"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."