Kriegsspiel: Reisswitz's Umpire, Fog of War and the Inventor's Exile

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Before the 1800s, military games were elaborate forms of chess on grids of colored squares. In 1811 the Prussian nobleman Georg von Reisswitz built a sand table with sculpted hills and wooden blocks, and in 1812 presented King Frederick William III with a cabinet that unfolded into a six by six foot board of interchangeable porcelain terrain tiles at a scale of 1 to 2,373, matched to Prussian marching pace. The royal family loved it, but it had no rules for resolving combat, and by 1816 he abandoned it. In the 1820s his son, also Georg von Reisswitz, an artillery officer, revived the game with fellow officers in Berlin and turned it into a training simulation.

The son added partial damage that wore units down over several rounds, custom dice for casualty tables, smaller exchange pieces that opened visible gaps in a line, and accurate printed maps at 1 to 8,000. His key idea was the umpire: players wrote orders, the umpire moved the pieces, hid enemies out of sight and delayed or destroyed messages. In 1824 he demonstrated it at Berlin Castle, General von Müffling declared it a schooling for war, and the king ordered sets for every regiment. Two years later Reisswitz was transferred to Torgau, a posting the episode describes as banishment.

• Reisswitz set up a workshop with carpenters, painters and a tin foundry to produce the sets.
• He reportedly offended superiors, and his game exposed senior officers' mistakes regardless of rank.
• He took his own life in 1827, and gaming clubs later removed his name from their publications to keep the game alive.
• General von Verdy du Vernois created free Kriegsspiel, replacing dice and rule tables with the umpire's judgment.
• After Prussia's 1870 victory over France, armies around the world translated the Kriegsspiel manuals.