The war of the miniature worlds

"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."

Before we cancel H G Wells for being an irredeemable misogynist, we should probably remember that when he wrote Little Wars over a century ago, women in the West were generally left uneducated. Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) saw her brothers go off to school and university while she had to make do with a few basic lessons at home. Most girls therefore never had the opportunity to get interested in anything beyond the home or to develop their minds in interesting ways. It's very different today, thankfully. (In fact, among the people we personally play games with, the one who wins most often is a woman.)

H G Wells did not invent modern wargames; the credit for that usually goes to Johann Hellwig. And another famous author, Robert Louis Stevenson, arguably invented wargaming with miniatures in the 1880s but he never published his rules. It was after dinner with yet another well-known author, Jerome K Jerome of Three Men in a Boat fame, that Wells had the idea of designing and publishing his own set of rules. He concluded his wargaming book by saying:

"This world is for ample living; we want security and freedom; all of us in every country, except a few dull-witted, energetic bores, want to see the manhood of the world at something better than apeing the little lead toys our children buy in boxes. We want fine things made for mankind—splendid cities, open ways, more knowledge and power, and more and more and more—and so I offer my game, for a particular as well as a general end; and 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."

Wells is not the only famous name in the world of sci-fi and fantasy to get bitten by the gaming hobby bug. Peter Cushing (above) was another. What would they have made of A Thunder of Dragons, we wonder.