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The game-board represents a number of successive pictures, and is not very different in principle from moving-pictures. In fact, the suggestion has been made repeatedly for several years and is now in process of development that the various situations in tactical games might advantageously be photographed on films and afterward projected in rapid succession on a screen.
Of course, the game-board has the tremendous disadvantage that it presents only a picture, and does not show a real performance; but the more it is used, and the more fleets and game-boards work together, the more accurate the picture will become, and the more correctly we shall learn to read it.
Naturally the results obtained are not quite so convincing as those of actual war or battle; but they are more convincing than can be attained in any other way, as yet devised, especially as many of the operations of the game-board that turn out well in games are tried out afterward by the fleet in peace maneuvers.
When two officers, or two bodies of officers, find themselves on different sides of a certain question, they sometimes "put it on the game-board," to see which side is right. This statement applies most obviously to tactical games; but it applies to strategic games as well; for both are inventions designed to represent in miniature the movements of two opposing forces.
The province of the game-board is merely to try out on a very small scale, under proper conventions or agreements, things that could not be tried out otherwise, except at great expense, and very slowly; to afford a medium, half-way between actual trials with big ships and mere unaided reasoning, for arriving at correct conclusions.
For this purpose, only one good means of solution has thus far been devised the game-board. The game-board, naturally, tries out only the units that maneuver on the ocean; it does not try out the mechanism inside those units, because they can be tried out best by engineering methods.
In the engineering arts, the practice is gotten by observing and remembering actual machines; and the assistance is given by drawings of different kinds. In strategy, the practice is given by observing and remembering the movements of actual fleets; and the assistance by means of drawings of different kinds, and by war problems, and the game-board.
In some ways, however, the lessons of the game-board are better guides to future work than "practical" and actual happenings of single battles: for in single battles everything is possible, and some things happen that were highly improbable and were really the result of accident.
To decide what things these will probably be, resort must be had to the teachings of history, especially the most recent history, and to the teachings of the war problem, the chart maneuver, and the game-board.
Here the strange episode comes in of the rival magicians gambling; it recalls the old tale of Rampsinitus descending into Hades and playing at dice with Ceres, and the frequent presence of draught-boards in the tombs, shows how much the ka was supposed to relish such pleasures. The regular Egyptian game-board had three rows of ten squares, or thirty in all.
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