course of study for all students."</ref>

===Miniature wargaming===
{{Main|Miniature_wargaming#History|l1=History of miniature wargaming}}
[[File:HG Wells playing to Little Wars.jpg|right|thumb|[[H. G. Wells]] and his friends playing ''[[Little Wars]]'']]
The English writer [[H. G. Wells]] developed codified rules for playing with toy soldiers, which he published in a book titled ''[[Little Wars]]'' (1913). This is widely remembered as the first rulebook for [[miniature wargaming]] (for terrestrial armies, at least). ''Little Wars'' had very simple rules to make it fun and accessible to anyone. ''Little Wars'' did not use dice or computation to resolve fights. For artillery attacks, players used spring-loaded toy cannons which fired little wooden cylinders to physically knock over enemy models. As for infantry and cavalry, they could only engage in hand-to-hand combat (even if the figurines exhibited firearms). When two infantry units fought in close quarters, the units would suffer non-random losses determined by their relative sizes. ''Little Wars'' was designed for a large field of play, such as a lawn or the floor of a large room. An infantryman could move up to one foot per turn, and a cavalryman could move up to two feet per turn. To measure these distances, players used a two-foot long piece of string. Wells was also the first wargamer to use scale models of buildings, trees, and other terrain features to create a three-dimensional battlefield.<ref>H. G. Wells (1913). ''Little Wars''</ref>

Wells' rulebook, however, failed to invigorate the miniature wargaming community. A possible reason was the two World Wars, which de-glamorized war and caused shortages of tin and lead that made model soldiers expensive.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.sarahsundin.com/make-it-do-metal-shortages-during-world-war-ii/ |title=Make It Do – Metal Shortages During World War II | website=www.sarahsundin.com |date=11 July 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.bmssonline.com/about-the-bmss.html |title=History of the British Model Soldier Society |website=www.bmssonline.com}}</ref> Another reason may have been the lack of magazines or clubs dedicated to miniature wargames. Miniature wargaming was seen as a niche within the larger hobby of making and collecting model soldiers.

In 1955, a California man named [[Jack Scruby]] began making inexpensive miniature models for [[miniature wargame]]s out of [[type metal]]. Scruby's major contribution to the [[miniature wargaming]] hobby was to network players across America. At the time, the miniature wargaming community was minuscule, and players struggled to find each other. In 1956, Scruby organized the first miniature wargaming convention in America, which was attended by just fourteen people. From 1957 to 1962, he self-published the world's first wargaming magazine, titled ''The War Game Digest'', through which wargamers could publish their rules and share game reports. It had less than two hundred subscribers, but it did establish a steadily growing community.<ref>Jon Peterson, in {{harvp|Harrigan|Kirschenbaum|2016|p=19}}</ref>

Around the same time in the United Kingdom, [[Donald Featherstone (wargamer)|Donald Featherstone]] began writing an influential series of books on wargaming, which represented the first mainstream published contribution to wargaming since ''Little Wars''. Titles included : ''War Games'' (1962), ''Advanced Wargames'', ''Solo Wargaming'', ''Wargame Campaigns'', ''Battles with Model Tanks'', ''Skirmish Wargaming''. Such was the popularity of such titles that other authors were able to have published wargaming titles. This output of published wargaming titles from British authors coupled with the emergence at the same time of several manufacturers providing suitable wargame miniatures (e.g. Miniature Figurines, Hinchliffe, Peter Laing, Garrisson, Skytrex, Davco, Heroic & Ros) was responsible for the huge upsurge of popularity of the hobby in the late 1960s and into the 1970s.<ref>See James Dunnigan's Foreword to Donald Featherstone's Lost Tales, published 2009. Dunnigan clearly places Featherstone in his role as a key propagator of wargaming as a hobby and tool for professionals.</ref>

In 1956, [[Tony Bath]] published what was the first ruleset for a miniature wargame set in the medieval period. These rules were a major inspiration for Gary Gygax's ''[[Chainmail (game)|Chainmail]]'' (1971), which in turn became the basis for the roleplaying game ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]''.

From 1983 to 2015, [[Games Workshop]] produced what was the first miniature wargame designed to be used with proprietary models: ''[[Warhammer (game)|Warhammer Fantasy]]''. Earlier miniature wargames were designed to be played using generic models that could be bought from any manufacturer, but ''Warhammer Fantasy's'' setting featured original characters with distinctive visual designs, and their models were produced exclusively by [[Games Workshop]].

===Board wargaming (1954–present)===
[[File:Tactics (1954).jpg|thumb|right|''[[Tactics (game)|Tactics]]'' (1954) was the first successful board wargame.]]
{{Main|Board wargame}}
The first successful commercial board wargame was [[Tactics (game)|''Tactics'']] (1954) by an American named Charles S. Roberts. What distinguished this wargame from previous ones is that it was mass-produced and all the necessary materials for play were bundled together in a box. Previous wargames were often just a rulebook and required players to obtain the other materials themselves.<ref>{{harvp|Donovan|2017|p=101}}:<br />"Unlike many earlier war games for the home, which amounted to little more than a set of rules and the occasional map, Tactics came with all the miniature tanks, infantry, and planes need to play in its box."</ref> The game was played on a pre-fabricated board with a fixed layout, which is why it was called a board game.

Roberts later founded the [[Avalon Hill|Avalon Hill Game Company]], the first firm that specialized in commercial wargames. In 1958, Avalon Hill released [[Gettysburg (game)|''Gettysburg'']], which was a retooling of the rules of ''Tactics'', and was based on the historical [[Battle of Gettysburg]]. ''Gettysburg'' became the most widely-played wargame yet.<ref>Jon Peterson, in {{harvp|Harrigan|Kirschenbaum|2016|p=15}}</ref>

Board wargames were more popular than miniature wargames. One reason was that assembling a playset for miniature wargaming was expensive, time-consuming, and require artisanal skill. Another reason was that board wargames could be played by correspondence. Board wargames were usually grid-based, or else designed in some way that moves could be explained in writing in simple terms. This was not possible with the free-form nature of miniature wargames.<ref name="Peterson2012">{{harvp|Peterson|2012}}</ref>