The route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement (opens in new tab)

Military exercises where the commanders and staff are real but the troops are simulated are called command post exercises.[1] The US military's approach seems to be less like gaming and more like doing it for real. Five day 24-hour training exercises, using the same people and gear the real command post uses, with 1:1 real time. Somewhere in the back are umpires using computers to track what's happening. The objective is not so much to learn tactics as to see who and what breaks. Screwing up can set back real-world careers.

There are people pushing for more paper war-gaming, but they're in the minority.[2] "Train like you fight" is an Army mantra. But the U.S. Army War College is trying.[3] There's a lot of heavy thinking going on around how to defend Taiwan.

[1] https://www.army.mil/article/192566/increasing_proficiency_w...

[2] https://www.lineofdeparture.army.mil/Journals/Protection/Pro...

[3] https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/back-to-the-basi...

Diplomacy is a fun parlor game, and was also played mail style where the moves get delivered and the results get posted. I've played both ways, though the Mail version we did was just having a ref who collected our next move and posted the results on a xerox. I think we did around three moves a week and included barbs (insults) to be published in the posting.

They mentioned Gary Gygax was inspired by their modification where they chose to play the board game Diplomacy while adding on acting in personas as they negotiated and played the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)

Jon Peterson's "Playing at the World" is a fantastic book. Highly recommend!

And obviously there are extremely serious tactical simulations like Combat Mission (https://www.matrixprosims.com/game/combat-mission-profession...), which are used by militiaries.

SPI in the 70’s created an extensive list of paper wargames.