Wargaming - History

History

Drawing inspiration from Chess, Hellwig, Master of Pages to the Duke of Brunswick created a battle emulation game in 1780. According to Max Boot's book War Made New (2006, pg 122), sometime between 1803 and 1809, the Prussian General Staff developed war games, with staff officers moving metal pieces around on a game table (with blue pieces representing their forces and red pieces those of the enemy), using dice rolls to indicate random chance and with a referee scoring the results. Increasingly realistic variations became part of military training in the 19th century in many nations, and were called "kriegspiel" or "wargames". Wargames or military exercises are still an important part of military training today.

Modern wargaming originated with the military need to study warfare and to 'reenact' old battles for instructional purposes. The stunning Prussian victory over the Second French Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 is sometimes partly credited to the training of Prussian officers with the game Kriegspiel, which was invented around 1811 and gained popularity with many officers in the Prussian army. These first wargames were played with dice which represented "friction", or the intrusion of less than ideal circumstances during a real war (including morale, weather, the fog of war, etc.), though this was usually replaced by an umpire who used his own combat experience to determine the results.

The first specific non-military wargame club was started in Oxford, England, in the 19th century. Naval enthusiast and analyst Fred T. Jane came up with a set of rules for depicting naval actions with the use of model ships, or miniatures around 1898 (Reprinted 2008). The 1905/6 edition of Jane's Fighting Ships includes a revised edition for "The Naval War Game".

H.G. Wells' books Floor Games (1911) and Little Wars (1913) were attempts to codify rules for fighting battles with toy soldiers (miniatures), and make them available to the general public. They were very simple games, and in some ways just provide a context for shooting spring-loaded toy cannons at toy soldiers, but "in his Appendix to Little Wars, Wells speaks of the changes required to convert his admittedly simplistic rules into a more rigorous Kriegspiel." However, Wells also states in his rules that combat "should be by actual gun and rifle fire and not by computation. Things should happen and not be decided," in opposition to the general nature of Kriegspiel play.

In 1940 Fletcher Pratt's Naval War Game was first published. The game started in New York, but other clubs formed around the USA. Jack Coggins was invited by Pratt to participate, and recalled that Pratt's game involved dozens of tiny wooden ships—built to a scale of about one inch to 50 feet—spread over the living room floor of his apartment. Their maneuvers and the results of their battles were calculated via a complex mathematical formula, with scale distances marked off with tape measures. The game's popularity grew and moved to using a ballroom for games with 60 or more players aside. The game was respected by the Naval War College and serving naval officers regularly participated in games For an evaluation of the Fletcher Pratt Game versus reality see Chapter 10 of The Fletcher Pratt Naval Wargame book. link

All of these games were meant to be accessible to the general public, but actual play was made difficult owing to the expense of purchasing an army or navy's worth of miniatures. As leisure time and disposable income generally rose through the 20th Century, miniatures games slowly gained a following. Most gaming groups informally wrote and/or revised their own rules, which were never published. In 1955 Jack Scruby started producing miniatures using RTV rubber molds, which greatly reduced their expense, and he turned this into a business (Scruby Miniatures) in 1957 and started publishing War Game Digest. It, and its successors, put fellow miniatures enthusiasts in touch with each other, and provided a forum for ideas and locally-produced rules to be shared with the rest of the hobby.

Around the same time in the UK Donald Featherstone began writing an influential series of books on wargaming, which represented the first mainstream published contribution to wargaming since H.G Wells. Titles included : Wargames, Advanced Wargames, Solo Wargaming, Wargame Campaigns, Battles with Model Tanks, Skirmish Wargaming. Such was the popularity of such titles that other authors were able to have published wargaming titles. This output of published wargaming titles from British authors coupled with the emergence at the same time of several manufacturers providing suitable wargame miniatures (e.g. Miniature Figurines, Hinchliffe, Peter Laing, Garrisson, Skytrex, Davco, Heroic & Ros) was responsible for the huge upsurge of popularity of the hobby in the late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the first modern mass-market wargame, based on cardboard counters and maps, was designed and published by Charles S. Roberts in 1952. After nearly breaking even on Tactics, he decided to found the Avalon Hill Game Company as a publisher of intelligent games for adults, and is called "The father of board wargaming". The modern commercial board wargaming industry is considered to have begun with the publication of Tactics II in 1958, and the founding of The General Magazine by Avalon Hill in 1964. In 1961, AH published Roberts' Gettysburg, which is considered to be the first board wargame based entirely on a historical battle. D-Day and Chancellorsville, the first commercial games to use a hexagonal mapboard, were also published that year.

Avalon Hill had a very conservative publishing schedule, typically about two titles a year, and wargames were only about half their line. By the end of the 1960s, a number of small magazines dedicated to the hobby were springing up, along with new game companies. The most important of these were undoubtedly Strategy & Tactics, and the company founded to save it from failing: Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI). Under SPI, S&T started including a new game in every issue of the magazine, which along with the regular games SPI was publishing vastly increased the number of wargames available.

Coupled with an aggressive advertising campaign, this caused a tremendous rise in the popularity of wargaming in the early 1970s, with a large number of new companies starting up. Two of these would last for some years: Game Designers' Workshop (GDW), and Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). TSR's medieval era miniatures game, Chainmail (1971) included a fantasy supplement that led to a new phenomenon that would become much bigger than its parent hobby, role-playing games (RPGs). (For a better look at these developments see the history of role-playing games.)

The 1970s can be considered the 'Golden Age of Wargaming', with a large number of new companies publishing an even larger number of games throughout the decade, powered by an explosive rise in the number of people playing wargames. Avalon Hill's PanzerBlitz (1970), Panzer Leader (1974), and Squad Leader (1977) were particularly popular during this time, with their innovative geomorphic mapboard system. Wargames also diversified in subject, with the first science-fiction wargame (Galactic Warfare, published in the UK by Davco) appearing in 1973 and one of the longest lasting and most successful (Star Fleet Battles, published by Task Force Games) appearing in 1979; and in size with both microgames such as Steve Jackson's Ogre, and "monster games" appearing during the decade.

The boom came to an end, and was followed by the usual bust in the early 1980s, most markedly with the acquisition of SPI by TSR in 1982. The hobby never truly recovered from this, and is today much smaller than it was during the 1970s. Numerous factors have been implicated in the decline, including the rise of gaming alternatives (such as RPGs), the ever increasing complexity of wargames, and changing demographics and lifestyles.

During the 1980s, much of the market for wargames was dominated by roleplaying games. Then, when personal computers became available, gamers could simply "sit down and play" without learning masses of rules, clearing physical space, and finding and coordinating schedules with opponents. However, in 1983 Games Workshop published Warhammer Fantasy Battle, initially as a "Mass-combat Role Playing Game", which quickly moved to dominate the fantasy wargaming market. When collectible card games arrived in the 1990s, the gaming market became even more competitive. By this time, many wargame publishers were already long gone.

Despite the decline, wargaming continues to survive in different forms. Advanced Squad Leader (1985) became a niche hobby in and of itself, and Axis and Allies (1984) was very popular with the mass market audience and Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983) spawned a long-lasting line popular miniatures games including the successive editions of Warhammer and the science-fantasy Warhammer 40,000 game. The genre of 'card-driven games' emerged with the publication of We the People by AH in 1994, and continues in current releases from GMT. Battle Cry (2000) and Memoir '44 (2004) proved that light wargames can still be commercially successful, as long as the rules are clear and accessible, and the components are high in quality. Block wargames, such as those published by Columbia Games remain quite popular. Companies like GMT Games and Multi-Man Publishing continue to survive and publish highly detailed hex and counter wargames.