Siege of Bodenburg is a wargame

Miniature wargaming

Miniature wargaming is a form of wargaming that incorporates miniature figures, miniature armor and modeled terrain as the main components of play...

 developed by Henry Bodenstedt. It is one of the earliest sets of rules for conducting battles with medieval miniatures, and it influenced Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax

Ernest Gary Gygax was an American writer and game designer best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson. Gygax is generally acknowledged as the father of role-playing games....

, author of Chainmail

Chainmail (game)

Chainmail is a medieval miniatures wargame created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. Gygax developed the game with fellow Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association member Perren, a hobby-shop owner with whom he had become friendly, and the game was first published in 1971...

and later Dungeons and Dragons.

The game is played on a tabletop using 40mm medieval Elastolin

Elastolin

Elastolin is a trademark used by the German company O&M Hausser for the toy soldiers and other types of figures it manufactured from composite material and later from plastic....

 miniatures manufactured by O&M Hausser. Bodenstedt owned a hobby shop in New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, and he gave away copies of the rules for free to promote the sale of the miniatures. In 1967 the game was published by Strategy & Tactics

Strategy & Tactics

Strategy & Tactics is a wargaming magazine now published by Decision Games, notable for publishing a complete new wargame in each issue...

magazine in five parts, starting with issue #6. The name of the game is presumably a play on Bodenstedt's own name, though there was an actual medieval castle called Bodenburg

Bodenburg

Bodenburg is a village in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is located about 20km south of Hildesheim, and about 5km from Bad Salzdetfurth. The community has a population of 2,000.-Overview:...

 south of Hildesheim

Hildesheim

Hildesheim is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is located in the district of Hildesheim, about 30 km southeast of Hanover on the banks of the Innerste river, which is a small tributary of the Leine river...

.

Playing the Game

The game requires a 6' by 6' tabletop divided into a grid of 4" by 4" squares. Battle is resolved using a combat results table

Combat results table

A Combat results table or a CRT is used in wargaming to determine the outcome of a clash between individual units within a larger battle....

 similar to those used by board wargames such as Tactics II. One player is the defender, and in addition to the castle he has at his disposal 30 footmen, 15 archers, 12 mounted knights, and a supply wagon. The attacker's forces include 40 footmen, 14 archers, 24 mounted Huns

Huns

The Huns were a group of nomadic people who, appearing from east of the Volga River, migrated into Europe c. AD 370 and established the vast Hunnic Empire there. Since de Guignes linked them with the Xiongnu, who had been northern neighbours of China 300 years prior to the emergence of the Huns,...

, 3 catapults, 4 movable parapets, 4 scaling ladders, and a siege tower. The attacker wins if he eliminates all of the defender's knights or captures the castle within 15 turns. Otherwise the defender wins.

The Hausser Castle

Bodenstedt designed the battlefield to be used with a plastic castle manufactured by Hausser. This castle, incidentally, appears in the photographs of miniature battles in Chainmail

Chainmail (game)

Chainmail is a medieval miniatures wargame created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. Gygax developed the game with fellow Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association member Perren, a hobby-shop owner with whom he had become friendly, and the game was first published in 1971...

. Moreover, the ruined moathouse in The Village of Hommlet has the same floorplan.