"The Hellenic game polis and the Roman game latrones are both centuries older than chess or chaturanga, so there's an even longer history of strategy board games with aspirations of martial relevance. The trouble is, the skills you learn as a novice player don't transfer very well to things that aren't strategy board games. Even though military theory and chess theory have overlapping concepts like 'initiative' and 'maneuvering', they're not entirely the same thing. Worse, the focal point of player development undergoes a phase change around Class B towards memorizing colossal game trees and figuring out how to navigate the branches as they gradually thin out near the extremities. If you try to assess your commanders using their Elo rating as a proxy, at best you're going to run into collider bias. It took a remarkably long time to invent a reasonably accurate simulation game for commanders to train up their fingerspitzengefühl without getting their hands dirty in the field."
"Kriegsspiel had two key advantages over its precursors. First, it was played on a topographic terrain map rather than a flat board with no features other than the grid. Unit travel was measured in inches and plotted with a straightedge and compass. Second, players interacted with the game by submitting written orders to an umpire. Letting a neutral third party handle the pieces turned it into a game of imperfect information – for example, troops without mutual knowledge of their position could be removed from the board, forcing the players to try and predict enemy movements without worrying about trivially easy cheating. The verisimilitude of having your message to the front lines delayed because you accidentally ordered the messenger to cross two rivers and a minefield on horseback made it popular for teaching as well as just for fun. It also cost a small fortune and used a suite of dice with the outcome of specific attack scenarios written on the faces in painfully tiny font, so when Kriegsspiel escaped from Prussia in the mid-19th century there was still room for improvement.
"Even more than training simulations, commercial wargames need to balance realism against ease of play. This isn't always a direct tradeoff; the newer video games can actually— I'm sorry, do you know what a computer is?"
It takes her a second to place it, but yes. Her mother owns a Macintosh, which she has never really had the time or inclination to interact with firsthand. It only stands out in her memory as the incongruous hunk of beige plastic in the boudoir. She does have an inkling of what it does, though.
"They're a sort of electric typewriter than can talk to one another over the phone lines."
"Among other things," Cassian says dryly. "They're an interface for anything that can be represented as information – text, images, and sound are the most common, but they can also handle rules and game state. In a 'video game' the computer acts like the umpire from Kriegsspiel. It can't improvise, but it can carry out any fully-specified task at high speed. Because they flawlessly keep track of any number of details, games like Harpoon and Panzer General let the player make high-level strategic decisions about tanks and aircraft carriers without anyone needing to roll dice or consult tables of instructions. In fact, because video games don't need to slow down to accommodate complexity, they can compress rulebooks larger than the worst Avalon Hill doorstoppers into an appealing form factor."
The notion of something like a dedicated magic mirror system for information retrieval is intriguing. Could it be done without a computer? The mirror itself would work just the same, but organizing a media library for the transmitter's benefit would make everything much more efficient, maybe even to the point of being worth doing in the first place. Juno files the idea away for later.
"It sounds interesting! I will have to try a video game the next time I'm home. But what does it all have to do with this morning?"
If only he'd known she already had a computer! Alas, an introduction to the wonderful world of PBEM Diplomacy will have to wait.
"Playing by perfectly rigid game rules can only approach total freedom of action. With a computer serving as the umpire those rules can be arbitrarily complicated, but they can't encompass what the creators didn't anticipate or didn't care to include. Those are still important considerations, right? Intuitively it feels like wargames ought to be open-ended enough that innovative play styles can succeed or fail, rather than being impossible in the first place, while still constraining the overall design to a more fun version of what warfare looks like. That's the idea, anyways.
"Today's experiment is a hybrid approach: a real-time strategy game where every unit's particular capabilities are laid out in full detail, where the rules don't exclude anything that unit could hypothetically do, and the game doesn't need human adjudication to determine how long anything takes to accomplish or how effective it will be. It's going to be brilliant."
Or it will be poorly executed and waste everyone's time and enthusiasm, but he's not going to dwell on that.
"A game this brilliant must be played in a secret room with as few witnesses as possible," Juno says solemnly.
"You get me!"
They have reached the secret room – it's not hidden per se, but it's far from any part of the castle still in use and is indistinguishable from any of the hundred other rooms they passed along the way. Cassian gives it the shave-and-a-haircut knock and the lock snaps open automatically.
"After you," he offers.
The floor inside is carpeted with thousands of miniature trees, each no more than eighteen inches tall, planted in a layer of actual dirt spanning from wall to distant wall like an enormous garden bed. The leaves blend together into a midnight-green canopy layer that extends halfway across the room until it reaches an indoor lake comparable in surface area and depth to a particularly luxurious bath.
North of that lake, in pride of place at the center of the diorama, is an astonishingly detailed 1:64 scale replica of Hogwarts Castle. Despite its ersatz nature the stonework appears to be made from real stone, the wooden fixtures from real wood. Dim yellow light shines through fingernail-sized glass windows, and glittering rivulets of water flow from the spouts of the outdoor fountains.
Farther north still is picturesque Hogsmeade village, joined to the castle by the road students traverse on thestral-drawn carriages at the start of term. Every square inch of the town, from the eclectic businesses that cater to witchcraft students to the forlorn and decrepit Shrieking Shack, has been recreated as faithfully as Hogwarts itself.
Finally, squatting at the end of the road as it encircles the map is the Hogsmeade train station – not its first time being reproduced at reduced scale, because model train enthusiasts have already gotten to every train station in the country, but perhaps its first time in a hobbyist setup where the railway is not the focus.
And there's a girl! Cassian said they were brother and sister, though there's no family resemblance between them. She's standing over the Astronomy Tower, staring intently into the topmost floor as though there's something wrong with it, with the soles of her shoes resting on the surface of the water. She doesn't acknowledge their arrival.
"It should stand up to some light traffic, as long as you don't kick anything over."
She steps cautiously into the room, carefully avoiding anything that looks like it was crafted with a modicum of intention to detail. Even so, her footfalls leave swathes of flattened grass and wildflowers in her wake. She circumnavigates the lake, indirectly approaching the castle. Does it look any different up close?
It's not just the castle! The low stone wall that encircles Hogwarts is there, complete with a little wrought-iron gate spanning the road. The model groundskeeper's cottage sits near the model Forbidden Forest, as does a bonsai whomping willow. On the opposite side lie the school's Quidditch pitch and the Herbology greenhouses. In addition to the main road, gravel trails and desire paths crisscross the grounds between the courtyards and the rolling green hills. It is a very lifelike scale replica.
Juno crouches next to one of the other towers and peers through the window. What's it got going on inside?
That tower is Gryffindor Tower, and inside it is the Gryffindor common room! It's been kitted out with dollhouse furniture in deep red and gold, big comfy sofas with matching curtains and rugs. All of that is arranged around a beetle-sized mahogany table and backlit by a flickering light coming from the fireplace. There are even paintings hung on the walls. It's totally authentic, as far as she can tell – she probably can't tell, it's not like she's ever been inside the Gryffindor common room – it's certainly very convincing.
It sure looks that way. There are a lot of exterior windows to look through, but for any rooms she cares to check it's easy to see they've been filled with all the odds and ends necessary to give the appearance of habitation by 1:64 scale wizards.
Up close, Cassian's sister looks… tired. Haggard, even. Not like someone guilty of burning the midnight oil too many nights in a row; more like someone who's recently restarted chain smoking to cope with the death of a loved one. The only part of her with any intensity is her gaze, which starts burning a hole in the side of Juno's head as soon as she enters her field of view.
"You're not Stephanie."
In retrospect it would have been smart to tell Bronwen in advance that Stephanie couldn't make it. Time to interrupt Juno before she says something inflammatory.
"Yes, yes, we've met before. This is Juno; she was my partner in Romania last year for the doubles set."
"The Auld Alliance strikes again!" she says, punching the air. "Our victory was never in question. Your brother is very good at what he does, and I am who I am."
The fact that Cassian liked this foreigner enough while paired up on the dueling circuit to give their team a name is good enough for Bronwen. She outsources most of her character judgements to him anyways.
"It's nice to meet you. My brother does not have a girlfriend, he has a white-hot platonic friendship with a human stress ball. There is a sense in which this means he is available."
