Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who by David M. Ewalt Read Free Book Online Page A

century. But chess didn’t stop evolving in the Middle Ages. Over the following centuries, hundreds of chess variants were created in attempts to modernize the game and return it to its roots as a battlefield simulation. In 1664, Christopher Weikhmann of Ulm, Germany, created Kőenigsspiel, the King’s Game, boasting that it would “furnish anyone who studied it properly a compendium of the most useful military and political principles.” Weikhmann increased the number of pieces on each side to thirty, replacing antiquated knights and bishops with then-modern military units like halberdiers, marshals, and couriers. He also created variant rules for up to eight players, expanding the board to more than five hundred squares.
    In 1780, Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, “master of pages” in the court of the Duke of Brunswick, went even further. His “war chess” board consisted of more than 1,600 squares, each color-coded to indicate terrain: white for level ground, green for marshes, blue for water, red for mountains. There were hundreds of pieces, each one a colored chit representing an entire military unit, including batteries of mortars, pontoon boats, and regiments of hussar cavalry. The rules became so complicated that Hellwig required the participation of a neutral third party to direct the game and settle disputes—the Holy Roman Empire’s version of a Dungeon Master.
    In the early days of the Napoleonic wars, Georg Leopold von Reiswitz, a Prussian civil servant, wanted to play Hellwig’s War Chess, but couldn’t afford a set, so he developed his own version. Publishedin 1812 as Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers Under the Guise of a War Game, it used dice to simulate the role of luck in battle and a table covered in sand in order to model topography. In 1812, he constructed a luxurious game table using modular wooden tiles instead of sand. He presented it as a gift to King Frederick Wilhelm III. Kriegsspiel, literally “war game,” began to catch on. In the 1820s, von Reiswitz’s son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf, refined the rules further, and mass-produced the game in a box the size of a hardcover book—small enough for a soldier to carry in his pack.
    In the 1860s, under Otto von Bismarck, the game became a standard training exercise for Prussian officers. When two decades of military success followed, Kriegsspiel basked in reflected glory: After the Franco-Prussian War, British generals cited it as a factor in von Bismarck’s decisive victory. Armies around the world copied the game and began using it to train their own officers.
    By the twentieth century, war games were commonplace in the military and had begun to spread into the mainstream. In 1913, the British novelist H. G. Wells took his own stab at the genre, publishing Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys’ Games and Books . The text amounted to Kriegsspiel for Kiddies : a short, simple, accessible set of rules. Wells did away with complicated boards, encouraging play on a kitchen table or bedroom floor. And he ditched the counters and markers that represented military units: Little Wars required only a child’s own collection of tin soldiers.
    It was a seminal moment. Wells stripped away rigid conventions that had built up over a millennium and saw into the heart of playing soldier: It’s a game, and it’s supposed to be fun.
    A pacifist, Wells was quick to distance his “diversion” from martial instruments of war like Kriegsspiel. “How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing?” he asked. “Here is the premeditation,the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides.”
    With World War I only a year away, Wells hoped simulated violence might help avoid actual bloodshed. “Great War is at present,