Before long, the meetings were crowded and increasingly contentious, as the old problem of bickering over rules reared its head. A solution was found in the form of an eighty-year-old army training manual, Strategos: A Series of American Games of War, published in 1880 by Charles A. L. Totten, a lieutenant in the Fourth United States Artillery. Dave Wesely, an undergraduate physics student at Saint Paul’s Hamline University, unearthed the book in the University of Minnesota library and rediscovered the centuries-old idea of an all-powerful referee. It quickly became standard practice.
