"The term, "war-game" is simply a translation of the German term, "kriegspiel." Because many are simply uncomfortable with the term "war-game," feeling perhaps that war is too serious for "games," you will often see every term but war-game used to describe war-games. These include Map Maneuver, Chart Maneuver, Field Maneuver, Exercise, or increasingly, "modeling and simulation."
The origins of war-gaming can be traced back some 5,000 years to the Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu and the game Wei-Hai ("encirclement"), a Chinese game that is usually now called "Go." A later, similar game was the Indian Chaturanga, the system from which chess in its various forms came about. Chess itself gave birth to at least one game, which more formally depicted armed combat. This was the 1644 design known as The King's Game from one Christopher Weikmann. It included 30 pieces per side of 14 military types, each with a different fixed rate of movement. Like its predecessors, it was played principally for pleasure but differed by its emphasis on the strategic level of war.
The first game to break away from chess, however, was invented by Helwig, Master of Pages to the Duke of Brunswick in 1780. This game included 1666 squares, each coded for a different rate of movement depending on the terrain the square represented. Playing pieces now represented groups of men instead of a single soldier, and each unit was rated for different movement (infantry moved 8 spaces, heavy cavalry 12, for example). In 1795, Georg Vinturinus, a military writer from Schleswig, produced a more complex version of Helwig's game. He modified it in 1798 by using a map board that depicted actual terrain on the border between France and Belgium. Britain came close to inventing modern war-gaming. In late 1781 a Mr. Clerk of Great Britain developed a method of using model ships to simulate historical engagements. By carefully placing his "ships" in their historical locations at the beginning of an engagement, stepping through the battles, and analyzing the influence the geometry of the combatants had on their combat power, Mr. Clark was able to acquire many useful insights…"
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