A normal wargame is a strategy game in which two or more players command opposing armed forces in a simulation of an armed conflict.Dunnigan (1992), The Complete Wargames Handbook, p. 13: "To be a wargame, in our sense of the word, the game must be realistic." Wargaming may be played for recreation, to train military officers in the art of strategic thinking, or to study the nature of potential conflicts. Many wargames re-create specific historic battles, and can cover either whole wars, or any campaigns, battles, or lower-level engagements within them. Many simulate land combat, but there are wargames for naval, air combat, and cyber conflicts, as well as many that combine various domains.
There is ambiguity as to whether or not activities where participants physically perform mock combat actions (e.g. friendly warships firing dummy rounds at each other) are considered wargames. It is common terminology for a military's field training exercises and military exercise to be referred to as "live wargames", but certain institutions such as the US Navy do not accept this.War Gamer's Handbook (US Naval War College), p. 4: "The [U.S. Naval War College's War Gaming Department] uses the Perla (1990) definition, which describes war gaming as "...a warfare model or simulation whose operation does not involve the activities of actual military forces, and whose sequence of events affects and is, in turn, affected by the decisions made by players representing the opposing sides" (Perla, 1990, p. 164). This institution differentiates a wargame from a training exercise, which uses real forces." Likewise, activities like paintball and airsoft are often classified as combat sports. In contrast, however, the War Olympics also calls itself "the international army games" and often is referred to as wargaming colloquially.
Escalated conflicts and strategies developed specifically to handle them have always been a part of recorded history, however, modern wargaming was invented in Prussia in the early 19th century, and eventually the Prussian military adopted wargaming as a tool for training their officers and developing doctrine. After Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War, wargaming was widely adopted by military officers in other countries. Civilian enthusiasts also played wargames for fun, but this was a niche hobby until the development of consumer electronic wargames in the 1990s.
Professional vs recreational
A professional wargame is a wargame that is used by a military as a serious tool for training or research. A recreational wargame is one played for fun, often in a competitive context.
Recreational wargames can cover a wide variety of subjects, from pre-historic to modern – even fantasy or sci-fi combat. Games which do not include modern armaments and tactics are of limited interest to the military, though wargames covering famous historical battles can interest military historians. As professional wargames are used to prepare officers for actual warfare, there is naturally a strong emphasis on realism and current events.
Military organizations are typically secretive about their current wargames, and this makes designing a professional wargame a challenge. The data the designers require, such as the performance characteristics of weapons or the locations of military bases, are often classified, which makes it difficult for the designers to verify that their models are accurate. Secrecy also makes it harder to disseminate corrections if the wargame has already been delivered to the clients. Then there is the small player base. Whereas a commercial wargame might have thousands or even millions of players, professional wargames tend to have small player bases, which makes it harder for the designers to acquire feedback. Consequently, errors in professional wargame models tend to persist.": "Much of the data that goes into the programs is classified: as a result, checking on whether it is correct is difficult, and errors, once they have crept in, tend to stay. Secrecy also makes it hard to update the games as needed.": "Unlike those in the wargaming hobby, professional wargamers work in a relatively closed society. One organization's games are not freely available for all to try, critique, and modify. Professional wargame designers may document their games (usually in classified publications), but they seldom describe the design process they employed to create them."
Although commercial wargame designers study consumer trends and listen to player feedback, their products are usually designed and sold with a take-it-or-leave-it approach. Professional wargames, by contrast, are typically commissioned by the military that plans to use them. If a wargame is commissioned by several clients, then the designer will have to juggle their competing demands. This can lead to great complexity, high development costs, and a compromised product that satisfies nobody.: "One is the need to satisfy the requirements of many different user organizations each of which does not wish to buy the game off the shelf but actively attempts to pull it in its own direction. Often the outcome is great complexity and compromises that end up, like the famous camel that was created by a committee, by satisfying nobody."
Commercial wargames are under more pressure to deliver an enjoyable experience for the players, who expect a user-friendly interface, a reasonable learning curve, exciting gameplay, and so forth. By contrast, military organizations tend to see wargaming as a tool and a chore, and players are often bluntly obliged to use whatever is provided to them.: "Finally, those who design, manufacture, and market games in the commercial world are obliged to pay attention to users' demands, such as ease of play and creating a good interface between player and game. Their counterparts working in, or for, the military, are not nearly as affected by these concerns. On occasion this can lead to bad games that people simply do not want to play."
Professional wargames that are arbitrated by an umpire or the players themselves (manual wargames) tend to have simple models and computations compared to recreational wargames. Umpires may even be allowed to make arbitrary decisions using their own expertise. One reason for this is to keep the learning curve small. Recreational wargamers tend to have a lot of wargaming experience (it is usually considered a hardcore hobby), so learning a complicated new wargame is easy if it is similar enough to ones they've already played. By contrast, military officers typically have little or no wargaming experience. A second reason is that the technical data required to design an accurate and precise model, such as the performance characteristics of a fighter jet, is often classified.
Overview The exact definition of "wargame" varies from one writer to the next and one organization to the next. To prevent confusion, this section will establish the general definition employed by this article.
A wargame simulates an armed conflict, be it a battle, a campaign, or an entire war. Business wargames do not simulate armed conflict and thus fall outside the scope of this article. A wargame is adversarial. There must be at least two opposing sides whose players react intelligently to each other's decisions, though there are wargames with solitaire rules to govern the actions of the non-player side(s).Wargaming Handbook (MoD 2017), p. 21 A wargame does not involve the use of actual troops and armaments. This definition is used by the US Naval War College. Some writers use the term "live wargames" to refer to games that use actual troops in the field, but this article shall instead refer to these as field exercises.
Setting and scenario A wargame must have a setting that is based on some historical era of warfare so as to establish what armaments, unit types, and doctrines the combatants may wield and the environment they fight in.: "Unlike abstract games of strategy, all wargames have a setting, which determines the armaments of the combatants and the environment in which they deploy." A historical setting accurately depicts a real historical era of warfare. Among recreational wargamers, the most popular historical era is World War 2. Professional military wargamers prefer the modern era. A fantasy setting depicts a fictional world in which the combatants wield fictional or anachronistic armaments, but it should be similar enough to some historical era of warfare such that the combatants fight in a familiar and credible way. For instance, Warhammer Age of Sigmar has wizards and dragons, but the combat is mostly based on medieval warfare (spearmen, archers, knights, etc.). Some are also set in a hypothetical future or counterfactual past, to simulate, for example, a "World War Three" or rebellion of colonists on Mars.
A wargame's scenario describes the circumstances of the specific conflict being simulated, from the layout of the terrain to the exact composition of the fighting forces to the victory conditions of the players. Historical wargames often re-enact historical battles. Alternatively, the game may provide fictional "what-if" scenarios. One challenge in the design of historical wargames is that the scenarios may be inherently unbalanced and present one side with an unwinnable situation. In such cases, the victory conditions may be adjusted for the disadvantaged side so that they can win simply by doing better than what happened historically. Some games simply concede that the scenario is imbalanced and urge players to switch sides and play again to compare their performance. It is easier to design a balanced scenario where all players have a fair chance of winning if it is fictionalized. Board wargames usually have a fixed scenario.
Level of war A wargame's level of war determines to the scope of the scenario, the basic unit of command, and the degree to which lower level processes are abstracted.
At the tactical level, the scenario is a single battle. The basic unit of command is an individual soldier or small group of soldiers.:"A player's decision level is strategic if his responsibility extends to allocating resources, possibly including economic and political resources as well as military forces, to fight and win an entire war. A player is making tactical-level decisions if he is most concerned about positioning relatively small numbers of men and weapons to apply violence directly to the enemy; that is, to fight battles." The time span of the scenario is in the order of minutes. At this level, the specific capabilities of the soldiers and their armaments are described in detail. An example of a tactical-level games is Flames of War, in which players use miniature figurines to represent individual soldiers, and move them around on a scale model of the battlefield.
At the operational level, the scenario is a military campaign, and the basic unit of command is a large group of soldiers. At this level, the outcomes of battles are usually determined by a simple computation.