Just to be clear, I'm asking about the hobby of tabletop war gaming with miniatures, not war games as in the training exercises that modern militaries engage.
I have two areas of interest that I'm hoping someone can shed light on.
Primarily I would like to know if there is evidence for any war games existing prior to modern times. It occurred to me (while buying some miniatures to use playing Crossfire) that games may have existed historically that are similar to the tabletop wargaming we have today. It would, after all, just require a set of rules and some miniatures or tokens. However, I have not had luck finding any indication that such games existed. Is there any evidence for historical war gaming? If so, then what do we know about those games and how they were played?
Second, were Go and Chess considered to be representative of military conflict?
I have read claims that the games of Chess and Go were both created to reflect warfare and that they were even considered useful teaching aids for military commanders. I'm not sure if there is good evidence for either of those points though. And, I'm especially skeptical of of the idea that military officers could apply much of that gaming experience to actual combat considering how abstract both games are. So, if there is no evidence of less stylized games, then is there any good evidence for Chess and Go being treated as combat simulations or useful training aids?
According to Of Dice and Men by David Ewalt, one of the first games we'd recognize as a wargame was "Königsspiel" (lit. "King's Game"), created by Christoph Weickhmann in 1664. It was essentially a modification of chess with a larger board and (many) more pieces--up to 30 including "halberdiers", "marshals," and "courtiers", and supporting up to eight simultaneous players.
A century later, in 1780, Johann Hellwig build an expanded Königsspiel-like game with a board consisting of over 1600 squares, color coded for terrain, and hundreds of pieces representing battalions and regiments of infantry, horse, and artillery.
And in 1812, Georg Leopold von Reiswitz published his own version of Hellwig's game titled "Tactical Wargame, or instructions for a mechanical device to show realistic tactical maneuvers." Later shortened to "Kriegspiel" (lit. "war game"), it took off, and by the 1860's a refined version (developed by von Reiswitz's son and including such revolutions as using dice to introduce uncertainty and luck) was used as a standard training exercise for officers in the Prussian army.
Getting into the 20th century, Kriegspiel was still played (heck, some folks still play it today). In 1913, a century after the first publication of Kriegspiel, H. G. Wells (author of The War of the Worlds and the Island of Dr. Moreau, et al) published his own wargame, Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys Games and Books, which vastly simplified Kriegspiel's rules.
As for your question regarding the nature of chess and go as wargames, I'm afraid I can't answer without excessive speculation. However, it does seem that Weickhmanna and Hellwig's wargames were born out of a desire to turn chess into something more "realistic" and a less-abstract simulation of actual military tactics.