Little Wars

Overview

In 1913 H. G. Wells — already famous for The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds — published a slim, cheerful, illustrated book of rules for fighting battles with toy soldiers on the floor. Little Wars is part game manual, part memoir of afternoons on the carpet, part pacifist sermon. It is also one of the founding documents of recreational wargaming: the moment the Prussian officers' Kriegsspiel came home to the nursery and became a hobby.

It sits in this museum because the hobby it helped create — grown men and boys moving painted figures across model terrain by agreed rules — is the soil in which Chainmail, Blackmoor and Dungeons & Dragons took root half a century later.

Origins

Wells had already written Floor Games (1911), a book about the imaginary cities and islands he built on the floor with his two young sons using bricks, boards, toy trains and soldiers. Little Wars was the promised sequel devoted to battle.

He tells the origin story himself. The game "became possible," he writes, with the invention of the spring breechloader toy gun, "capable of hitting a toy soldier nine times out of ten at a distance of nine yards." At a lunch in Sandgate, a friend he identifies only as "J. K. J." — generally taken to be the humorist Jerome K. Jerome — picked up one of these guns, knocked over a soldier and issued challenges. Someone asked what would happen if the men could be moved, and the idea germinated. With another friend Wells began laying out "a Country" of books and obstacles on the floor and working out, by trial and argument, rules that would make the result feel like a real engagement. The book was published in London by Frank Palmer in 1913.

How it plays

Little Wars is a two-player (or two-team) miniatures wargame with no referee and no dice. The battlefield is whatever is to hand: a floor or garden, with wooden blocks, books and toy trees as hills, houses and woods. Each side fields hollow-cast lead soldiers of the kind made by W. Britain — infantry, cavalry and artillery.

Players alternate moves, and every move is timed; Wells suggests a minute for moving thirty men and recommends a timekeeper calling out the last two minutes, the last minute and the last thirty seconds. Movement is measured with lengths of string: an infantryman may move up to one foot, a cavalryman up to two. Artillery follows the rule of "guns first," and a gun is only in action if at least four of its own men stand within six inches of it. When a gun fires, it really fires — the toy four-point-seven gun launches a wooden cylinder, and any soldier it knocks over is dead. Hand-to-hand combat is resolved by simple arithmetic: equal forces in contact annihilate each other, while a force double its enemy's size takes the survivors prisoner.

That is the key difference from a board game such as chess. There is no grid and no fixed set of legal moves: the rules translate physical actions on open terrain into military results. It is the direct ancestor of the tape measures and model hills of miniatures wargaming, and of the "inch" movement scale that Dungeons & Dragons inherited from Chainmail.

Reception & impact

The book's charm is its voice. Wells describes a battle in the bombastic tone of a general's memoir, and he closes with a turn that has made the book quotable ever since. Having played, he says, you realize "just what a blundering thing Great War must be." Then: "Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion." He wrote those words the year before the First World War began.

An appendix, "Little Wars and Kriegspiel," shows Wells knew exactly where his game came from: it sketches a larger, umpired variant with supply, engineers and railways, in the spirit of the Prussian original.

Legacy

Little Wars became a touchstone for the British and American miniatures hobby that grew after the Second World War, and it has rarely been out of print: Da Capo Press reissued it in 1977, and it is freely available from Project Gutenberg. The wargamers of the 1960s — among them Gary Gygax, who read Wells as he immersed himself in the hobby — inherited its assumptions: that grown adults could play with toy soldiers without embarrassment, and that a good rulebook could make a tabletop into a world. Gygax later contributed a foreword to a 2004 edition.

The chain from here runs through the wargaming clubs of the Miniatures & Board Wargames boom to Chainmail, whose medieval rules added knights and, in a fantasy supplement, dragons and wizards — and from there into the dungeon.