"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."
She laughs. "I am only joking. Cassian told me that Stephanie felt under the weather last night, which is how the topic of your little game came about. He did not invite me; I invited myself."
"He has that effect on people. We didn't rig up any seating for spectators, but the once the game starts the sideline boundaries will be visible. Hope you're okay with standing. There aren't any rules for outside interference, the game just stops if you cross the line before the end."
Good, they're getting along. It's always hit or miss when trying to get Bronwen to socialize with other people. She's only recently graduated from sticking to Cassian's side at all times like a limpet to occasionally wanting total seclusion – not precisely the direction he was hoping for her to grow in, but he'll take what he can get.
He checks his watch. "Shall we get the armies set up? Mine's still in the trunk, I don't know about yours."
"In my pockets. I'll take the far corner." She gets up, swaying gently as though the effort has cost her dearly, then steadies herself and walks away.
Juno does not comment on this. If Cassian thought his younger sister being sickly and adopted was relevant he would've mentioned it. Instead, she follows him towards the trunk. It's shoved into the corner with terrain mounded up against the sides, lid ajar, an open padlock hanging from the rim. Physically on the small side, not that its size matters.
"We've already committed to the units we're going to field," he explains as he removed a tall wooden cabinet from the trunk. "We declared the type of army in advance, so we each had an overview of what could be in the enemy's forces while drafting, but you have to finalize your list without consulting your opponent's list along the way. Otherwise you enter a loop of picking specialized units to defeat your opponent's exact setup, which they can then counter in the same way, and so on. It might be better to have a drafting rule with more flexibility, like alternating choices, but this one came with the game and it works."
He opens the cabinet, sets a single piece of dark plastic on the top shelf, then closes the door again.
"Just going to test this first," he mutters, and locks the cabinet. Then he unlocks it again.
He still has memories of his homeworld, but his clearest memory is of the sky.
They'd begun to reach for the stars long before he was born, relying on massive orbital shipyards and launch platforms as stepping stones into the cosmos. Those titanic arcs of plasteel and tritanium were as visible as the moons and sun, their lambent signal lights flickering across the hulls like artificial constellations in the night. He remembers the sky more clearly than the face of his own mother – a shining symbol of civilization, the combined efforts of myriad races and creeds and nations united under one banner. How could you not know that you lived in a golden age of prosperity when the proof of it was always hanging overhead?
He remembers the sky during the invasion: the arrival of foreign capital ships, the brief exchange of fire, the way the satellites twisted and burned and gradually disintegrated under their own weight as they fell into the atmosphere. As a child he'd been sheltered from the impact of the collapse, though with hindsight he knows the xenocide would've been carried out swiftly after the Federation surrendered to the Imperium. The ancient armies of humanity had outpaced Earth's former colonies in the rush to reclaim the galaxy, and in a matter of years the system and its people were repurposed into engines of that glorious conquest.
Khan doesn't remember why he was chosen. Maybe it was because his parents had invested heavily in his genetic welfare. Maybe it was because he could recite the tenets of the Imperial Truth by heart when prompted by the recruiters. Maybe the recruiters had a quota to fill. Who can say? The rest of his memories from before they crammed five synthetic organs into his cranial cavity and grew him into an instrument of war are blurry and fragmented.
His experiences are disjointed. Endless years spent lurking in the depths of an unknowable monstrosity of a space ship; battles fought on the surface of a hundred planets, against a thousand foes. Khan's life, extended far beyond its natural span, became a homogeneous procession of tedium and slaughter. Home faded behind him until it was nothing but the burning sky and a feeling of deep-seated loathing for everything the Imperium stood for.
The irony is, turning to Chaos had been almost exactly the same: a brief period of becoming something more, followed by an interminable slog between worlds in the carcass of an ancient ship, accompanied by a legion of delusional maniacs. The hope of personally taking revenge for long-forgotten Ceti Alpha died after mere decades, but at last even the final embers of his desire to build anything good or righteous in this universe have begun to dwindle. Orbital shipyards never seem to last.
It is in the midst of another bout of maudlin introspection that Khan finds himself staring up at…
A mutant! Though he has the form and proportions of a baseline male homo sapiens, he stands nearly 400' tall, clad in dark robes cut from an impossible volume of black fabric. In one hand he holds a log from a massive fallen tree, and in the other he holds what appears to be a Land Raider.
Khan is a veteran of several campaigns spearheaded by daemon princes, so he has precisely the survival instincts he needs for this situation. He immediately prostrates himself before the skyscraper-sized psyker, or as close as he can manage while wearing power armor. The hip joints are too bulky to support the range of motion needed to touch the faceplate to the ground while kneeling, which means that proper deference to one's superiors means going all the way to prone. As an afterthought he removes the helmet, in case this one wants to directly observe him looking down to avoid eye contact.
See, this is why he wanted to start early. Now he has time to troubleshoot before the match starts.
"There's something wrong with it… not a total mobility failure, it was fully animated for a moment there before it fell on its face. Could be one of the tertiary enchantments misfiring, or maybe the core segment is fine but the armor is sophisticated enough qua technology to short out in this atmosphere. I'll try turning it off and back on again, that usually works."
Door closed, locked, unlocked, opened, closed, locked, unlocked, opened.
"All right, how about now?"
He remembers the last twenty seconds of his life, but feels like a book that's been rapidly re-shelved and removed to riffle through again in quick succession. He's standing up once more, helmet back on like he never took it off in the first place, trapped under the questioning gaze of the same titanic mutant as before. Clearly it wasn't interested in grovelling.
"Reactor online, sensors online, weapons online – all systems nominal. Thirteen deployments remaining before mandatory scheduled maintenance."
"Check that you have the full range of motion. You're looking for—" parts of your power armor that weren't assembled properly "—unexpectedly loose or tight joints, panels that won't move, clogged valves, missing parts, any extraneous material or broken pieces…"
What does he think "all systems nominal" means Khan will perform a full diagnostic scan while rotating his arms and legs in place without complaining, in case the mutant does… whatever that was, again. Nothing seems to be off, apart from the fact that at least one person here is very much the wrong size.
"Report: no moderate or severe problems detected, lord. Battery capacity degraded to 85% of maximum, coolants need to be recycled sooner than expected, and several armor plates have minor cosmetic damage."
Cassian has no idea why that works for both computers and magic, but it does work. He relocates Khan to the top of the cabinet and begins stuffing the shelves with all manner of similar plastic miniatures.
He's running Chaos Space Marines in this battle, and not just because he had a blast while kitbashing and painting them. Their scale model of Hogwarts only occupies a small fraction of the floor space, but its magical defenses will make it a strategic linchpin for both players: among other things it blocks teleportation, both inbound and outbound, and it suppresses firearms†. An army that has guns can fight almost everywhere on the battleground, but an army that doesn't need guns has an impregnable bastion to take cover in and sally from. Traditional siege tactics won't help anyone who gets permanently shoved out of Hogwarts during the initial stage of the fight, since they have neither the manpower to construct investments nor any need of external resources even if the castle were besieged. Furthermore, since Bronwen helped build it and knows exactly what it's capable of, the ideal army would also be able to hold Hogwarts against an opponent that naturally wants to occupy it as well.
Chaos fills this niche exceptionally, with such a variety of strong build options that no one-trick pony army list can hope to win within or without Hogwarts proper. He has three flavors of psyker disciplines at his disposal, powerful melee mixup attacks, really good offensive buffs, and a plethora of tools he didn't even pick up but can bluff with should the need arise. Plenty of Chaos divisions don't lose a jot of firepower when they holster their guns, something most Imperial and Xeno factions can't boast of. Space Marines over daemons was a closer call, but big guns and heavy armor were ultimately too valuable to leave out – ignoring Hogwarts entirely is not the optimal play here, but if Bronwen does it anyways he needs to be able to capitalize on the advantage and win, something he can't do if she runs a gunline army and dares him to close in with sword and sorcery.
†The exact nature of Hogwarts' actual magical defenses was changed slightly in the adaptation.
Despite the improbability of what Elric is seeing, this is no illusion. He's been magically summoned to join a platoon in some godsforsaken cul-de-sac of reality where the square-cube law doesn't apply. This is… not categorically impossible? Stranger things have probably happened to someone else, somewhere in the galaxy?