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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

> Second, the computer will allow us to have (at long last) true limited intelligence wargames. Many boardgamers have difficulty appreciating the importance of this capability. Indeed, the full intelligence required by boardgames is so taken for granted that many boardgamers resent the limited intelligence features of computer wargamers, feeling that they are being cheated out of their birthright.

Good to see things never change, gamers argued against change back then as well! Today fog of war and not knowing exactly what the enemy is doing is taken for granted, and full intelligence games are the exception, so he really nailed that prediction!

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Fog of war type elements were possible back then, they just required a third party to act as umpire and determine what each party can see/know, and probably duplicate (or triplicate) copies of the game.

Diplomacy was created in 1954, and there the limitations are not really fog of war (you can see all players tokens) but the moves are written down and executed "simultaneous" and in verbatim (so moving an army from Constantinople to Smyrna will fail if all you have in Constantinople is a fleet). Since it is hard or impossible to complete your goals without help from others, you negotiate their moves as well as yours and try to maneuver your troops into more favorable positions.

And if all fails, the only thing you can do is sit idly by and watch how all your moves turns to dust as your former allies turn against you.

There are also simpler implementations like Stratego (1946), where both players know where all the pieces are but not which pieces are which.

The classic fog of war game is surely Battleship[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)

Battleship lacks most other elements that make a good war game interesting.

Even big, serious war games like Advanced Squad Leader had some limited fog of war mechanics. Concealed units could get a '?' counter on top of them, and if you start with concealed units, you often got a whole pile of '?' counters to spread around, and your opponent would have no idea which had real counters underneath and which had just more '?' counters underneath.

It's much more limited than what computers make possible of course, but it worked well enough.

There were also games that didn't need a referee but allowed fog of war by having the value of the pieces hidden to the opponent. The classic example is the children's game Stratego, but more complicated wargames even added dummy counters that represented no units but just false sightings and the like.

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