Free Kriegsspiel
Decision Games
Once upon a time there was the Kriegspiel. A thing of great beauty, it was both cumbersome to play and expensive to acquire. Thus, while the rare birds who invested time and treasure in learning the rules and acquiring the apparatus learned a great deal from the experience, the game wrought few, if any, direct effects on military institutions.
In 1876, a Prussian officer with a French name, Julius von Verdy du Vernois, published a little book called A Contribution to the Wargame (Beitrag zum Kriegsspiel.) In this modestly-titled work, Verdy (as he was known to his contemporaries) described a two-sided wargame in which the presence of an authoritative umpire allowed players to dispense entirely with rule books, tables of results, and the rolling of dice.
This approach became so popular that, nearly a century and a half after the publication of Beitrag zum Kriegsspiel, American Marines have repurposed the term Kriegspiel to describe an exercise of this particular type.