Kriegspiel (board wargame)

Kriegspiel, German for wargame, is a two-player board wargame published by Avalon Hill in 1970 that simulates a conflict between two opposing nations, taking its name from a nineteenth-century Prussian military training game originally devised by a mapmaker to instruct soldiers in tactics. The 1970 Avalon Hill release is a simplified, modern reinterpretation aimed at a mass commercial hobby-game audience rather than at military instruction, developed hastily by Avalon Hill vice-president Tom Shaw after original designer Jim Dunnigan became unavailable and Shaw needed a finished game in time for the March 1970 American Toy Fair. Shaw himself later described it as one of his least serious designs, done in a panic to meet the deadline. Gameplay uses an alternating movement and combat system resolved through strategic decision-making rather than dice. Despite that hurried origin, the game proved commercially successful, selling around eighty-six thousand copies over the following decade, mostly to casual players new to wargaming, even though a 1976 SPI reader poll ranked it last among two hundred and two games rated and an internal Avalon Hill survey placed it last among twenty-five of the company's own titles. Production of Kriegspiel ended in 1979.