Standard Game · Wargame

Free Kriegsspiel

The war game as it was played after 1876, when the rigid rules of 1824 were thrown away and an umpire was put in their place. You command an advanced brigade on the Aulne in August 1870 — but you never move a battalion. You write orders on a printed form, an orderly rides with them, and your subordinates carry them out as they understand them. The map you work from is not the board: it shows your own troops where they were last reported and the enemy where an officer thought he saw him, with the hour beside each. There is no combat table anywhere in the game. Every question of judgement is decided by an umpire who records the factors he weighed, the verdict and his die, in a book you may read at any time and disagree with afterwards.