I remember reading a short story, somewhen in the late 90s, about an alien invasion.
Earth is overwhelmed, all its ships are disintegrated, and when they are about to lose, they are told they are participating in a galactic wargame, kinda like a chess game. The twist at the end was that
None of their ships were destroyed, they were merely teleported somewhere until the end of the game.
Maybe this could have been written by Asimov, but I'm not sure. BTW, I read it in French.
"Honorable Opponent", a short story by Clifford D. Simak, first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1956, available at the Internet Archive. It appeared in French as "Honorable adversaire" here and here. Any of these covers or these look familiar? If you read it in French in the late 1990s, it was probably in the 1998 Simak collection Honorable adversaire et autres nouvelles.
In this passage the war is over and now we learn that, while we have been destroying their ships, they have merely been teleporting ours out of the action:
The general tried to speak, but the lump was there to stop him. He swallowed it and tried once again.
“We didn’t understand,” he said.
“You did not have a taker,” said the Fiver. “That why you fight so rough.”
“We couldn’t help it,” the general told him. “We didn’t know. We never fought this way before.”
“We give you takers,” said the Fiver. “Next time, we play it right. You do much better with the takers. It easier on us.”
No wonder, the general thought, they didn’t know about an armistice. No wonder they were confused about the negotiations and the prisoner exchange. Negotiations are not customarily needed to hand back the pieces one has won in a game.
