The route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement

Jon Peterson is an expert on the history of wargames, and the tabletop role-playing games that they spawned. His books include Playing at the World, on simulated combat from chess to Dungeons & Dragons, The Elusive Shift, on the evolution of role-playing, and Game Wizards, on the legal feuds that shaped the early history of D&D.

In this interview, Peterson discusses how advances in statistics and cartography made wargaming possible, the journey from 18th-century Prussian military officers to Midwestern hobbyists, how RAND played an instrumental role in the birth of D&D, and how little the core debates on game design have changed in the past 200 years.

Umpires, topography, and dice

Angela Chen: I wanted to start by talking about the very early history of wargames. In your book Playing at the World, you write that an Indian game called chaturanga was the precursor to and inspiration for chess, which then developed into the first modern wargame.

Jon Peterson: Right, and through India, chaturanga made it to the Arabic world. When chess was introduced to Europe, it had a huge impact. People viewed the game as a means of studying statecraft, seeing it differently from other parlor games.

In 1664, Christoph Weickhmann wrote that games based on a board—deploying and managing units—could help one become a better leader. However, these early games had very prescribed movements. People began proposing ways to improve chess by reflecting the actual battlefields of Europe: infantry, cavalry, and artillery, while still using the basic grid concept.

Johann Hellwig, in the late 18th century, was the first to recommend such a game for instructing young officers, aiming for something both entertaining and didactic.

From Grids to Scale

Angela: At this point it’s still on a board. How did it develop from there?

Jon: Let’s talk about Georg Venturini. He applied a scale to the map. He was concerned with questions like: What distance does this square represent? How far does a soldier march in a day?

Clara Collier: The variants before Venturini sound like tactical turn-based video games with squares on a grid, where terrain affects speed but there's no sense of real distance.

Jon: Quite accurate. Venturini wanted a scale to bind the game's setting to its system. These principles also determined artillery range. Throughout the 19th century, technological innovation required designers to constantly adjust these rules.

The Kriegsspiel Breakthrough

Angela: After Venturini, we get the Reisswitzes, who invented the first modern wargame, the Kriegsspiel.

Jon: Reisswitz the elder dispensed entirely with the grid. He built terrain models to a specific scale and used a ruler to determine troop movement.

Clara: Why was this tradition so concentrated in the German-speaking world?

Jon: By the end of the 1790s, the German-speaking world had a big problem: Napoleon. People were looking for an edge. There was a lot of work on quantifying warfare—statistics to predict how many soldiers might die during a march.

Occupied Prussia was not allowed to have an army, so military scientists turned to wargames. The younger Reisswitz, an artillery officer, took his father's designs and introduced simulation systems and probability. When you combine an instrument of chance, like dice, with a probability table, you have something new.

Jon: He introduced dice and combat result tables in 1824. He also introduced the concept of a referee or umpire. Players no longer moved pieces; they wrote orders for the referee, who decided the outcome behind the scenes using dice and tables, providing only field reports as feedback.