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War Gaming: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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A genre of board games and miniatures games centering around the simulation of warfare, either based on real conflicts or fantasy scenarios. Some games include highly detailed miniatures and maps; however, most games of this genre consist of one or more maps of the theatre of conflict, a variable number of unit counters (small square pieces of heavy cardstock with printed numbers and symbols representing military units, as well as markers of various sorts), and rules with accompanying tables and charts. The most important such table is a "Combat Results Table", giving a set of battle results calculated according to the numerical odds of attacker versus defender; the players roll dice and compare the resulting numbers to the table to see how the battle came out. Table wargames can focus on any level of battle from literally man-to-man combat (e.g., the Squad Leader series) to whole army groups or fleets. [[Expansion Pack]]s with different scenarios are also common.
The [[Ur Example]] is probably Kriegsspiel, literally, "War Game," which was created by two Prussian officers, Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reiswitz and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz. The game was widely played by the Prussian officers of the 19th Century, and after some stunning Prussian victories, military officers around Europe. It was [[Serious Business]]; kriegsspiel was endorsed by the General Staff of Prussia as an invaluable teaching aid. Kriegsspiel was the [[Trope Codifier]] for a lot of conventions used by current military thinkers, military historians, war gamers, and table top role players. It codified the colors red and blue for enemy and friendly forces, respectively, the use of maps and minis terrain, detailed movement rules and turns, referees and game masters, specialized dice, the block symbols for units, table quarters, [[Loads and Loads of Rules]], the [[Random Number God]], the core rulebook, [[Rule Zero]], and so on. It was so influential that it is still [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16957/kriegsspiel available today]. A great many of the concepts used to create training simulations for modern officers and table top wargames today would seem completely familiar to the Reiswitzes, even despite technology they could never have imagined.
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