Kriegsspiel is a genre of wargaming developed by the Prussian Army in the 19th century to teach battlefield tactics to officers. The word Kriegsspiel literally means "wargame" in German, but in the context of the English language it refers specifically to the wargames developed by the Prussian army in the 19th century. Kriegsspiel was the first wargaming system to have been adopted by a military organization as a serious tool for training and research.
It is characterized by high realism, an emphasis on the experience of decision-making rather than on competition, and the use of an umpire to keep the rules flexible and manage hidden information. After Prussia's impressive victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War, other countries began designing similar wargames for their own armies.
Most forms of Kriegsspiel involve at least two teams of players and one umpire gathered around a map. The map represents a battlefield. Each team is given command of an imaginary army which is represented on the map using small blocks, often painted. Each block represents some kind of troop formation, such as an artillery battery or a cavalry squadron. The players command their troops by writing their orders on paper and giving them to the umpire. The umpire will then read these orders and move the blocks across the map according to how they judge the imaginary troops would interpret and execute their orders. The outcomes of combat are determined either by simple mathematical calculations or the umpire's judgment.
History Precursors By definition, a "wargame" is a strategy game that attempts to realistically represent warfare. The earliest wargames were invented in the German states around the turn of the 19th century. They were derivatives of chess, but the pieces represented real military units, cavalry, infantry, artillery, etc. and the squares were color-coded to represent different types of terrain.
These early wargames were not realistic enough to satisfy the military. 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, say, a square mile, and the pieces had to move square by square. This, of course, did not represent how real troops maneuvered in the field. The grid system also forced the terrain to take unnatural forms, such as rivers flowing in straight lines and right angles.
Reisswitz Sr.'s prototype (1812) In response to these criticisms, a Prussian nobleman and wargaming enthusiast named George Leopold von Reisswitz set out to develop a more realistic wargame wherein the units could move about in a free-form manner over more natural terrain.
Reisswitz first experimented with a table covered in a layer of damp sand. He sculpted the sand into a three-dimensional model battlefield, with hills and valleys. He used little wooden blocks to represent troop formations. The Prussian princes heard about Reisswitz's project and asked for a demonstration. He showed it to them in 1811, and they enthusiastically recommended the game to their father, King Frederick Wilhelm III.
Reisswitz did not want to present the king a table of damp sand, so he set about constructing a more impressive apparatus. In 1812, Reisswitz presented to the king a wooden table-cabinet. The cabinet's drawers stored all the materials to play the game. The cabinet came with a folding board which, when unfolded and placed on top of the cabinet, provided a gaming surface about six feet by six feet in size. Instead of sculpted sand, the battlefield was made out of porcelain tiles, upon which terrain features were depicted in painted bas-relief. The tiles were modular and could be arranged on the table surface to create a custom battlefield. The scale was 1:2373. Troop formations were represented by little porcelain blocks. The blocks could be moved across the battlefield in a free-form manner; dividers and rulers were used to regulate movement.
The royal family was delighted by Reisswitz's game, and frequently played it. However, it was not adopted by army instructors nor sold commercially. The apparatus that Reisswitz made for the king was too expensive for mass-production.:"...Reiswitz's wargame was not intended as a commercial offering, like that of Hellwig or Venturini—it was a lavish, custom-built gift for a monarch, with an apparatus fit for a museum; cost-effective manufacturing of the Taktisches Kriegs-Spiel cabinet was simply out of the question." Additionally, his system was not complete and required some improvisation on the part of the players. For instance, the rules for resolving the effects of hand-to-hand combat and terrain advantage were not fully worked out.:trans.:"The rules for deciding hand-to-hand attacks, and the method for determining terrain advantage had not been fully worked out, and there were still difficulties with deciding effects from gunfire." Reisswitz may have been too distracted by the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars to perfect his game. By 1816, Reisswitz seemed to have lost interest in wargaming altogether. The development of the wargame was continued by his son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz.:"The elder Reiswitz's interests seem to have drifted away from Kriegsspiel after the standalone publication of his history of wargaming (Literärisch-kritische Nachrichten über die Kriegsspiele der Alten und Neuern, 1816), so his son assumed charge over the ongoing development of the game."
Reisswitz Jr. perfects Kriegsspiel (1824)
Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz was a junior officer in the Prussian army. He took over the development of his father's wargame after his father lost interest in it. He developed the game with the help of a circle of junior officers in Berlin. The prince eventually heard of Reisswitz Jr.'s project and, having fond memories of playing Reisswitz Sr.'s wargame, joined the son's gaming circle.
In the earlier wargames of Hellwig and Venturini, units were like chess pieces in that when attacked, they were simply killed and removed from play, even if the pieces represented groups of soldiers. By contrast, units in Reisswitz's game could suffer partial losses yet still remain on the battlefield. A unit might withstand several rounds' worth of enemy attacks before finally collapsing. Reisswitz's game was thus the first to incorporate unit hitpoints. It also modeled variable damage: The casualties inflicted by an attacker on his enemy were determined using dice.
Reisswitz Jr.'s game was designed to be played on accurate, large-scale (1:8,000) topographical maps. The Prussian army had recently begun using such maps, which were the product of new advances in cartography and printing. These maps may have not been available to Reisswitz Sr. and previous wargame designers, but they were available by the 1820s and Reisswitz Jr. took advantage of them.: "Few, and entirely incomplete terrain maps had been published, and even those, with a few exceptions such as the 1:10,000 maps of Saxony, did not give terrain in a large enough scale to allow smaller units to be properly represented." Using topographical maps allowed for more natural terrain and the play of battles in real locations.
Reisswitz Jr.'s great innovation, however, was the introduction of an umpire. The players did not directly control the troop blocks on the game map. Rather, they wrote down their orders for their troops and gave them to the umpire. The umpire would then move the blocks across the game map according to how they judged the imaginary troops would interpret and carry out the players' orders.:"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." When the troops engaged the enemy on the map, it was umpire who rolled the dice, computed the effects, and removed slain units from the map.
The game could simulate the fog of war, where the umpire would place on the map blocks only for the troops which were in visual range of both sides. The umpire kept a mental track of where the hidden troops were located, and only deployed blocks for them when they came into view of the enemy. The umpire arbitrated situations which the rules did not explicitly cover, which plugged any gaps in Reisswitz Jr.'s system. This required the umpire to be an impartial and experienced officer.
In early 1824, the prince invited Reisswitz Jr. to present his wargame to the king and his senior generals at Berlin Castle. They were impressed and officially endorsed his game as a training tool for the officer corps. The Chief of the General Staff, General von Müffling declared: "this is no ordinary sort of game, this is schooling for war. I must and will recommend it most warmly to the army.", quoted in The king ordered that every regiment receive a Kriegsspiel set. Reisswitz established a workshop by which he could mass-produce and distribute it.:"To convert this to a mass-market venture, the younger Reiswitz organized a workshop to manufacture the game, which included a tin foundry, painters and carpenters, as well as the support of the Royal Lithographic Institute to manufacture maps of the appropriate scale." He sold the game's material in a box-set priced at 30 thalers. 30 thalers in 1824 had an equivalent purchasing power of €1,704 in 2025 (US$2,020)."Purchasing power equivalents of historical amounts in German currencies". Bundesbank This was thus the first wargame to be widely adopted by a military as a serious tool for training and research.
Kriegsspiel after Reisswitz Jr.'s death In 1826, Reisswitz was transferred away from Berlin to the provincial city of Torgau. This was interpreted as a banishment: allegedly, he had made offensive remarks about his superiors. He committed suicide in 1827. This disgrace was detrimental to the progression of his wargame for obvious reasons. It wasn't until 1860 that the game was widely played in the military. Until then, it survived thanks to the efforts of a small number of wargaming clubs. The earliest of these clubs was the Berlin Wargame Association.
Another prominent club was the Magdeburg Club, managed by General von Moltke. These clubs continued to develop Reisswitz's game, but they avoided mentioning his name in their publications. In 1828, the Berlin Wargame Association published a limited expansion to Reisswitz's system. In 1846, they released a fresh wargaming manual which received a second edition in 1855. These updates sought to make Kriegsspiel more realistic, but they also made the rules more complicated.
Wilhelm von Tschischwitz published a Kriegsspiel manual in 1862 that incorporated new technological advances such as railroads, telegraph, and breech-loading cannons; and which used conventional gaming dice. It also greatly simplified the rules, making the wargame even simpler than Reisswitz's original version.: [Tschischwitz] preserved the primitive method of Reisswitz, but adopted less complicated and more practical rules for computing losses." Tschischwitz's rules went through three editions between 1862 and 1869. In 1869, Colonel Thilo von Trotha published his own wargaming treatise which went through three editions and had more complicated rules.
The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 broke a long period of peace for the German states, which made many officers feel a pressing need to better familiarize themselves with the conduct of war. This led to a surge in interest in Kriegsspiel among Prussian officers.
The free Kriegsspiel movement