The First Shot

Jerome K. Jerome picked up a toy cannon after dinner at Sandgate and fired it at a row of lead soldiers. Wells called this “the Cannonade of Sandgate” and “a shot that still echoes round the world.” Jerome never played again. Wells never stopped — not until a real war made toy warfare obscene.

Between that dinner-party shot and the guns of August 1914, Herbert George Wells produced exactly two game-design works: Floor Games (1911), a freeform guide to imaginative play with toy soldiers and wooden bricks, and Little Wars (1913), the first miniature wargame rulebook commercially published for civilian recreation. Two books. Six years of active play. Then silence — a deliberate, principled abandonment that lasted the remaining thirty-two years of his life.

The output is tiny. The shadow is enormous. Donald Featherstone carried Little Wars in his kitbag throughout World War II. Gary Gygax played the original rules with Jeff Perren in the late 1960s and explicitly traced Dungeons & Dragons’ area-of-effect spells to Wells’ spring-loaded cannon burst radius. Jon Peterson identified Little Wars as the first time wargaming rules were marketed to the general public as leisure rather than military training. Every miniature wargame published since — every one — exists in the space Wells opened.

What He Actually Invented

The hagiography is generous. The evidence requires precision.

Wells did not invent recreational wargaming. Johann Hellwig designed a civilian-oriented wargame in 1780. The University Kriegspiel Club at Oxford operated from 1873. Robert Louis Stevenson played elaborate wargames with measured movement and dice in 1881–82 but never published his rules. Prussian Kriegsspiel (1812/1824) used dice, probability tables, and topographic maps for military training. Wells inherited a scattered tradition. What he created was the first mass-market, commercially published, complete rulebook for recreational miniature wargaming — a distinction of accessibility and reach, not of absolute priority.

His most original mechanical contribution was physical projectile combat resolution: spring-loaded Britains 4.7-inch naval gun toys firing wooden cylinders to physically knock over enemy soldiers. No prior published game system had codified physical projectile firing as a formal combat mechanic. The Masterman brothers — Charles F.G. Masterman (Liberal politician) and Captain Walter Sidney Masterman (Boer War veteran) — helped balance the mechanic by requiring four-man gun crews within six inches and preventing guns from simultaneously moving and firing. Wells reported ninety percent accuracy at up to nine yards by experienced gunners.

Real-time turn pressure was equally novel. Each player received a timed turn calculated by force size — approximately one minute per thirty men and one minute per gun. A timekeeper called warnings at two minutes, one minute, thirty seconds, and “Time!” This created what Wells described and modern designers recognize as friction: “just that eventfulness one would expect in the hurry and passion of real fighting” — careless exposures, hasty shooting, units getting left behind. No prior wargame imposed real-time pressure on players as a friction simulation.

Three-dimensional terrain modeling with scale buildings, trees (shrub branches), hills (books), and chalked rivers was mostly original. A points-based scoring system — infantry worth one point, cavalry 1.5, guns ten, prisoners 0.5 — enabled campaign play and appears novel for recreational wargames. Hidden deployment using blinds (boxes moved on the battlefield that might contain full forces or token units, enabling feints) also appears original for toy soldier games.

Several mechanics often attributed to Wells were inherited. Alternating turns date to chess and all Kriegsspiel variants. Measured movement with rulers was used by Stevenson in 1881–82. Figure removal as a casualty concept echoes chess piece capture. What Wells uniquely combined was the physical immediacy of children’s play with the structural rigor of military simulation, packaged into a purchasable product that anyone could buy and play.

A Surprisingly Modern System

The rules of Little Wars are remarkably internally consistent for 1913. Each turn follows a strict phase order: artillery (fire or move, not both), movement, cleanup, and close combat resolution. The melee system is mathematically complete and deterministic: equal forces annihilate each other; in unequal engagements, each man in the smaller force kills one opponent before dying; isolated forces below one-third the enemy’s strength surrender as prisoners. Wells eliminated dice entirely: “We decided that every man should be as brave and skilful as every other man, and this restored strategy to its predominance over chance.”

The campaign system works through cumulative point scoring across multiple battles, incentivizing tactical retreats and surrenders rather than last-stand fights. The non-terrain-designing player receives compensatory choice of deployment side or first move. The Kriegspiel appendix, developed with Colonel Mark Sykes, proposes more elaborate rules including logistics, military engineers, railway transport, and simulated rifle fire — though Wells candidly admitted he had “never yet tried over these more elaborate developments.”

Artillery dominance is the most noted balance problem. The spring-loaded cannon, at ninety percent accuracy, can kill multiple figures per shot through chain reactions. Modern adaptations recommend reducing shots from four to two per turn. The physical dexterity element creates a genuine skill factor unrelated to strategic thinking — a player with better hand-eye coordination holds a meaningful advantage. This is simultaneously the system’s most distinctive and most criticized feature. Gygax called the rules “simple but not particularly realistic.”

What Remains

Little Wars (1913) — the first commercially published recreational miniature wargame rulebook, in continuous print for over a century.

The concept of published, accessible wargaming rules for civilians — the format that made the hobby possible.

Points-based army balancing, three-dimensional terrain, hidden deployment, real-time turn pressure, area-of-effect burst radius — secondary mechanics that became industry standards long after the spring-loaded cannon was retired.

The documented chain: Wells to Featherstone to Gygax. Three names, three books, one hundred years. The entire modern tabletop industry exists in the space that chain created.

A novelist from Bromley who spent six years playing with toy soldiers, wrote it down, published it, and walked away — never knowing he had fired the first shot of a hobby that would outlive him by a century and counting.

Total: 17 points. Year: 1913.