Little Wars is a book about wargaming, written in 1913 by HG Wells. This is my review of it, and it does contain spoilers (for a 100+ year old non-fiction rulebook for wargames.)
Many tabletop gamers get into a habit of defending their hobby because it's not uncommon for an onlooker to demand an explanation for it. Isn't gaming just a waste of time? Shouldn't it be left to children? You do know a game isn't real life? Tabletop wargamers have the luxury of leaning on history. The respected author HG Wells was a wargamer, he even wrote a book called Little Wars about the game. Kriegsspiel was invented in 1812 by the Prussians as a method of studying battle strategies. This is a scholarly pursuit.
Having used this defense myself, I figured I needed to actually read Little Wars to find out what a wargame was in the mind of a man of 1913. To my great surprise, the wargame HG Wells developed back in 1913 is largely the same as the wargames we're playing in the 2020s. You could take chapter 3 ("The Rules") out of the book and tell somebody it was an early edition of Warhammer 40,000 and they'd believe you. With just a few exceptions, this book reads like a modern series of blog posts you might stumble across on RPG Planet today. It's only 6 chapters, so I may as well review each one in turn.
Chapters 1 and 2
A preamble to the rules portion of the book, chapters 1 and 2 is HG Wells musing about the quirks of playing with tin soldiers as an adult. He starts by acknowledging that humans have played with some form of toy soldiers for a long time, but that modern (1913) technology has nearly perfected the art form. Small tin soldiers were available for purchase in local shops, but the really exciting advancement was that there were now little toy artillery units capable of propelling a miniature cannonball (or something, it's not clear to me what the projectile was) into tin soldiers to knock them over.
HG Wells found this technological novelty so enjoyable that he regularly set up toy soldiers in his lawn so he and his friends could knock them over with their toy artillery batteries. Eventually, they started incorporating blocks of wood to represent houses in a town, which gave tin soldiers a chance to take cover, and trimmings of shrubbery to represent forests. The next logical progression was that tin soldiers wouldn't just stand around waiting to be knocked over. Surely they would advance on the gun firing at them to take it over. So he invented rules for movement (1 foot for infantry, 2 feet for cavalry), and the artillery functionally became "capture the flag" objectives.
It's a complete documentation of HG Wells' game design progress, and it's a fascinating read. It starts with the problem statement that without structure, playing with tin soldiers and toy guns becomes chaotic or meandering, and ends with a full set of rules for movement, ranged combat, and melee.
Chapter 3: The rules
Having documented his process, HG Wells presents his rules for wargaming in chapter 3. Aside from the fact that he played on enormous surfaces (his garden) and that ranged combat was decided by actually firing projectiles ate enemy models rather than by rolling dice, there's not much here that a modern wargamer wouldn't recognise. Here are the rules in summary (I use some modern terminology for brevity):
Setup
- One player creates the battlefield (he calls it "the country") with wood blocks for houses and twigs for trees, and the opposing player chooses a deployment zone.
- Toss a coin to determine initiative.
- If you're playing indoors, set up a curtain across the middle of the battlefield so the players can't see the opposing army. Deploy your troops. If you're playing outdoors, take turns deploying one unit at a time.
Movement phase
Each turn lasts up to 5 minutes and is strictly timed. On your turn:
- Starting on Turn 2, you may fire an active gun at your opponent's troops. A gun is in action only when there are at least 4 allied soldiers within 6 inches of it. A gun makes 4 attacks. You may not fire on Turn 1.
- Move a unit or a gun that has not been fired this turn. A gun moves along with the soldiers using it. Infantry move 1 foot and cavalry move 2 feet.
- If a shot touches a soldier (even just rolling to his feet), the soldier is dead and is removed from the battlefield. A shot can never kill more than 1 soldier (the first one it touches.)
Melee
When a soldier ends a move in contact with an enemy soldier, those soldiers are in melee. If the number of soldiers in melee are equal on both sides, then all soldiers are killed.
If the soldier count of melee units are unequal, then the result of combat must be calculated. Calculations are not timed. First, determine the delta between the inferior and superior forces. For example, a unit of 3 soldiers in melee against 5 soldiers has a delta of 2.
- If there are at least half of an inferior force's number of allied soldiers within 1 move, then each soldier of the inferior force kills a soldier of the superior force, and then is killed. The player that moved into melee chooses which soldiers (for both players) are killed.
- If the inferior force has no allies within 1 move, then the superior force takes {delta} prisoners. The remaining inferior force kills 1 soldier each, and is also killed.
Prisoners are not dead, and are not removed from the battlefield. You can use one of your soldiers to escort prisoners to the rear, or to a base camp, or whatever. A single soldier can escort up to 7 prisoners, but must remain within 6 inches until the prisoners are imprisoned.
Prisoners can be liberated by the death of any escort (from enemy fire, for example.) A prisoner is disarmed and cannot fight (even in melee) until they return to the back line of their own army. An inferior force can raise a white flag at any time to surrender and become prisoners.
Capturing a gun
An artillery unit is captured when 4 of your soldiers (and no opposing soldiers) are within 6 inches of its rear arc.
End game
Those are the rules. HG Wells discusses what kinds of game you might play, including a mission to wipe out the enemy entirely, or just to capture all opposing artillery, or to reach a specific point on the battlefield, and so on. He acknowledges that the length of a game is strongly influenced by what kind of mission you choose, and how long you allow each turn to last.
I wouldn't shoot projectiles at my miniatures for several reasons, but I everything else about the game is serviceable. I'm especially intrigued by the melee rules. I have always felt that melee ought to be especially deadly, and I don't think it gets deadlier than in this system.
I also appreciate the idea of prisoners, although I can imagine getting very distracted from the battle by trying to free captive soldiers.
Chapter 4: Battle at Hook's Farm
This is a battle report, just like the ones you read online or in White Dwarf or Wargames Illustrated. HG Wells describes, with charming and sincere enthusiasm, a battle between 2 armies, with commentary about strategies and mistakes. Better yet, he does it while roleplaying a the general of the his army, demonstrating that as early as 1913 that wargaming was fostering the wildest imaginings of players.
What's even better is that HG Wells includes photographs of his game setup. This is 1913, so cameras hadn't even been around for that long, but here are photographs (by his wife, Amy Catherine Wells) of grown men playing with toy soldiers from 100+ years ago. His indoor setup doesn't look too different from my own gaming table, and as with the rest of the book it's a little surprising to see how little the game has changed.
Chapter 5 and 6
The final chapters of the book are speculative. They include some additional ideas for ways you could modify the game. HG Wells freely admits that most of the ideas are untested.
He also provides some ideas for how military schools might improve the training exercises of Kriegsspiel. This is also speculative and it's based on correspondence with military officers he had while the previous chapters were being published as magazine articles. Ideas include firing heavy brass bolts from artillery as a way to represent shells, which don't bounce or ricochet like the cannonballs (or whatever) HG Wells uses in his home games.
There's an awareness of how simulated reality gets represented by game mechanics. For instance, shell fire kills soldiers within a radius of where the projectile lands rather than just killing a single soldier.
Little wars are better than big wars
The most endearing thing about Little Wars isn't the fact that HG Wells, like many of us today, felt the need to explain to his peers why he likes to play with toy soldiers. It's not that the rules are uncannily familiar even if you've never read them before. It's not even the photographs that let you see, with your own eyes, grown men crouching or lying on the ground to aim their tiny artillery.
The real charm of Little Wars is the challenge, at the end of chapter 5, that HG Wells gives us. He notes that little war is a far superior solution for conflict than a real war, and makes this proposition:
This world is for ample living; we want security and freedom [...] Let us put this prancing monarch and that silly scare-monger, and these excitable "patriots," and those adventurers, and all the practitioners of Welt Politik, into one vast Temple of War, with cork carpets everywhere, and plenty of little trees and little houses to knock down, and cities and fortresses, and unlimited soldiers—tons, cellars-full—and let them lead their own lives there away from us.
If you're a wargamer or roleplayer, or just a modern tabletop gamer, this is a book well worth reading. It's out of copyright now, so it's available for free from gutenberg.org and as an audio book from Librivox.
