- Wells, H. G.
Little Wars.
Springfield, VA: Skirmisher, [1913] 2004.
ISBN 0-9722511-5-4.
-
I have been looking for a copy of this book for more than
twenty-five years. In this 1913 classic, H. G. Wells
essentially single-handedly invented the modern pastime of
miniature wargaming, providing a (tin soldier) battle-tested
set of rules which makes for exciting, well-balanced, and
unpredictable games which can be played by two or more people
in an afternoon and part of an evening. Interestingly, he
avoids much of the baggage that burdens contemporary
games such as icosahedral dice and indirect fire
calculations, and strictly minimises the rôle of chance,
using nothing fancier than a coin toss, and that only in
rare circumstances.
The original edition couldn't have appeared at a less auspicious time:
published just a year before the outbreak of the horrific Great War (a
term Wells uses, prophetically, to speak of actual military conflict
in this book). The work is, of course, long out of copyright and text
editions are available on the Internet, including
this one at
Project Gutenberg, but they are unsatisfying because the text
makes frequent reference to the nineteen photographs by Wells's second
wife, Amy Catherine Wells, which are not included in the on-line
editions but reproduced in this volume. Even if you aren't interested
in the details, just seeing grown men in suits scrunching down on the
ground playing with toy soldiers is worth the price of admission. The
original edition included almost 150 delightful humorous line
drawings by J. R. Sinclair; sadly, only about half are reproduced
here, but that's better than none at all. This edition includes a
new foreword by Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.
Radical feminists of the dour and scornful persuasion should be
sure to take their medication before reading the subtitle
or the last paragraph on page 6 (lines 162–166 of the
Gutenberg edition).
September 2006 