Our second visit to Asterisk this weekend.
From Asterisk Magazine, April 2026:
Historian Jon Peterson traces 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.
One of us (Clara) has spent more time than she’d like to admit at the gaming table. The other (Angela) has never filled out a character sheet in her life. But both of us are fascinated by what happens when we try to reduce the most violent and unpredictable of human actions down to a set of rules. In this interview, the three of us discuss 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. Have fun.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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. And when chess was introduced to Europe through the Iberian Peninsula and the Caliphate, it had a huge impact, first in Spain and then spreading to the remainder of Europe. People viewed the game as a means of studying statecraft, and so they saw it differently from other kinds of parlor games that were circulating at the time.
Christoph Weickhmann writes about this in his 1664 book The Newly Invented Great Kings’ Game. He believed that games that were based on a board — based on being able to deploy units and manage them, and to engage in a competition that required you to understand different lines of attack— could help you become a better leader.
But in these early games, you had very prescribed movements, so people questioned how useful it really was as an understanding of military tactics or grand strategy. And so a lot of people started proposing ways that you could improve the game of chess. People said, “let's get rid of all these confusing units and break this down to what the battlefields of Europe look like today. There's infantry, there's cavalry, there's artillery. Let's focus on trying to figure out ways to represent them, still using the basic concepts of chess, where there’s a board, there’s a grid.”
So Johann Hellwig, who was educated in Brunswick in the late 18th century, was the one who first recommended a game like this for the instruction of the young who needed to learn how to be officers. He recommended playing a game that would be entertaining, but at the same time didactic.
Angela: At this point it’s still on a board. How did it develop from there?
Jon: Well, let’s talk about Georg Venturini first. Venturini really applied a scale to the map, which was not something you would find in Hellwig’s game. His map was still treated like a chessboard, but he was concerned about questions like: What distance is this square supposed to represent? How far does the soldier march in a day? And based on that, how many squares will a soldier march in the day in a realistic game?
Clara Collier: The wargame variants that exist before Venturini sound a lot like combat in tactical turn-based video games that have squares on a grid. The squares can have different terrain — this one can be swampy, and it makes your unit slower, for example. But there's no sense of how that corresponds to real distances in space.
Jon: Quite accurate, yes. Venturini really wanted to create a scale as a tool that bound the setting of the game to its system.
Then the same principles determine how far artillery can fire. It becomes a question of, “based on how far we think the distance to the square is, how far can our guns fire?” And they calculated this before people actually had rifled barrels, so guns couldn't actually fire very far at all. Throughout the 19th century, as time went on, technological innovation required designers to revisit the principles of wargames and adjust for that.
Angela: After Venturini, we get the elder Georg von Reisswitz and his son, who together invented the first modern wargame, the Kriegsspiel. It sounds like there were a few key conceptual leaps between Hellwig’s and Venturini’s games and what the Reisswitzes developed....
....MUCH MORE
May 8 at Asterisk - "Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?"
