Started as "all the computer strategy games in chronological order". Now a bit more.
https://zeitgame.net/
The Wargaming Scribe
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Update: German (and Dutch!) scholarly litterature were well aware of the 1812 rules.
Surprisingly, the ruleset is MUCH closer to modern wargaming than the 1824 Kriegsspiel - no umpire to start with! Except for the lack of dice (fully deterministic!) it could be released today and “pass”. The intro is worth reading, as it mentions the many wargames… the first wargame was inspired by!
Well, well, well. In late 2024, the Berlin “Digital staatsbibliothek” digitalized it, an event that seems to have escaped everyone attention (at least in the French/English] world. I took the scan, OCR’ed it and machine-translated it. Voilà:
zeitgame.net/translations...
Just as importantly, the rules of 1812 Kriegsspiel were hard to come by and never translated to English. A few researchers claimed they were lost, other just call them unavailable - and so unlike the 1824 Kriegsspiel it is only ever mentionned en passant [4/6]
Which one you choose depends on where you draw the line between abstract games like Chess and full-fledged wargames. My personal choice is Opiz (dice and CRT!) but Vinturinus is a good choice too. Attempts to find earlier precursors produced a few 16th century titles, but it’s unconvincing [2/x]
One title that has been surprisingly ignored is the Tactical Kriegspiel (1812), by Reisswitz Sr, father of the Reisswitz designed Kriegsspiel (1824). It was a popular game in courts (both Prussia and Russia), but was not used by the Prussian Army to train its officer, so less relevant [3/x]
Kriegsspiel (i1824) considered to be the first modern, by convention more than by consensus - scholarly works as far back as 1966 (the furthest one I checked) mention earlier wargames, with the consensus being distributed between Holwig’s game (1780), Vinturinus’ (1795) and Opiz (1806) [1/x]
