Standard Game · Wargame · Version 1.0.0

Little Wars

H. G. Wells published Little Wars in 1913 and with it the first rules anyone had written for playing at war with toy soldiers. This is that game in a browser, with his rules kept as he wrote them and measured in inches: an infantry-man moves a foot and a cavalry-man two, a gun wants four men within six inches or it will neither move nor fire, and guns are dealt with before a single man is touched.

What Wells does not give a table for is what a shot does — he says only that men knocked over by a shot are dead, and as many are dead as it knocks over or causes to fall. So the shot is not diced for. A wooden bolt leaves the muzzle, drops, bounces, rolls, glances off a wall and ploughs through a file of infantry, and whatever it lays down is what dies. There is no cover rule because none is needed: a wall stops the bolt.

Six games: The Battle of Hook's Farm, The Blow at the Rear, The Defensive Game, The Cannonade of Sandgate, The Choosing Game, Kriegspiel (Appendix). A machine general in three tempers, each fitted by playing them against one another rather than by guessing. Free measurement on a floor drawn to scale, with pan and zoom, a rule along the edge in feet, and a range card on every gun showing its measured chance at each range.