By no chance, the title of Lewin’s book spells it as two words, implicitly distancing itself from the industry’s lexicon, where it is spelled as a single word. The point, of course, is what we mean by “wargame” and why its lineage being in the 1950s, not earlier. 3 Lewin sketches a centuries-long genealogy preceding Avalon Hill games. Lewin contends the usual notion that wargaming, as a hobby and a commercial activity, was invented by Roberts and his Avalon Hill Company in the 1950s. In his informative, superbly illustrated War Games and Their History, C.G. Roberts in the late 1950s, greatly stressed this aspect, as you can tell from the box covers of games such as Tactics II (1958) and Gettysburg (1958). The very first hobbyist board wargames designed by Charles S. European game designers produced some successful war-related games, such as Albert Lamorisse’s La Conquête du monde (1957), known in the English speaking-world as Risk, but this game conveys quite an abstract representation of warfare, while the great novelty offered by American wargames was precisely their so-called “realism”. 2 After 1945, Europe was not a very receptive place for games dealing with war. Dunnigan noted, it is no accident that the modern wargame hobby was born in the United States, which had triumphed in both world wars without any direct experience of enemy occupation or aerial bombings of its territory (beside Pearl Harbor). In less than a year, Europe would fall in one of the most horrific conflicts of human history, whose ending would lay the foundation for a new, even more terrible world conflagration.Īs legendary wargame designer James F. His message is essentially: “Do not make war, play it”.
In his Little Wars (1913), one of the very first rulebooks for miniature wargame ever published, Wells somehow tries to “calm his conscience”, saying that his game can help people to grasp the horrors of war. Wells, both a socialist and wargamer, was aware of the politically slippery nature of his hobby. Already on the eve of the Great War, science-fiction writer H.G. In the 20th Century, after the bloodshed of two World Wars –– wars waged by German generals still employing Kriegsspiel to test their plans –– the mixing of game and war gradually became seen as a problem. In 19th-Century Prussia, the game Kriegsspiel, enthusiastically endorsed by King Friedrich William III, was used as a conceptual tool to train the officer corps. In pre-modern Asia and Europe, stylized battle simulations such as Go and Chess were highly respected cultural artifacts. For a long time, this fact posed few political or ethical problems. War has always played quite an important role in board games.