Kriegsspiel

"Anyone know of solid simulationist ww2/1 wargame rulesets that go into different types of supply lines, ammo fuel and ration handling, fatigue and morale, etc.? Making a farcical overly complex 40k game that needs to feel like 'this is something 5 people from Germany and Russia play once a year over the course of 12 days in a frozen cabin somewhere and the victor is inevitably whoever made sure their 4th company commander packed a space messenger pigeon to requisition a crate of fresh underwear'"

– A user on a 40k discord server, summarizing the Kriegsspiel experience nicely.

Kriegsspiel (literally meaning "war-game") is a Prussian strategic tabletop game which was invented in 1811 by the fantastically-named Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reisswitz. It's over two centuries old, and from a time when being a "wargamer" meant being born into nobility, having a glorious non-neck beard, and enlisting in some Officers Korps to train to become an armchair general.

In essence, it is the father of modern wargaming: two (teams of) players took control of opposing armies while a third neutral party intervened to simulate the inherent trouble of outdated intel, wrongly received and interpreted orders and the like. As a game, it's actually intricate and convoluted, but it was never meant to be played just for the lulz. Reisswitz intended his 'game' to sharpen the mind of upcoming officers for real tactics and what problems they might actually encounter in the field.

Reisswitz's ostentatiously named son: Lieutenant Georg Heinrich Leopold (or Rudolf?) Freiherrn von Reisswitz continued his fathers work and published an 1824 version, with a considerably expanded scope an ruleset.

Modern Incarnation

The game is still played to this day. Partly in officer training, but while those rules are not publicly available, some communities have created rules adaptations meant to be played by hobbyists as well. Using the technological advancements we've made since the time of horses and sabers, these games can now be played without requiring an entirely separate physical map and board pieces per participating player.

Since you'd be hard pressed to find many players today with the knowledge and experience of 19th century warfare needed to play the judging third party - often named Umpires - these rules use dice and updated instructions to attempt to maintain the real battlefield problems that are so core to the game's identity and appeal. The main difficulty of playing the game still comes from limited information and the difficulty of trying to clearly communicate your intentions to another human being, a skill that many of today's wargamers are known to be incredibly skilled at, keeping it a remarkably interesting experience.

There is not one single version of these rules; the original game was adapted by multiple military organisations for different periods, and today's players have made multiple interpretations of what to keep and what to change for their modern versions.

See Also

• Wikipedia's entry on Kriegsspiel
• A FATAL & Friends archive about Kriegsspiel
• BoardGameGeek's entry on Kriegsspiel