# Kriegsspiel tags: #game/wargame/kriegsspiel  **Kriegsspiel** is the great-great-grandparent of the whole tabletop wargaming hobby, and it arrives from a stranger place than anything the hobby has produced since: a serious military training tool cooked up in 19th-century Prussia, not a boxed product for a friendly game night. It has no fixed victory conditions, no interest in being fair to both sides, and it was never meant to entertain the masses. For something that predates the hobby itself, it's startlingly modern — the umpire, hidden information, and delayed orders are still the bones of how we think about wargaming. ## Setting Kriegsspiel drops you into the commander's seat of a 19th-century battlefield, most faithfully the Napoleonic-era Prussian army the original was built to train. This isn't a game about exploring a world; it's a game about handling a real one. You are an officer commanding an imaginary army of wooden blocks on a topographical map, issuing orders the way you'd issue orders to men in the field, trying to out-think the officer commanding the enemy side. There's no objective handed to you like a game would; the umpire decides what each side is actually trying to do — expel the enemy from a defensive position, inflict a certain number of casualties — and the winner is whoever best performs a real commander's job. That's the quiet radicalism of the thing: players don't move pieces, they write orders as if commanding real troops, and they don't get to see the whole board any more than a real commander would. The fog of war is genuine, not a figure of speech. ## Mechanics The signature mechanic is the **umpire** — a single, ideally experienced officer who is the game's entire rules engine. Players never touch the blocks. They submit written orders to the umpire, who interprets how the imaginary troops would actually carry them out, moves the pieces, rolls for combat, tracks casualties, and — crucially — only ever places on the map the troops both sides can actually see. Every order, every shot, every contact channels through that one person. The original 1824 rules, the **rigid Kriegsspiel**, were surprisingly crunchy. Reisswitz designed a set of bespoke dice whose faces carry clusters of numbers and symbols giving damage scores for different situations, plus a *losses table* — the first unit hitpoints, tracked with pins — and movement tables ruling how far each troop type advances in the two minutes a turn represents, over each kind of terrain. It was rigorous, and it was a lot to set up; only the umpire needed to master the whole thing, which is rather the point. The **free Kriegsspiel**, championed by General Julius von Verdy du Vernois from 1876 onward, tore most of that out. Verdy's argument was that the only things Kriegsspiel truly needs are the umpire and concealed information — the rules and tables just got in the way of an experienced umpire's judgment. In its free form the game dispenses with dice and combat tables entirely and lets the umpire arbitrate every outcome as they see fit; the historian Peter Perla's line is that von Verdy transformed the umpire from computer into a conscientious god. Either way, the player's actual decision — how clearly you phrase orders for an umpire who will take you at your word — is what you're really risking. ## Editions Kriegsspiel isn't a boxed product, so its "editions" are the successive rule sets and a handful of distinct forms: - **Reisswitz Sr.'s prototype (1812)** — the first practical version, presented to the Prussian king as a wooden table-cabinet; movement regulated by dividers and rulers, a step up from the chess-derived games that preceded it. - **Reisswitz Jr.'s *Kriegsspiel* (1824)** — the ur-edition that defined the form: the umpire, bespoke dice, unit hitpoints, and fog of war. The **rigid Kriegsspiel**. - **Tschischwitz's manual (1862, three editions through 1869)** — folded in railroads, the telegraph, and breech-loading rifles, swapped the bespoke dice for conventional ones, and simplified the rules. - **The free Kriegsspiel (1876)** — von Verdy du Vernois dispensed with rules and dice, leaving just the umpire and hidden information; the form that crowded out the rigid style in professional military circles. - **Modern revival** — translations by British wargaming enthusiast Bill Leeson and groups like the International Kriegsspiel Society revived it, running double-blind, simultaneous-movement games with delayed communications and genuinely large online recreations of Gettysburg and Waterloo. ## References - [Kriegsspiel - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel) - [The Kriegsspiel Network](https://kriegsspiel.org.uk/) - [The Original War Game - The Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-original-war-game-69829ec6)