The partial advantage of the game-board over the occurrences of actual war, for the purpose of studying strategy, lies largely in its ability to permit a number of trials very quickly; the trials starting either with identical situations, or with certain changes in conditions.  Of course, the game-board has the tremendous disadvantage that it presents only a picture, and does not show a real performance; but the more it is used, and the more fleets and game-boards work together, the more accurate the picture will become, and the more correctly we shall learn to read it.

One limitation of the game-board is that it can represent weather conditions only imperfectly—­and this is a serious limitation that mayor may not be remedied as time goes on.  The theory of the game-board is in fact in advance of the mechanism, and is waiting for some bright inventive genius for the remedy.  Until this happens, the imagination must do the best it can, and the effect of a certain kind of weather under the other conditions prevailing will have to be agreed upon by the contestants.

The term “war game” is perhaps unfortunate, for the reason that it does not convey a true idea of what a “war game” is.  The term conveys the idea of a competitive exercise, carried on for sport; whereas the idea underlying the exercise is of the most serious kind, and has no element of sport about it, except the element that competition gives.  A war game may be simply a game of sport—­and sometimes it is so played; but the intention is to determine some doubtful point of strategy or tactics, and the competitive element is simply to impart realism, and to stimulate interest.  When two officers, or two bodies of officers, find themselves on different sides of a certain question, they sometimes “put it on the game-board,” to see which side is right.

This statement applies most obviously to tactical games; but it applies to strategic games as well; for both are inventions designed to represent in miniature the movements of two opposing forces.  The main difference between strategic and tactical games is the difference in size.  Naturally, the actual means employed are different, but only so different as the relative areas of movement necessitate.  In the strategic games, the opposing forces are far apart, and do not see each other; in the tactical games, they operate within each other’s range of vision.

War games when played for the purpose of determining the value of types of craft and vessels of all kinds, may take on almost an infinite variety of forms; for the combinations of craft of different kinds and sizes, and in different numbers, considered in connection with the various possible combinations of weather, climate, and possible enemy forces, are so numerous as to defy computation.