Interesting.
Reminds me of something my exhusband used to do…. They called it the ‘pin game’. A bunch of guys were playing it together. We would go over to the GM’s house, he would take my then husband down to the basement where he kept an enormous table with a map laid out and all these little metal men and buildings and such. And they would talk about their moves and my exhusband would take his colored pins and move them on the maps where he wanted his troops to go and over the week the guy running it would talk to each of the other players and the next week, when they each went back, the big table would show the troop movement and what resulted.