Guy Debord's Kriegsspiel is now available as an app

According to Wikipedia, Guy-Ernest Debord (28th December 1931 to 30th November 1994) was 'a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International'.

He was also the designer of a very impressive, gridded wargame.

Debord wrote about the wargame that he devised in his book A GAME OF WAR, which was co-authored with Alice-Becker-Ho and published in 1987. He described the book as follows:

So I have studied the logic of war. Indeed I succeeded long ago in representing its essential movements on a rather simple game-board… I played this game, and in the often difficult conduct of my life drew a few lessons from it — setting rules for my life, and abiding by them. The surprises vouchsafed by this Kriegspiel of mine seem endless; I rather fear it may turn out to be the only one of my works to which people will venture to accord any value. As to whether I have made good use of its lessons, I shall leave that for others to judge.

Although all the unsold copies of his book were pulped on his orders in 1991, it was republished in French in 2006, with an English translation in 2008. Since then, Class Wargames has been demonstrating it at special events around the world.

I first became aware of Guy Debord's game when I began the research for my book, THE PORTABLE WARGAME, and I became intrigued by it. I bought Richard Barbrook's book entitled CLASS WARGAMES: LUDIC SUBVERSION AGAINST SPECTACULAR CAPITALISM, which described the game in some detail, but until now I have never had the opportunity to play it.

Guy Debord's wargame is now available as a free iPad app, and I recently downloaded it to mine. The app allows you to play online against a live opponent or against the game's own artificial intelligence. So far, I have chosen the latter option as I want to master the rules before trying my luck against someone who has more experience than me.

On screen, the gameboard looks like this:

The rules are deceptively simple and can be briefly summarised thus:

• The game is played on a 20 x 25 square gridded board
• The terrain is broken up by mountains, and there are several forts that either side can occupy during the course of the game
• Each side has two arsenals or supply bases, and the game ends when one side loses all their units or both of these arsenals
• There are supply routes that run vertically, horizontally, and diagonally across the board, and in order to move a unit, players must either have them on one of the supply routes or be contiguous with a friendly unit that is on a supply route
• Each player has a number of different units (infantry, cavalry, foot artillery, horse artillery, and generals)

• Players take turns moving troops across the board
• Each player can move up to five units each turn and is allowed mount one attack.
• Attacks are decided by summing the offensive power of all the units that are in the range of an enemy target square and then subtracting the total defensive power of the other player's unit.
• If this number is greater than 2 then the attack is a success

Sounds simple, doesn't it ... but like with all 'simple' games, the subtlety is in the play.

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Some illustrations from Richard Barbrook's book show how the basic game (as shown above in the screen shot of the iPad screen) ...

... can be adapted for Napoleon's Marengo campaign ...

... and the Battle of Austerlitz.

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Please note that the copyright of all the illustrations from Richard Barbrook's book lie with him and are used here for review purposes only.