Pratt.

This is coolbert:

From the archives [from almost forty years ago] of the magazine Sports Illustrated a description, sentimental like, of the Pratt "Naval War Game"

"The World's Most Complicated Game"

"Fletcher Pratt, a historian and naval expert, invented a complex pastime that used ballroom floors and up to 120 players"

A "pastime" modeling naval warfare, a simulation, a wargame that was spot-on with regard to validity and accuracy.

"the rules for a mammoth contest that required up to 60 people on a side, a large ballroom to play in and vast fleets of accurately scaled ships, and the Naval War College started sending down experts to take lessons."

The U.S. Naval War College and also evidently the British Admiralty too. Recall that the task force sent to the south Atlantic in hunt of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee was found to be more than adequate for the task based upon a Pratt simulation.

"Most Complicated" in large measure to equations and tables, just one equation of which calculated the "fighting power" of each combatant vessel:

"There was a vast formula for calculating the fighting power of each ship: (Gc� x GN + Gc'� x Gn' + 10TT + 10A� + 10A'� + 10A" + 25Ap + M) Sf; + T"

Those miniatures scale models of various sizes NOT again merely a cosmetic or be thought of as toys. An integral prart of the competition,m ranging and accuracy of gunnery based upon the ability of the competito4rs to measure by "eyeball" the distance in inches to a target:

"Shooting [gunnery and the associated ranging] was the key to the operation, and it gave Pratt and his assistant inventors the most trouble. They tried all sorts of methods: aiming flashlights, firing toy cannon at each other, even retiring to another room and whanging away with air pistols at battleship pictures pasted on the wall. Finally they contrived a paper arrow with a metal-headed pushpin at each end. When you were a ship captain and it was time to shoot, you sprawled on the floor, lined up the pins on an enemy ship, tried to guess how many inches away the enemy ship was and wrote that estimated range on a handy piece of paper."

The "most complicated game" now a thing of the past, passe', except for those rare and solitary aficionados that read the War Times Journal - - downloading charts, tables, rules, dice throw programs, battling it out on the high seas, warships mano-a-mano, if now only on the kitchen table!

"There are still a few groups playing today, chiefly in England, but nothing survives on the scale of those big, post-midnight clashes of mighty fleets in a big ballroom"

Forty years into the future, the folks at War Times Journal might dispute that?

coolbert.