(23/41: 1824) (23/40) GEORG VON REISSWITZ
The Man Who Invented the Game Master
Before Dungeons & Dragons, before Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign, before H.G. Wells pushed toy soldiers around his parlor floor, a Prussian artillery lieutenant solved a problem that would shape gaming for two hundred years.
Georg von Reisswitz wanted to simulate war. Real war. Not chess with cannons. Not the polite abstractions his father had shown the King a decade earlier. He wanted fog, confusion, surprise. He wanted generals to feel what it was like to give orders and wait — not knowing if the courier got through, not knowing what was happening on the other side of the hill.
But how do you hide information in a game where both players can see the board?
His answer: you don’t let them see the board.
Instead, you put someone in the middle. A neutral officer who sees everything. Players write their orders on paper and hand them to this man. He moves the pieces. He rolls the dice. He decides what each side can see and what stays hidden.
Reisswitz called this person the Umpire.
It was the most important invention in the history of gaming.
The Problem Before Reisswitz
War has been abstracted into games for millennia. Chess descends from Indian Chaturanga, itself a stylized representation of four military divisions. But chess — and every game like it — shares a fundamental limitation: perfect information. Both players see everything. There is no fog, no surprise, no uncertainty about enemy positions.
Real war has almost nothing but uncertainty.
In the late eighteenth century, game designers began pushing toward realism. Johann Hellwig’s 1780 kriegsspiel used colored squares representing terrain and military-themed pieces representing units. Johann Georg Julius Venturini’s 1797 version added more elaborate rules for movement and combat. But these games still operated like chess: complete visibility, alternating turns, deterministic outcomes.
Reisswitz’s father, Georg Leopold von Reisswitz, made a significant advance in 1812. He built a cabinet with modular terrain tiles that could be arranged to represent actual battlefields. Sand tables allowed three-dimensional topography. The King of Prussia was impressed enough to keep the apparatus at court.
But even this version showed all pieces to all players. Combat was deterministic — an attacked unit simply died or didn’t, based on fixed rules. There were no hidden reserves, no delayed communications, no partial damage, no confusion.
The elder Reisswitz had improved the board. The younger Reisswitz would improve the game.
The Lieutenant Who Knew War
Georg von Reisswitz was born in 1794, the year Prussia entered the War of the First Coalition against revolutionary France. He grew up during the Napoleonic Wars — the most devastating European conflict between the Thirty Years’ War and World War I. By the time he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Prussian artillery, he had seen what modern industrial warfare looked like.
He understood something his father’s generation of game designers hadn’t fully grasped: command is mostly uncertainty.
Generals send couriers and hope they arrive. They hear gunfire over the ridge and guess at what it means. They commit troops to an attack and don’t know for hours whether it succeeded. They give orders based on information that’s already outdated by the time they receive it.
Chess teaches tactics. It does not teach command.
Reisswitz set out to build a game that taught command.
The Invention
In 1824, Reisswitz published his Anleitung zur Darstellung militärischer Manöver mit dem Apparat des Kriegsspiels — a dense, technical manual describing a new kind of wargame.
The innovations were numerous and interlocking:
Topographic Maps. Instead of abstract grids, Reisswitz used actual military survey maps at 1:8000 scale. Terrain wasn’t symbolic — it was real geography, with real elevation, real road networks, real fields of fire.
Time-Scaled Movement. Units moved according to realistic march rates. A minute of game time equaled a minute of real time when using the standard pace. Players experienced something like the actual tempo of military operations.
Probabilistic Combat. Instead of deterministic outcomes, Reisswitz introduced dice and casualty tables. The same attack against the same position might succeed or fail depending on chance — reflecting the reality that warfare is not a solved equation.
Partial Damage. Units weren’t simply alive or dead. They accumulated casualties, represented by swapping unit markers for smaller versions. A regiment that took 30% losses still existed but fought at reduced capacity.
But the crucial innovation — the one that made everything else possible — was the Umpire.
How the Umpire Worked
In Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel, players never touched the map.
Each side had a commander (or team of commanders) in a separate room with their own partial map showing only what their forces could observe. They wrote orders: Move the 3rd Regiment to the crossroads. Send a patrol north along the river. Hold position and await further instructions.
These orders went to the Umpire, who stood at the main map with all the pieces — the complete picture that no player could see.
The Umpire read the orders, moved the units according to their written instructions, and checked for contact. If opposing forces came within observation range of each other, he informed both sides — but only what they could realistically see from their positions. Hidden units stayed hidden. Reserves behind hills remained unknown. The enemy’s intentions were opaque.
When combat occurred, the Umpire rolled dice, consulted casualty tables, and updated the unit markers. He tracked time. He enforced communication delays, so messages between commanders arrived only after realistic travel time had elapsed. A courier sent across two miles of rough terrain didn’t deliver instantly — he arrived when the Umpire calculated he would arrive.
Most importantly: if something happened that the rules didn’t cover, the Umpire decided. His rulings were final.
One contemporary summary captures the structure: “Only the Umpire was allowed to actually place and move pieces. He was the only one having full knowledge of the game and its progress.”
This was new. No game had ever worked this way.
The Prussian Adoption
Reisswitz demonstrated his Kriegsspiel to Prince Wilhelm (the future Kaiser Wilhelm I) in 1824. The Prince was sufficiently impressed to arrange a presentation for the General Staff.
The reaction from General Karl von Müffling, Chief of the Prussian General Staff, became legendary: “This is not a game! This is training for war!”
The Prussian military adopted Kriegsspiel immediately. Copies were ordered for every regiment. Officers played as training exercises, testing scenarios, exploring alternatives to historical battles. The game became embedded in Prussian military culture.
Some historians credit this wargaming tradition for Prussia’s remarkable military successes in the following decades — the defeat of Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870-71. Whether Kriegsspiel actually made Prussian officers better commanders is impossible to prove. But the correlation between a military culture that institutionalized wargaming and a military record of decisive victories was noticed by everyone, including Prussia’s future enemies.
By the 1870s, every major European army had adopted some form of kriegsspiel training. The British War Office translated Reisswitz’s rules. The French military developed their own variants. The game designed to train Prussian officers became the global standard for professional military education.
The Tragedy
Georg von Reisswitz did not live to see any of this.
In 1827 — just three years after publishing his Kriegsspiel, at the age of thirty-three — Reisswitz died by suicide.
The historical record is sparse on details. What we know is that despite the official adoption of his game, Reisswitz faced significant professional difficulties. Some accounts suggest he was passed over for promotion. Others indicate conflicts with superior officers who resented a junior lieutenant receiving royal attention. The Prussian military hierarchy of the 1820s was not kind to innovators who disrupted established methods, even when those innovations proved valuable.
Reisswitz may have invented the most influential game in military history, but he didn’t live long enough to see its influence. He died thinking himself a failure, not knowing that his Umpire would become the Dungeon Master, that his fog of war would shape every video game with hidden information, that his solution to the problem of uncertainty would underpin a global entertainment industry.
The man who invented the Game Master never got to play in a campaign that lasted more than a few sessions. He never saw what his invention would become.
The Line from Reisswitz to Gygax
The connection isn’t metaphorical. It’s direct, traceable through documented influence at every step.
1876: Verdy du Vernois and Free Kriegsspiel. Prussian General Julius von Verdy du Vernois published a variant that pushed Reisswitz’s concept further. His innovation: throw out the dice and casualty tables entirely. Let the Umpire simply decide what happens based on military judgment. The Umpire becomes not just a referee but an author, shaping outcomes through expertise and narrative logic rather than mechanical calculation. This was the birth of “rulings, not rules” — the philosophy that would later define old-school RPG play.
1913: H.G. Wells and Little Wars. The novelist published a toy-soldier wargame for civilians, complete with spring-loaded cannons that fired matchsticks at lead figures. Wells included an umpire with a stopwatch to adjudicate disputes, explicitly crediting Prussian Kriegsspiel as his inspiration. The game was meant as entertainment, not training, but it carried the Umpire role into the hobbyist world.
1967: David Wesely and Braunstein. A Minneapolis wargamer ran a scenario where, instead of commanding armies, players took individual roles in a Napoleonic-era town: the mayor, the student revolutionary, the banker, the spy. One person — the Referee — managed everything behind the scenes, controlling all non-player characters and adjudicating all conflicts. Wesely later said he borrowed the referee concept from Charles Totten’s 1880 Strategos, itself descended from Prussian Kriegsspiel.
1971: Dave Arneson and Blackmoor. One of Wesely’s players took the Braunstein concept home and started running fantasy games in a world he called Blackmoor. Players controlled individual heroes instead of armies. One person — still called the Referee — controlled the world, revealing information selectively, deciding outcomes, managing the fog of war.
1974: Gygax and Arneson publish Dungeons & Dragons. The rulebook defines the “Dungeon Master” as a referee and storyteller who presents challenges, adjudicates rules, and reveals outcomes. The DM sees behind the screen; the players do not.
The Dungeon Master is the Umpire in a wizard’s hat.
The Honest Assessment
The old scoring gave Reisswitz Architecture 10 and Mastery 11. The new methodology corrects both — and the corrections reveal something important about how we measure genius.
Architecture measures two things: how well the system was built AND whether other designers built on it. Reisswitz’s system was robust enough for military adoption across Europe. The Umpire role, probabilistic combat, hidden movement — these specific structural elements were adopted across the entire wargaming tradition. The system was a complete military simulation with interlocking subsystems: maps, movement, combat, communication, command.
But other designers didn’t build ON Reisswitz’s system — they were inspired BY his concepts. Verdy du Vernois threw out Reisswitz’s dice and tables entirely and kept only the Umpire concept. Wells built a completely different game inspired by the tradition. Wesely built Braunstein from Totten’s adaptation, not from Reisswitz’s original rules. The concepts propagated universally. The specific architecture — the casualty tables, the movement rates, the map system — did not become a template other designers literally built upon.
Architecture 8. Serious engineering that other people noticed. Specific structural elements adopted across an entire tradition. But one game, never expanded by its creator, not an extensible ecosystem. The concepts were infrastructure. The specific system was not.
Mastery measures craft development across a body of work. Reisswitz published one game. He was thirty years old. He died three years later. There is no body of work to evaluate. There is no craft evolution visible — no early rough work followed by polished mature work. There is no design voice developed across multiple titles. There is one extraordinary achievement.
The military adoption proves the game worked. It doesn’t prove the designer had mastered game design as a discipline. He may have. We can’t know. One data point.
Mastery 3. Early career or limited depth. One notable design of extraordinary quality. Real but limited. Promise without fulfillment — not because of any failure, but because a bullet ended the story at thirty-three.
The old score of 11 was outside the scale entirely. The methodology is honest about what it can and cannot measure. One game — even the most important game concept in history — is not evidence of mastery. It is evidence of genius. Those are different things.
The Scoring Case
Invention (10): “Pulled it out of their ass.”
“Pulled it out of their ass.” Before Reisswitz, no game used a human mediator to manage asymmetric information between players. The Umpire concept had no frame of reference. His contemporaries — military officers accustomed to chess-like wargames — saw it and said the equivalent of “what IS this?” Müffling’s response — “This is not a game! This is training for war!” — is the 1824 version of encountering something with no prior art. The concept propagated to every RPG, every referee-based wargame, every video game with hidden information. He is universally credited.
Architecture (8): “Serious engineering that other people noticed.”
“Serious engineering that other people noticed.” The system was complete — topographic maps, time-scaled movement, probabilistic combat, partial damage, communication delays — all integrated around the Umpire role. Robust enough for military adoption across Europe. But the specific architectural elements (casualty tables, movement rates, map scales) were not the template other designers copied. Verdy du Vernois stripped the tables. Wells built differently. Totten adapted loosely. The Umpire concept propagated universally. The specific system did not. One game, never expanded, no supplements, no third-party development.
Mastery (3): “Early career or limited depth.”
“Early career or limited depth.” One published game. Dead at thirty-three. Cannot assess craft mastery from a single work, regardless of its brilliance. No body of work. No craft evolution. No design voice developed across multiple titles. The contribution is real — enormously real. But mastery requires a body of evidence, and the body of evidence is one book.
Adjustments (+2):
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: No. Active approximately 1820–1827. Seven years at most.
- ■ Full-time career: No. Military officer. Game design was not his profession.
- ■ Awards: No. Predates all gaming awards by 150 years.
- ■ Branded name: No. “Kriegsspiel” is known among wargamers but fails the grandmother test.
- ■ Cross-genre success: No. One game, one genre.
- ■ Commercial success: No. Military adoption, not commercial retail.
- ■ Design propagation: +2. The Umpire concept propagated to every RPG, every referee-based wargame, every video game with fog of war. Documented chain of influence across 200 years. Universally credited.
The Pattern This Reveals
Georg von Reisswitz is the methodology’s hardest test case.
The man who arguably made the single most important invention in gaming history scores 23. Elizabeth Magie, who invented the most played board game in history, scores 25. Gary Gygax, who built an empire on Reisswitz’s Umpire concept, scores 39.
The 16-point gap between Reisswitz and Gygax is the difference between a flash of genius and a life’s work. Both score Invention 10. The gap comes from Architecture (8 vs 10), Mastery (3 vs 9), and Adjustments (+2 vs +10). Gygax built the system, refined the craft over 37 years, triggered every career fact in the checklist. Reisswitz had the idea, built it once, and died.
This is what the methodology is designed to measure. Invention can max out on a single brilliant act. Mastery and Adjustments reward showing up for decades and proving it over and over. A world-changing idea starts the conversation. A body of evidence finishes it.
The year tiebreaker does important work here. At 23 points, Reisswitz (1824) sits above every other 23-point designer by over a century. The earliest innovator with the least to build on. When two designers tie, the one who came first — with less prior art to draw on, less accumulated design wisdom to inherit — gets the nod. Reisswitz had nothing to build on but chess and his father’s sand table. Everything he created, he created from scratch.
The Hidden Pattern
Georg von Reisswitz is the ghost in every game room.
When a Dungeon Master describes what your character sees — and withholds what they don’t — that’s Reisswitz.
When a video game reveals the map only as you explore it, that’s Reisswitz’s information architecture, automated.
When a referee decides that yes, you can try to swing from the chandelier, and rolls to see what happens, that’s Verdy du Vernois building on Reisswitz’s foundation.
When uncertainty creates tension, when hidden information creates surprise, when not knowing creates drama — that’s the design problem Reisswitz solved in 1824.
He didn’t live to see any of it.
He died at thirty-three, thinking himself a failure, not knowing that his Umpire would outlive the Prussian military, outlive the empire he served, outlive the style of warfare he tried to simulate.
The role he invented has been translated into a hundred languages, embedded in millions of games, performed by tens of millions of referees and game masters and dungeon masters who have never heard his name.
What Remains
The Umpire.
That’s what remains. The person in the middle. The one who sees everything so the players can experience discovery. The one who holds the secrets so the game can have surprises. The one who makes rulings when the rules run out.
Georg von Reisswitz invented a role that has been performed continuously for two hundred years. The title has changed — Umpire, Referee, Game Master, Dungeon Master, Keeper, Storyteller, Marshal, MC — but the function remains what Reisswitz defined: a human being standing between the players and the complete game state, mediating information, shaping experience, making uncertainty playable.
23 points. 1824. The lowest score for any Invention-10 designer on the list.
The methodology doesn’t rank importance. It measures craft, system, career, and impact across four independent questions. On three of those questions, there simply isn’t enough evidence — one game, seven years, dead at thirty-three.
On the first question, nobody in two hundred years has scored higher.
Every tabletop RPG session is a memorial service for a Prussian lieutenant who died too young.
He just didn’t know he was founding a religion.
Total: 23 points. Year: 1824.
23 points. 1824. The lowest score for any Invention-10 designer on the list.
He just didn’t know he was founding a religion.