UNCLE DUKE
A wargames legend in a Fantasy Film: Part 1 of 3
A wargames legend from the USA.
Peter Adkinson offered to allow us a glimpse into a very special piece of wargaming history. Take it away Peter! Ed.
In early 2014 I received a call from Bruce “Uncle Duke” Seifried (1935-2018). I didn’t yet know Duke nearly as well as I would come to, but I certainly knew of him for his legendary “Extravaganzas”: extensive wargaming dioramas and painted miniatures, and for the important role he played in the development of wargaming throughout his life. He called to see if I was interested in buying any of his collections. Duke had reached out to me a couple of times over the past decade or so and I had always declined, so I think he was surprised when I said yes but he recovered quickly and the negotiations began.
My wife and I had recently toured in Paris where we saw the famous collection of
dioramas at the Musée des
Plans-reliefs. This collection is inspiring to any wargamer and I was no exception. I had recently finished film school and was in the earliest stages of trying to figure out how to apply my new knowledge. My creative partner, Steve Conard, and I were starting to conceptualize a storyline for an epic fantasy story, something on the scale of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings.
THE CALL
When Duke called I immediately had this idea that one of our story lines could be based around a military protagonist. Of course for an epic fantasy story there has to be a big war. Suddenly, I imagined Duke’s extravaganzas as more than just cool collectibles from the early days of our hobby, but as potential movie props.
Another event that influenced my creativity in these days was Jon Peterson’s book, Playing at the World, which traced the history of the multitude of
factors that led to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. As any true fan of tabletop gaming knows, D&D grew out of wargaming, and the history of wargaming (at least up to the 1970’s) is covered in great detail. In reading this book I learned about Georg Leopold von Reiswitz (1760-1828) who in 1811 presented Taktisches Kriegs-spiel to the royal family of Prussia, where it was enthusiastically received. Using damp sand to sculpt three-dimensional topographical elements, for the first time in history toy soldiers could be maneuvered freely across a custom battlefield. Using rulers to measure distances, this was a fundamental break from the chess tradition of movement on a square grid.
I was sold by Peterson’s proposal that Reiswitz deserves credit as the founding father of wargaming. I’d always heard this legend that wargaming was invented by the Prussians and contributed to the victories of Frederick the Great, but I’d never been exposed to the details. Now that I knew about this Reiswitz guy I was eager to create a character that was an homage to his efforts.
CHARACTER CREATION
So I created a character in my Chaldea fantasy story called Reiswitz Georg von Gustavus. In our Chaldea story, Reiswitz invented wargaming. Like our real-world Reiswitz, he extrapolated from a chess-like board game, which we call Einvigi.
I told Duke of my idea and he was very excited. I ended up buying three of his collections: Azteca, Babylon I, and Ramses II. I also very much wanted a Roman legion; Duke didn’t have one but he said he’d be happy to put one together and paint it for me, so we added that to the deal. The only quest at that point was how to transport them from his home in Janesville, Wisconsin in middle-us to me in Seattle, in the northwest corner of the US: Duke was worried they wouldn’t hold up well to shipping.
A plan was hatched to wait for good weather in the summer and drive them in a van. So I rented a van for a one-way trip and recruited a gamer from the area to drive the van with the mini’s midway, to Missoula, Montana. And my wife and I flew to Missoula and drove the van to Seattle. This gave me a convenient excuse to show my wife the various small towns in northern Idaho and eastern Washington where I had grown up.
By the summer of 2014, I had my Uncle Duke collections, including my Roman “Petronis” legion, safe in my film studio in West Seattle. ■
Look for Part 2 of this editorial in the next issue and learn how Uncle Duke became “the old toy maker” of Chaldea.