Little Wars

[MortiS-the-Lost]

H.G. Wells's - “Little Wars” or to give it's full title “Little Wars (A Game for Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books)”  has long been considered to be first widely available recreational Wargaming rulebook and I recently discovered it's available for you to read online.

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/ltwrs11.txt

Unfortunately it's just a .TXT file (rather than PDF) so the illustrations and photographs are missing, but it's certainly worth a read if you have at least a passing interest in the (pre)history of our hobby.



The book is written in a rather rambling style and in places is hilariously dated and some what rampantly sexist – Wells refers to women as (among other things) “trampling skirt-swishers” and describes how lady visitors  “regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.” he even at one point refers to a female friend of his as  “a daring ornament of her sex” also check out the book's subtitle. More interestingly the first chapter of the book explains how rules were developed during play and later chapters explain the actual mechanics of the game - which you can still find echoes of in the games we play today: Line of sight, varied movement rates, close combat, victory points, war machine crews and blind setup are all in there. Of course there are also things in Little Wars we don't see today for instance, very few players these days would be happy about firing a spring-loaded cannon at their finely painted miniatures (morons and players of Robogear being the exception) and I'm not aware of any one using various lengths of string to measure movement these days


^  H.G Wells moves his cavalry unit while his friends patently wait for Codex Spacemarines to be released  

Also there is what is probably the earliest example of a Battle-Report / AAR in which Wells talks about how he lead 'The Blue Army' to victory at 'THE BATTLE OF HOOK'S FARM'. (although the fact the photographs of the battle are missing in the online version kinda ruins it)
In the final chapter Wells goes on to suggest things that would later become known to us as Blast Templates, Movement Trays and Difficult terrain among other things.

[Delves]

Interesting, I stumbled upon this book and the TXT file a few months ago and was certainly entertained by it!  Great summary here, Little Wars is a gem!

[Marchomer]

Very interesting finding! I will read it when I will be in the mood! I'm curious to explore the foundations of the wargames!

MortiS-the-Lost wrote

 H.G Wells moves his cavalry unit while his friends patently wait for Codex Spacemarines to be released  

LOL

[Billiam Babble]

A real gem of a find!

I kept looking at this thread and kept going into denial about it. Too strange!  And yet ...

 I used read quite a bit of Wells, but I hadn't realised that this was actually available.  One wonders if these games inspired the tactical geographic movements of the invasion of the South East in War of the Worlds - maybe he actually played with tripods!  Okay, silly speculation aside.

MortiS-the-Lost wrote

 Wells refers to women as (among other things) “trampling skirt-swishers” and describes how lady visitors  “regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.”

Fantastic.
*grumbles about own partner and female friends ....*

^  H.G Wells moves his cavalry unit while his friends patently wait for Codex Spacemarines to be released  

LOL  

[MortiS-the-Lost]

Billiam Babble wrote

One wonders if these games inspired the tactical geographic movements of the invasion of the South East in War of the Worlds - maybe he actually played with tripods!  

maybe ... but the chances are about a million to one

[Billiam Babble]

That's it! I'm deleting my account ...!

[Billiam Babble]

I found this on the Arima website today.  A sort of illustrated companion to Little Wars (?)

http://arima.it/giochi/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=744

[MortiS-the-Lost]

Hmm interesting, I'd seen the title of the book before but haven't been able to get hold of a copy to read yet

[uncle phil]

Illustrated copy

http://www.scribd.com/doc/33483097/Little-Wars-by-H-G-Wells

[Sjeng]

My god, I thought this was a joke. Wellsian Warhammer. Who would have thought it? Amazing.

[jaggedjaw]

I actually have a copy of this book (tried to play it once, but couldn't find anyone who wanted to). Still, it's fun to see whats changed in war-gaming over the years (i.e. no unit profiles, the ability for individual models to surrender, prisoners, supply chains, string, etc.)