Board game “Fulda Gap”, 1977

In 1977, the US game manufacturer “Simulations Publications Inc.” (SPI) published the board game “Fulda Gap – The First Battle of the Next War”, a war game set in the present day. “Fulda Gap” refers to the relatively flat landscape around the town of Fulda in Hesse, which forms a corridor through the surrounding low mountain ranges. In NATO’s defense planning at the time, it was expected that any attack by the Warsaw Pact would focus on this corridor. Conventional forces could have quickly advanced into the territory of the FRG, divided West Germany in the middle and reached the NATO bases, especially in the south of Germany. In the event of an escalation of the East-West conflict, “the first battle of the next war” could have taken place in the “Fulda Gap”, as in the title of the game.

Two players can play through this scenario on a game board divided into hexagons with two dice and cardboard tiles (so-called counters), which represent military units. The game thus belongs to the conflict simulation genre. The board is roughly divided into forests and plains interspersed with river arms, and there are also civilian population centers such as Frankfurt am Main, Mainz and Worms on the map. SPI wanted to make the entire spectrum of the weapons arsenal of the NATO and Warsaw Pact states playable and based its data on manuals such as the “Taschenbuch der Landstreitkräfte”, which were only approximations due to the limited sources on the Warsaw Pact armies at the time.

In addition to conventional forces such as tanks and artillery, the rules recommend that players also use nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. To design the rules for nuclear war, SPI worked with publicly available analyses of the effects of nuclear weapons and consulted an expert on the effects of radioactive radiation. However, the long-term contamination from nuclear explosive devices and the risk of their use escalating into a global nuclear war were not addressed in the game. In the game, the level of contamination of a landscape by an NBC weapon merely means that the troops deployed there have to use more “movement points” to leave this area and are “attacked” anew each turn until the contamination is rolled away. The use of nuclear weapons was thus integrated into a controllable set of rules.

The game also attracted attention outside US living rooms: the US military is said to have used it for simulation games and the German peace movement, which was on the rise at the time, also took notice. When SPI presented “Fulda Gap” at the toy fair in Nuremberg in 1982, there were protests. Previously, the game had only been available on US bases. Critics saw “Fulda Gap” as a trivialization of the impending nuclear escalation at the time, which could not be “won” like a game, as the playful result of the “defense” would have meant the complete destruction of the region in reality. The game struck a nerve because, according to the critics, neither the rules of the game nor NATO’s actual defense plans took into account the effects of combat operations on the German population and stood in bizarre contrast to the game’s claim to be an “enjoyable experience”.