Have there ever been any war games in medieval or ancient times?

Board games, at least in an Indo-European context (I don’t have the training to speak to their use in other cultures, but given that one game I will be talking about is generally agreed to be the ancestor of games from chess to xianggi, I would encourage other flairs to chime in), appear to have been regularly presented as a form of entertainment for the warrior elite specifically, suggesting that a wide variety of games could be treated as an abstraction of strategy. Now, let us be clear – board games occupy a strange middle ground between strategic training and leisure activity, and the evidence remains somewhat ambiguous as to the extent to how far we can push the analogy to modern war games in the tradition of Kriegspiel, but I’ll here outline a few.

In a Norse context, there's hnefatafl, which is regularly described as a leisure activity for elite warriors and the gods. The 10th century poem Völuspá uses tafl pieces as a framing device for existence itself - the first thing the gods do after creating the world is play tafl, and thefirst thing the divine survivors of Ragnarok find are those same tafl pieces. The cosmological significance of this is, however, a bit tangential to the question. It's clearly associated with an elite context - in Ragnars saga, Hvitserkr and Sigurðr ormr-i-auga, sons of Ragnar loðbrók, areplaying tafl when they learn of their father's death. This stock scene repeats in several other sagas, and in fact is preserved into the far more reliably historical Sturlunga saga, where a chieftain is killed in a surprise attack because he can't stand up from the tafl-table quicklyenough to defend himself. Given that the elite, even into the 13th century, serve as the main warrior class of Norse society, this suggests that playing board games was seen as some sort of abstract training. This is confirmed in archaeological evidence - board game pieces are one of the traditional "warrior" grave goods - the famous burial at Bj. 581, which has causeda recent re-evaluation of some of the core assumptions of goods-dating because the inhabitant of the grave was biologically female, had tafl-pieces, and this is hardly anomalous. Interestingly, there is a trend by the 13th century to start rejecting it - Konungs skuggsjá, a mid-13th century encyclopedic text that’s designed to include all the knowledge it is proper for an elite person to know, says: “Þat er ok siðgæði at flýja tafl ok teningakast, portkvenna hús eða eiða úsæra, lygivitni eða aðra gjó eða saurlifi.” [it is also proper to avoid tafl and die-casting, brothels and any untruth, lying words, or other vain or lascivious living]. In this context, it appears that tafl was losing its context of an elite training deed, and was becoming a widespread leisure activity, presumably with a gambling element, and therefore was perceived as no longer associated so strongly with elite warriors as it was in the Viking Age.

Early medieval Ireland has a similar game (probably), known as Fidchell. This is, once again, a sort of royal or divine game – it therefore fills precisely the same social context as tafl. One of the clearest examples of it as a sort of strategy is in the text known as The Wooing of Etain – the god Midir challenged the king Eochu to fidchell games, including wagers over the winner, in order to be able to kidnap Eochu’s wife Etain, the reincarnated form of Midir’s wife Etain, who was turned into a fly some thousand year previously and swallowed. However, the Irish texts do not limit fidchell to be a elite male warrior game – queens like Maeve and Mebd play it as well, often besting their husbands. However, it still preserves a clear ancient reflex to be 1) very old and 2) part of being a well-rounded elite person, which in the social structures of medieval Ireland undoubtedly means being part of the warrior elite, and therefore can be reasonably interpreted as a test of strategic skill.

The last game I’ll talk about is caturanga, a board game attested from the Gupta Empire, with reflexes from potentially older Tamil fighting games like vallu (there are also games in the Mahabharata that are compared to battles, but these are dice games). This is, again, reaching the limits of my expertise, so I won’t postulate too strongly about its social role – however, the word appears to refer explicitly to military organizations attested in earlier texts. It features two opponents playing against each other, using different units: elephants, chariots, infantry, and cavalry. It is explicitly a model of Indian military structures seen by the same name in mythological texts (and in this case probably based on historical reality). Given the strong linguistic reflexes between the military structure of the caturanga and the board game of the same name, there’s not much reason to doubt it as some sort of war game, at least in its initial presentation. As always, it becomes an abstract pleasure in its own sake – the legendary introduction of the game to Persia in the time of Khosrau Nushirwarn features no hint that the sage who brings it to the Persian court was a warrior, but I do not count that as a disqualifying feature, any more than I’d disqualify a modern war game on the grounds that most convention-goers who play are not members of the military.

I hope that helps – there appears to be broad, independent recognition in any given culture almost as soon as we have writing from that culture that the strategy of games is reminiscent of the strategy of war, and that therefore gaming is an appropriate leisure and training activity for any given culture’s warrior elite. It certainly is not as developed or complex as Kriegspiel, but the latter was developed to fill a long-recognized social role.