kriegspiel

And nowhere was that competitive spirit more apparent than at lunchtime, when the scientists began playing Kriegspiel, a chess variant once favored by the German military.

This, perhaps, is why German military officers in the 19th Century devised a peculiar board game known as Kriegspiel - or "wargame" - as a training tool.

The American newspapers were filled with long, though belated, accounts of the brilliant fighting at Ciudad Rodrigo, Almeida, and Badajoz; and these narratives fired the imagination of Prescott, whose eagerness his companion found infectious, so that the two began to play at battles; not after the usual fashion of boys, but in a manner recalling the Kriegspiel of the military schools of modern Germany.

A year or so later I read in some newspaper that a fortune awaited the man who could invent something that could be applied to ships as the land Kriegspiel to armies.

Kriegspiel, krēg′spēl, n. the 'war-game' played with metal blocks on a map, to train officers in military manœuvres.